MyTreasur‑e is a powerful yet simple to use SaaS cash flow and treasury management software. Built on solidly reliable and trusted cloud technology, MyTreasur‑e is designed to enable treasury professionals to realize the benefits of a fully integrated treasury and risk management solution.
Overview
MyTreasur-e is one of Australia’s leading treasury software solutions. Locally owned and operated, MyTreasur-e was originally founded in 2004 as Finpacific.
Thoughtworks sat down with Nicolas Naim, Co-Founder and technical expert at MyTreasur-e, to get an insight into the vision behind the robustly growing business and the positive impact partnering with Thoughtworks has had on the rollout of the organization's strategies.
About MyTreasur-e
With a background in financial consulting, Nicolas is responsible, as Chief Technology Officer, for leading efforts across internal teams and working closely with Thoughtworks' cloud operations team. As a leader at a relatively small but growing company, Nicolas wears many hats: "I look after everything to do with technology, software development direction, AWS infrastructure management, and database management."
In the early days, Nicolas and Rangaswami Balakumar (Bala) co-founded Finpacific, the predecessor to MyTreasur-e. Finpacific was a distributor of treasury management software. Nicolas and Bala eventually realized they could be far more effective in supporting their clients' businesses if they established their own software solution. Propelled by enthusiasm and a clear vision, they forged ahead with their new mission. Despite their experience, the inevitable learning curve was a challenge in many areas. But they stayed the course and in 2012, the first version of their cloud-enabled, cutting-edge, and client-centric software MyTreasur-e was launched.
“Treasury management software is a relatively competitive field. Most solutions in the market are complex and often based on legacy systems, some over 25 years old, running out of the US or Europe. It continues to be MyTreasur-e’s mission to change that narrative”, said Nicolas, elaborating on the drive and passion behind MyTreasur-e.
Business goals
- Company growth
- Global expansion into new markets
- Increase R&D investment for continued development of software
- Agility around ongoing improvement of iterations
- Continue upholding vision of developing powerfully simple solutions
Preparing for further growth
As MyTreasur-e grew and evolved over the years, so did the challenges they encountered on the journey. Here are some of the key areas that MyTreasur-e were focusing on:
Starting from the ground up to build a customer-centric treasury management software
Understanding the essentials of AWS and keeping up with technology changes
Navigating through complex security requirements essential to larger client organizations
Maintaining up-to-date best practices
Managing manual / heavily customized processes that are not easily repeatable
Scaling processes for growth
Security compliance / regulatory requirements (ISO / SOC)
Complexity of onboarding new remote workers as the team grows
Nicolas added: “When we started, there were a lot of things we didn’t know that we didn’t know! When we went with AWS, we gave it a go based on the best knowledge we could acquire at the time, with the resources we had. It wasn’t set up as best practice, didn’t rely enough on cloud formations, was not built on a strong enough foundation, and resulted in manual processes and many iterations. We reached a point where things were not as efficient as they needed to be, and client requirements around security compliance were increasing.”
Nicolas identified risks around non-compliance, security / SOC and audit procedures, the complexity of onboarding new customers quickly and efficiently, and the importance of having a partner that understood security and compliance. By addressing these three vital risks, Thoughtworks has enabled MyTreasur-e to operate more efficiently around orchestration, access, credentials, and SSO, bringing greater confidence to the MyTreasur-e team in being agile, consistent, compliant, and secure.
We were responding to a large government RFP with heavy security requirements, and we realized that if we wanted to win the work, we needed to step up our AWS management, and Thoughtworks was a good fit for that.
This led to MyTreasur-e engaging Thoughtworks for a Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR), followed by a report and a deep dive workshop exploring the results, solutions, and viable outcomes. The workshop provided the in-depth understanding MyTreasur-e needed to decide on the best course of action.
A key differentiator that Thoughtworks prides itself on is a solid understanding of the value of an intimate approach to fit seamlessly with the customer's values and culture. When talking about outcomes with Nicolas, here's what he had to say: “After discussions with Jacob from Thoughtworks and reviewing the outcomes of the WAR report, we could see implementing Thoughtworks' recommendations would actually empower us to make things simpler. This is important for us, as our company value statement is “Powerfully Simple.” So we want to provide powerful solutions for our clients but keep our software simple. We felt strongly after our discussions that Thoughtworks aligns with the same philosophy and methodology.”
A four-stage approach
MyTreasur-e was introduced to a four-stage approach as part of their transformation journey. After workshopping the requirements and aligning goals based on being awarded the pending government tender, there was a clearly defined scope containing the following key aspects:
Well-Architected Framework Review - Understand the current landscape and set expectations
Foundation - Build the base foundation of the MyTreasur-e platform
Migration - Following Foundation and dependent on securing the government contract
Managed Services - Necessity for government workflows and security and compliance requirements
After MyTreasur-e successfully secured the large government contract, they engaged Thoughtworks to complete all four steps.
Thoughtworks' Managed Service solution proposed for this project was paramount for MyTreasur-e in responding to the RFP. Managed Services provided an additional layer of defense with Australian-based 24/7 support, alongside security and the compliance with regulatory requirements for having servers based locally in Australia.
Nicolas described why this was important for them: “Being with Thoughtworks, if there’s a technical problem, we know our clients have that 24/7 support in our system. That’s a plus for us and an important part of the service we provide to our clients.”
Outcome: Continued growth
How the partnership with Thoughtworks has facilitated the continued growth of MyTreasur-e
Nicolas explained: “Thoughtworks forged a partnership with us and built our AWS foundation using their proven experience and best practices. For us, it was easier and better to have a partner that understands everything straight away when we moved to the migration phase and then to managed services. This was a logical progression as Thoughtworks already knew our business and framework.”
Throughout the Foundation and Migration phases, MyTreasur-e has developed new principles and processes with Thoughtworks to ensure things run smoothly. These have proven efficient and effective, and MyTreasur-e is now exploring similar methodologies to adopt in their business to obtain similar outcomes.
“As a small business that wanted to grow, a big risk for us was that things weren’t as streamlined or automated - we always had a framework, but it wasn’t as good as we wanted it to be. Thoughtworks was able to work with us to template things, and make everything cleaner and organized, which allows us to cope with increased development demand and reduce manual processes,” said Nicolas.
As part of Managed Services, Thoughtworks facilitates regular meetings and monthly reporting, sharing the data MyTreasur-e need whilst removing the ambiguity and unnecessary details.
“It is still early days for our Managed Services with Thoughtworks, but the monthly reporting we get is very useful. We provide monthly reports for our clients, and a lot of this information I am able to pull directly from our Thoughtworks reports, which makes my life easier! Having regular meetings with the Thoughtworks team is great because it allows me to keep up-to-date with AWS best practices, and security updates. I get a lot of information through these meetings, which would take me a long time to get by myself, whereas now Thoughtworks provides information on new updates and asks us what we would like to implement. This is very beneficial,” said Nicolas.
The proactive updates and operational continuity allow MyTreasur-e to stay commercially competitive, secure, and compliant.
Thoughtworks is all about forming trustworthy partnerships, taking all the worry out of managing cloud operations, so customers like My Treasur-e can focus on staying safe, agile, and profitable.
“The Thoughtworks and AWS partnership is beneficial - Thoughtworks understands the intricacies of AWS and turns this into an advantage for the companies they work with. We decided to work with Thoughtworks because you are aligned with AWS and don’t offer Azure or Google Cloud because you wanted to focus on one and become specialized in it,” explained Nicolas.
"During this journey, something that I have noticed, really liked, and find really impressive is the skillset and knowledge of everyone at Thoughtworks. They are all amazing people who really know what they are talking about. I have learnt a lot from working with the Thoughtworks team over the last six months. This is definitely one of the key strengths of Thoughtworks as an organization - they know SO much. The knowledgeable team at Thoughtworks allows companies like MyTreasur-e to do things better. "
During this journey, something that I have noticed, really liked, and find really impressive is the skillset and knowledge of everyone at Thoughtworks. They are all amazing people who really know what they are talking about. I have learnt a lot from working with the Thoughtworks team over the last six months. This is definitely one of the key strengths of Thoughtworks as an organization - they know SO much. The knowledgeable team at Thoughtworks allows companies like MyTreasur-e to do things better.
