Enhancing Treasury Management with software solutions. Pluridio, partner in CEC Bank’s digital transformation

Technological innovations are now at the core of our everyday activities. To stay ahead of the competition and reach high client satisfaction, banks' treasury departments must adapt their technologies and expand their operations. CEC Bank has looked into Pluridio’s technological solutions to streamline Treasury management and digitalize the products and services provided to its clients, while still dependent on legacy systems.

Laborious manual operations have made it difficult for banks to follow critical points in their clients’ journey and develop ways to improve their experience. 

Any manual operation that takes much time is a competitive disadvantage, and more often than not, sales models emphasizing service and solution over product and process are more successful in matching client expectations.

For this reason, Pluridio designed solutions that integrate into the banks’ systems and automate Treasury operations.

Because of a high volume of work, many banks are looking for new solutions to become strategic leads and, finally, not lose the competition that expands on the market. 

Designed by bankers who understand financial institutions’ operations, Pluridio’s solutions flawlessly integrate with the bank’s existing systems and automate front-end and back-end Treasury operations. Technology is essential in financial markets to access real-time information, personalize the prices of the different products for sale, and mitigate the associated risks.

Pluridio's mission, how they spotted an opportunity and acted

Marius Ionescu is the co-founder and CEO of Pluridio. He founded the company in 2014 after witnessing that the process of treasury sales in banks lacked efficiency and was time-consuming, so he came up with a series of technology-backed solutions to allow banks to increase efficiency and profitability. With over ten years of experience in banking treasuries in Romania, nine of which were in the treasury of the largest bank in Romania, Marius coordinated treasury sales teams covering the entire country. In addition to mentoring the teams, he coordinated the sale and execution of thousands of transactions with complex derivative financial instruments for risk hedging purposes.

Alongside Marius Ionescu is Cristian Ioniță, co-founder and CTO of Pluridio. His technical expertise is the primary driver of technological innovation at Pluridio. Therefore, he initiates and oversees all technical aspects of product architecture and implementation. At the same time, his technical expertise includes software engineering, development, and consulting for various financial institutions and banks in the USA and Romania, such as the Bucharest Stock Exchange.

“The most profitable banks in Europe are investing in several common areas, such as automating sales analysis (business intelligence) and back-office processes. Accelerated digitization must play a central role in any financial institution because of the essential contribution that digital infrastructure, services, and tools have made over time for most people and companies. Digital solutions are essential to ensure the agility of management processes within a bank and to regain a competitive position in the dynamic and competitive environment of Treasury business.”

Marius Ionescu, CEO of Pluridio

Digital growth strategies for CEC BANK

CEC Bank is one of the banks that implemented a modern IT system for its Treasury Sales activities based on the solutions offered by Pluridio, TSS & FX Live Pricing Engine. Currently, 11 Treasury dealers of the bank use Pluridio’s solutions. 

Client expectations were shaped during the last decades by e-commerce and FinTech competition and the rise of technology. While increased regulation is leveling the playing field among banks and FinTech. Democratized access and information in a commoditized market with high availability of alternatives and social changes led to rising client service expectations. 

Ionuț Lianu, the coordinator of liquidity management activities and the Chief of Treasury within CEC Bank, was looking for dedicated solutions to improve client experience with faster service and personalized pricing for foreign exchange transactions executed through one of the existing internet banking channels of the bank, CEC Online. After analyzing several factors, he chose Pluridio’s solutions, including the key requirements of integration with the bank’s legacy systems to enable the use of the bank’s existing transaction channels and CRM functionalities.

“The price also plays an important role, but now it is not the only consideration. The way it integrates with existing applications and the functional features were the most important factors considered when choosing the solution.”

Ionuț Lianu, CEC Bank

What treasury software solutions were most suited for CEC Bank’s Treasury

One of the systems implemented in CEC Bank is Pluridio TSS (Pluridio Treasury Sales System), a specialized Front-Office CRM system to support Treasury sales and real-time reporting at counterparty and portfolio levels. It is used by the Treasury Sales team to automatically integrate and display the typically dispersed client, transactions, and communication data in a singular tool for decision support. Thus swift and precise information is readily available to dealers and their managers to make informed decisions while reducing workload and concentrating on sales. TSS is also the infrastructure for managing personalized pricing schemes at different levels and considering multiple variables.

“Modern treasury means content and networking. You must pay attention to what is happening in the market, the emerging opportunities, who is relevant to your activity, and how you are relevant to your clients. With the help of Pluridio solutions, we have simplified the work processes. When you enter transactions manually, copy-paste emails, reports, manual corrections, pivots, you no longer have time to focus on the business context and make decisions.”

Ionuț Lianu, CEC Bank

Along with Pluridio TSS (Pluridio Treasury Sales System, CEC Bank also implemented is the FX Live Pricing Engine. Part of the Pluridio Omni-Channel package, this solution customizes the quotes for value date Today foreign exchange transactions that are traded through one of the bank’s existing digital internet banking channels – CEC Online for legal entity clients.

The simplicity of integration is one of Pluridio’s greatest strengths

The main benefits of the Pluridio solutions that Ionuț Lianu observed shortly after the implementation of the system were the automation of business processes, the increase in the number of customers, and reduced manual work of employees, maximizing the potential of digital services offered by the bank treasury.

“We appreciated both the maturity and quality of Pluridio’s products and that the modules are integrated and interconnected. There are relatively few new products on the market. Thus, a new generation of products is needed to streamline treasury operations. In the long term, the main benefits of Pluridio solutions that I see are improving workflows and building software with notifications features, allowing for more time to understand and address the client needs.”

Ionuț Lianu, CEC Bank

How Pluridio enables the digital transformation of bank Treasuries

Regional or local banks cannot afford large development budgets and must cut short the time to market to keep pace with the global banks that afford innovation. Partnering with Pluridio enables regional and local banks to accelerate time to business and unlock the market potential, thus ensuring a more rapid return on their investment and a capped cost of scalability. Pluridio’s solutions improve Treasury profitability through higher efficiency of existing resources and represent a critical infrastructure to support growth and regulatory compliance. 

In addition to the solutions already presented, Pluridio also provides other solutions.
Pluridio Compliance Systems MiFID II is a three-systems suite for client classification, records keeping, and avoidance of conflict of interests, adapted to the bank’s specifications to fully comply with internal procedures and workflows. Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) is the regulation that sets the framework for the production and distribution of financial instruments to each category of clients of the banks.

Pluridio Omni-Channel suite includes both a back-end pricing engine – for the distribution of personalized services with foreign exchange transactions through the existing digital internet and mobile banking channels of the bank, and client-end white label digital trading platforms for execution of multiple financial instruments – fixed income included – and orders, based on html5 technology and mobile apps.