Enhancing payment processing: An evaluation of digitised travel allowance & daily allowance (TA-DA) processing at Mutual Trust Bank PLC's group finance division

Abstract

This report reflects a three month long internship in the Group Finance Division of Mutual Trust Bank PLC. This focuses on the role of the payment processing unit as the bank’s firewall for operating and capital expenditures. It outlines MTB’s organizational background, financial performance, as well as their governance practices to portray how the Group Finance department supports proper expense management and regulatory compliance. In this context, the report traces the end to end bill and reimbursement workflow and, in more particular detail, the digitisation of Travel Allowance and Daily Allowance (TADA) processing. The analysis of the traditional and paper based workflows against the new system reveals that digitisation does save a lot of processing time and manual hand offs. It enhances the quality of the documentation, traceability and the internal control of approvals. The estimated savings are huge reductions in the auxiliary messenger costs as well as increased capacity of processing per period. The results depict that despite the benefits of TA-DA digitisation, other segments like petty cash, conveyance bills and holiday bills are still largely manual. This puts the bank at risk of unnecessary delays, operational risk and increased administrative expenses. The report suggests the expansion of digital workflows, the reinforcement of the Bill MIS, as well as the more comprehensive integration of core banking and ERP platforms to make the processing of payments in all types of expenses more streamlined would result in greater benefit in the long run. These would improve efficiency, cost management and control and governance.