Europeans view treasury workstations quite differently from their U.S. counterparts. Price doesn't matter. All reasonable expenses are made to implement and maintain an effective, secure, redundant, 24x7 workstation, and efforts are now under way to combine other information media into the workstation. But, the number one complaint among CEOs is that treasury and finance sometimes act in silos. There is a direct correlation between the ability to get improvement projects accomplished and the ability to reach out and partner with other components of the business enterprise.
Structures are simple.
There is no better example of this than Dow Corning's move to a global payments platform. Dow Corning's corporate treasury department accomplished the goals of globally standardizing the payments process, migrating vendors to electronics and leveraging banking relationships for economies of scale. Treasury took the lead and made the key decisions on how particular activities could be most efficiently be performed. Tax treatment is a factor, but not the factor. At the CFO level, tax is a major-league consideration in treasury management.