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Investments & Debt

Overview

Investments and debt management in treasury encompasses two complementary areas:

Investments: Tracking term deposits, money market funds, overnight accounts - optimizing yield while maintaining security and liquidity. The classic hierarchy is "Security > Liquidity > Yield."

Debt: Managing bonds, loans, factoring, and credit facilities - calculating accruals, tracking maturities, and reporting positions to multiple stakeholders (accounting, management, FNA).

Both areas suffer from reliance on manual spreadsheets that are error-prone and difficult to maintain. Treasury teams need unified views of positions and automated calculations that reduce manual effort.

Palm can help by providing investment and debt tracking with automated accrual calculations, maturity alerts, and integration into cash forecasts.

For detailed ICP context and terminology, see fundamentals.md

Top Jobs & Desired Outcomes

Full history: jobs.md

✅ 1. See total liquidity position including invested cash alongside operational cash

Desired Outcomes: All solved — Investments Visibility, Forecasting

  • ~~Reduce effort to distinguish operational cash from invested cash~~
  • ~~Minimize confusion about total available liquidity~~
  • ~~Increase visibility into cash + cash equivalents in one view~~
  • ~~Reduce confusion about how much cash is immediately accessible vs locked in investments~~

"It's really good to have in a unique view all the different levels of cash" — Personio (2026-01-28)

Sources: Palm Internal (2025-12-02), Personio (2026-01-28), ON (2026-01-28, 2026-02-18) — Confirmed & Delivered (4 sources)

⚡ 2. Make informed investment decisions with confidence about cash availability

Desired Outcomes: - Reduce uncertainty when deciding how long to lock cash in investments based on forward cash needs - Increase the visibility of when invested cash becomes available - Reduce the frequency of overly conservative investment decisions due to lack of data - Minimize the time spent manually tracking investment maturities

"Taking those decisions from guesswork and overly conservative decisions to actually making more informed decisions with comfort and confidence" — Personio (2026-01-28)

Sources: Personio x2 (2025-10-21, 2026-01-28), Palm Internal (2025-12-02) — Confirmed (3 sources)

⚡ 3. Track investments (term deposits) and manage maturities/rollovers

Desired Outcomes: - Minimize the time spent manually entering investment data in Google Sheets - Reduce the risk of forgetting a maturity date and accidentally rolling over - Increase visibility into total investment position across counterparties

"This tracking is a huge pain actually. I never had a great tool for this" — ON/Amanda (2024-09-26)

Sources: Personio (2025-10-21), ON (2024-09-26, 2026-02-18) — Confirmed (3 sources)

⚡ 4. Auto-generate investment forecast impacts from instrument terms

Desired Outcomes: - Minimize manual effort to reflect investment maturities in cash forecasts - Increase forecast accuracy by automatically showing when invested cash becomes available - Reduce risk of forgetting maturity dates that affect cash availability

"When is that available for me is the big one" — Personio/Tom (2026-01-28)

Sources: Palm Internal (2025-12-02), Personio (2026-01-28), ON (2026-02-18) — Confirmed (3 sources)

⚡ 5. Track non-deposit investment types (MMCs, money market funds) alongside term deposits

Desired Outcomes: - Minimize incomplete counterparty exposure views caused by missing fund data - Reduce manual workarounds for tracking fund-like instruments separately - Increase accuracy of total investment position across all instrument types

"MMCs at UBS not included in total investments" — ON/Amanda (2026-02-18)

Sources: ON (2026-02-18), Personio (2025-10-21) — Confirmed (2 sources)

Key Pain Points

Full history: pain-points.md

  • Cannot see investments alongside cash in unified view - investments and operational cash tracked separately (Source: Personio 2026-01-28)
  • Making overly conservative investment decisions - without forward visibility, treasury defaults to shorter horizons (Source: Personio 2026-01-28)
  • Investment tracking in Google Sheets is manual and error-prone - "the upkeep of this sheet is quite manual" (Source: Personio 2025-10-21)
  • Money market fund data not integrated - BlackRock MMF movements not visible despite being significant (Source: Personio 2026-01-28)
  • Credit ratings require manual updates from multiple bank websites - each bank uses different terminology (Source: Personio 2025-10-21)
  • Bloomberg is expensive and not in budget - alternative credit rating sources needed (Source: Personio 2025-10-21)
  • Manual Excel tracking of debt accruals - complex calculations with floating rates, prone to formula errors (Source: Avramar 2025-07-09)
  • No helicopter view of total debt exposure - can't easily see liability across all facilities (Source: Avramar 2025-07-09)
  • Securities/collateral tracking is a nightmare - collateral spread across loans from merged companies (Source: Avramar 2025-07-09)
  • Bank reconciliation is difficult - banks calculate differently, hard to match figures (Source: Avramar 2025-07-09)

Key Opportunities

  • Unified investment tracking - Track term deposits, money market funds, overnight accounts in one place
  • Credit rating monitoring - Automated tracking with alerts for changes
  • Maturity integration with forecasts - Show deposit maturities as future cash inflows
  • Automated debt accrual calculations - Handle floating rates, penalties, withholding tax automatically
  • Multi-view debt reporting - Same data, different outputs for accounting/cash flow/FNA
  • Collateral tracking - Link securities to loans, track revaluation schedules

Open Questions

  • [ ] What credit rating sources are accessible without Bloomberg?
  • [ ] How to handle different bank terminology for ratings (secured vs unsecured, etc.)?
  • [ ] How to handle factoring visibility when bank doesn't provide client-level data?

Last updated: 2026-02-18 | Sources: 10 transcripts (view all)