Their finding: the business case for the new system was "definitely attractive. The changes have an up-front project cost, but keeping the old application would have required significant IT upgrade and maintenance cost in the next years," according to Norenberg. "The implementation furthermore triggers other simplifications within payment processing internally and externally."

Besides the economic downturn, cash-management renovations are being triggered by internal factors — a hiatus, say, after a long spate of merger activity. "We're a company that grew by acquisitions and mergers, so we're just starting to meld ourselves together on a back-end basis," says Stacy Cordier, assistant treasurer of Thermo Fisher Scientific, a $10 billion (in 2008) multinational scientific products and services company.

After all those mergers, Thermo Fisher wants to consolidate its global banking relationships to streamline its finance function, boost visibility into its bank accounts, and grab more control over cash. In line with that, the company has placed its cash management, trade services, lending, and global markets with HSBC across nine markets: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, South Africa, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, and Singapore.

Under the arrangement, HSBC will provide Thermo Fisher with a suite of cash-management services, including account services, daily transaction services, liquidity pooling structures, cash investment options, and outsourcing services.

Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company is a "hybrid" of centralized and locally managed cash operations, according to Cordier. On one hand, she has groups in Pittsburgh and the United Kingdom that manage the company's cash in the United States and parts of Europe, respectively, "on a very centralized basis." Those units benefit from real-time reporting and the ability to tote up cash balances each week.

On the other hand, employees in the Asia-Pacific time zone have no online access to the company's central cash systems at midnight U.S. time, according to the treasury executive, who notes, with some humor, that such employees "could call me; they've got my home phone number" if they're really desperate to cover a corporate expense. "We're working to ensure that we have visibility into all the various banking systems and can provide that hands-on support when it's needed," she adds.

Sometimes it's a new finance chief with a fresh pair of eyes that moves a company to start managing its cash in a focused way. Three-and-a-half years ago, Robert Schriesheim became CFO of Lawson Software, a large provider of enterprise-resource-planning-systems that operates in 30 countries. He discovered that, like many cash-rich software companies, "we really didn't have a cash-management system that provided us [with] the visibility that we needed in order to accurately manage our cash flow."

Systematic cash management and a strategic approach to capital-asset allocation were practically nonexistent. "If you walked in and said, I'd like to see our cash-flow forecasts for the next month, or two months, or three months, or a year — that type of discipline didn't exist," he says.

Schriesheim and his team proceeded to introduce Lawson to that type of discipline. On any given month, he says, he can get a forward 12-month rolling cash-flow forecast "so we know where the cash flows are going to be generated and where they're going to be consumed, by geographic region." The software vendor has also consolidated much of its cash management with one bank, JP Morgan Chase.

In the still-tight market for corporate credit, however, many finance executives are looking to buy cash-management services with another use in mind: as a bargaining chip to induce the bank to smile favorably on the company as a potential borrower. Thermo Fisher's Cordier says that was one of its purposes of its deal with HSBC. Throughout the company's history, she adds, "we've always told our crediting banks that if they supported us on their balance sheet, that we would offer them fee business wherever that opportunity arose."

About three years ago, the company negotiated its current credit agreements. Under current conditions, the low interest rates that Thermo Fisher's banks charged it in the boom times have left them with a pittance of revenue from the company. While that puts the company in a better position compared with its banks, Cordier says, the company wants to practice what it preaches when it says it will throw services business to banks that have provided it with credit. "And we're following through on that commitment," she adds.

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