While financial institutions are understandably risk averse, and historically prone to holding back on new technologies, the benefits now offered by the application service provider (ASP) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models have become impossible to ignore. The value of SaaS and ASP solutions go beyond issues of technology and reduced up-front investments. Optional services, such as processing support, additional data or premium support hotlines, add a great deal more value to the basic hosting package, and provide clear differentiators to in-house solutions and treasury solutions from the big enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors.
In addition, implementation is usually faster on hosted solutions and problems are solved faster as the provider has easy and direct access to the system and data to identify and solve the problem. Hosted solutions also reduce the demand for stretched internal IT resources (especially at smaller corporate treasuries), which are spared the task of installing and running the system, while still being involved with the interfaces to other internal systems.