You’ve managed to connect your treasury system to your banks. The platform says it’s pulling data in real time. On paper, things should be running smoothly. So why does your team still feel like it’s flying blind? Why is it still so hard to chase down details, having to look across different areas of the platform for multiple bits of information pertaining to the same transaction?
Here’s the problem: most legacy treasury management systems only give you part of the picture. What’s often missing is the full metadata or the context that makes your cash data actually useful and ready for the future. Without it, you can’t move fast, you can’t automate effectively, and you definitely can’t forecast with confidence.
In this article, I’ll share why we’re seeing more treasurers take a closer look at the architecture behind their systems. They’re becoming increasingly savvy about how the right data foundation—one that supports efficiency, agility, accuracy, and auditability—can transform their operations. Just as importantly, they’re setting themselves up to harness AI when the time is right.
What’s Metadata, and Why Is It So Important?
Every transaction tells a story. Metadata is what helps you read it.
Transaction metadata includes things like where a payment originated, what it was for, which entity it’s tied to, and how it should be categorized. It’s the difference between seeing a $1.2M wire and knowing it was a recurring rent payment for your APAC subsidiary.
With all of your transaction metadata intact, you can:
- Use a Google-like search and filter your data more easily
- Trust what you’re seeing in reports
- Build more accurate forecasts
- Tag transactions to categorize them for automation and audit trails
Without it? You’re back to toggling between systems, manually cleaning data, and second-guessing what’s real.
Trovata’s Director of Treasury, Yussuf Ali, explained it to me when we were having a conversation recently about the importance of having connectivity that enables world-class data management:
“Treasury teams don’t really care about metadata for metadata’s sake. They care about what it unlocks—efficiency, accuracy, scalability, auditability.”
– Yussuf Ali, Director of Treasury at Trovata
Where It All Goes Wrong
A lot of treasury teams assume that if a platform supports APIs, they’re getting clean, high-quality data.
The reality? Many legacy TMS platforms were built long before APIs became standard. Even if they accept API feeds now, most of them strip out metadata in the process. They only keep the bare minimum needed for basic functionality—amounts, dates, and account numbers.
Everything else gets left behind.
“[Legacy TMS] will take an API file and keep the bank account, the amount, the date, maybe the description. Everything else is left out because it’s not needed in that one module,” Yussuf explained. “So yes, technically they have APIs—but the moment the data hits their system, it gets diluted.”
That means you’re losing valuable context before the data even hits your dashboard.
Why This Matters (More Than You Think)
In a world where treasury needs to act fast and stay flexible, this kind of data loss is a real problem.
It slows down your team. It makes forecasting harder. And it limits what you can do with AI or automation down the line. Even if you’re not diving into machine learning today, your data should still be ready for it tomorrow.
“It’s not even five or ten years from now,” Yussuf said. “With machine learning, you need to know a lot about a specific data point. A lot of that information gets lost in these legacy systems.”
The more context you lose now, the more manual work you’ll be stuck with later.
What Makes Trovata Different
Being an API-first and cloud-native SaaS (not just cloud-hosted), Trovata was built from the ground up to preserve your metadata—not strip it out. From the moment your bank or ERP data enters the platform, all of it is stored in a structured, searchable data lake. You can slice, tag, search, and sync that data however you want—without losing critical context along the way.
“Even if the TMS doesn’t need all the data, maybe the ERP system does,” said Yussuf. “That’s Trovata’s approach—store everything, because you don’t know which data point you’ll need down the road.”
Want to find a specific vendor payment from three months ago? Or isolate all intercompany transfers in EMEA last quarter? That’s a five-second search, not a spreadsheet marathon.
Clean data means faster decisions. Rich metadata means smarter ones.
How Cloud Software Group Uses Metadata-Rich Connectivity Across Teams
For example, Bruce Edlund, Group Director, Assistant Treasurer at Cloud Software Group, recognized the value of implementing Trovata, a cloud-native, API-driven treasury platform (in lieu of a legacy Treasury Management System) to create value not only for Treasury, but IT, Accounting, Payroll, AP and AR teams across the global organization.
“It became more than a treasury tool—it’s now a shared data platform across the business. That’s a great win for us as a company. And, with increased confidence in our data’s accuracy, our treasury department now has a stronger voice in shaping company strategy.” – Bruce Edlund, Group Director, Assistant Treasurer at Cloud Software Group
Once Cloud Software Group’s treasury department was up and running with Trovata, it didn’t take long for other teams to notice the value of the data that it provides.
First, the tech team set up a feed of bank transactions to do reconciliations in Oracle Fusion rather than using separate feeds with an H2H connection to each major bank.
Then, the AR team began to use Trovata to establish a feed that helps streamline their process for matching bank transactions to invoices. Not only is this process quicker than pulling the data manually from bank portals, but it saves them on bank fees from generating reports.
“We have a couple of host-to-host connections… but getting transactions through Trovata is way better. I think the API connectivity is a big part of that. They just work better. They’re always on. The tech team loves it because they’re getting data from all our banks in one clean, consistent feed.” – Bruce Edlund, Group Director, Assistant Treasurer at Cloud Software Group
Don’t Let Bad Plumbing Limit Your Strategy
If your treasury team is still stuck cleaning up after your tools—manually reconciling data, patching together reports, or emailing around for context—it’s probably not a process issue.
It’s a data piping problem. One you didn’t even know you had.
“You paid for the bank API,” Yussuf pointed out. “So why are you losing half the value of that data once it enters your platform?”
The good news? You can fix it.
Trovata’s architecture was built for this moment. With API-native connectivity, rich metadata retention, and a modern, serverless infrastructure, Trovata gives treasury and finance teams the foundation they need to operate faster, automate confidently, and scale with ease.
Unlike legacy TMS platforms that dilute your data, Trovata delivers:
- Faster onboarding without third-party consultants or long implementation cycles
- Reliable, real-time connections to your banks—no more chasing down missing files
- Rich, structured metadata you can use across reporting, reconciliation, forecasting, and AI
- Easy access to your own data, so you can slice and dice it every way or route it upstream or downstream as needed
- Unparalleled, deep search capability across the entire platform, rather than only being able to look up certain transaction details in particular modules
“We didn’t need a huge IT team to implement Trovata,” said Bruce Edlund of Cloud Software Group. “Now multiple teams across the company are using it—and we’re finally getting the full value of our bank data.”
Curious to learn more about how Trovata can solve your cash data and visibility needs? Watch a product tour or book a 1:1 demo today!
