Healthcare Treasury Teams: Agile in Adversity, Accelerating Change
By: TxB Sales Leader, North America, Katie Wilson
The overall impact on healthcare organizations during the pandemic varied enormously across the sector. Emergency rooms strained to cope with a health crisis of an unprecedented scale, while groundbreaking advances in the life sciences allowed pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines at a rapid pace. Providers meanwhile were forced to embrace telemedicine almost instantaneously, regardless of whether they had prepared to go virtual.
While the crisis was unfolding, treasury organizations in healthcare were facing their own unique challenges.
• The treasury function had to convert almost overnight to become a real-time, remote operation. Secure payment approvals and seamless processing had to be quickly implemented, while any manual, paper-intensive or in-person tasks had to immediately shift to a wholly digital process.
• Critical health organizations suddenly received large cash balances via government support programs. These lifeline funds had to be held safely and deployed securely. Treasury teams relied on the guidance of their bank partners for deposit optionality and flexibility, balance sheet capacity and preservation of principal.
• The ability to act as a global player both quickly and efficiently also became critical, whether to support global clinical pharmaceutical trials or react to supply chain shifts and shortages. Across time zones, treasury teams had to operate seamlessly, executing frictionless cross-border payments.
These pressures placed new demands on the treasury organizations of healthcare companies—and put a new-found premium on having the most up-to-date treasury and banking technology in place. Treasury leadership teams had grown familiar in recent years with the value of being on the digital journey, and many were exploring new ideas and systems. But when the pandemic intervened, the pace of change went from slow and steady, to urgent—with a new demand for a real-time operating model.
The years to come
If there is a common thread in the strains the pandemic put on healthcare treasury teams, it will be found in the need for adaptability, agility, resiliency and reliability. These are traits that every treasury organization is pursuing with renewed purpose as the restrictions of the health crisis evolve into a next phase.
In many ways, healthcare treasury organizations demonstrated they were well prepared for the extraordinary demands faced throughout the crisis. Treasury teams had already begun the evolution toward real-time, rapid, frictionless and transparent operations. But now, with adaptability at the forefront, the time is ripe to lean into that journey and recognize the universal need for cutting-edge technology.
Be prepared with Goldman Sachs TxB solutions
At Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking (TxB), we have been on a shared journey with treasury teams, delivering a more advanced technology stack without the constraints of legacy transaction banking systems.
We invested pre-pandemic in technology that well suits the requirements of treasury clients in healthcare and beyond. Our platform was developed from a clean slate in the public cloud and is based entirely on the ethos of API integration, the delivery of real-time data and the provision of infinite data history at zero cost. Our revolutionizing technology allows us to bring greater transparency and speed to payment processing. Our intelligent routing engine and 99.95% uptime ensure a dynamic consumer-grade experience for corporate treasuries.
Your current treasury model may have been sufficient in the past, but TxB is focused on delivering solutions poised for the future of your treasury function—in which the demand for real-time, global interoperability, accuracy of forecasting and an on-demand user experience will never slow down.
