5 essential questions to let Kyriba manage TRILLIONS of dollars every day

22-03-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | Joe Marcin

Someone recently asked Joe Marcin, “What does Kyriba really do?” he thought about it for a moment and although Kyriba solves some really complex problems for their customers, it really comes down to a pretty simple answer.

At Kyriba, they help some of the world’s most well-known companies, government entities, and financial institutions answer these 5 essential questions:

  1. How much money do I have?
  2. Where is it?
  3. How much money will I have in the future?
  4. How do I optimize the way I move my money across financial institutions, legal entities, and international borders to lower risk and minimize costs?
  5. How do I turn my money into a growth asset by investing it in ways that yield higher returns while not increasing risk or lowing my access to liquidity whenever I need it?

Enterprise Liquidity Management is transforming the office of the CFO from a cost center to a profit center for customers all over the world. That is why the Kyriba customers trust them to manage TRILLIONS of dollars for them every day.

See some of the success stories here: https://lnkd.in/gp7sZMW

 

Contact Kyriba directly for more information.

How businesses in the healthcare & medical industry can improve their FX outcomes

18-03-2021 | treasuryXL | XE |

Having a secure, reliable and cost effective international payment provider as well as the tools and expertise available to support you to weather market volatility is crucial.

Any business that deals with foreign currency, no matter the size or the industry, has the potential to be impacted by the ups and downs of the foreign currency markets. A change in exchange rates from one day to the next could potentially increase importing costs, increase capital expenditure costs, or increase overseas investment costs.

If you are a business in the healthcare and medical industry, preparing for market volatility and knowing how to respond to shifts in currency values is critical. Otherwise, you could end up paying more than you projected on goods or services, which can have a detrimental impact on your bottom line.

Whether you’re importing medical devices and distributing them to local pharmacies or healthcare providers, or purchasing chemicals as part of the medicine production process, having a secure, reliable and cost effective international payment provider as well as the tools and expertise available to support you to weather market volatility is crucial.

How can your healthcare business address foreign currency risk?

Working with a knowledgeable, experienced foreign exchange provider is the first step to safeguarding your business against ups and downs of the currency markets. No one can predict the future, but an FX provider can help you prepare for potential volatility, and will have the tools and guidance to help you respond in the event of unexpected shifts.

Opening an Xe Business account will allow you to take advantage of our full suite of products and services, so you can:

  • Protect costs for imports;

  • Save time through accurate forecasting and quick and easy payments;

  • Save money with cheaper rates and no fees (compared to banks).

Learn More

How can Xe reduce foreign currency risk for your business?

We understand that no two businesses are the same. We work individually with each business in order to identify where their needs lie and what their risk exposures are, and develop an international payments and risk management strategy tailored to their operations.

We offer a range of products and services, including:

  • Spot transfers. Purchase currency and send your international payment at the current rate. If you need to make a quick payment, you can do it on the spot in just a few minutes.

  • Market orders. Identify a target exchange rate, and we’ll initiate your transfer when that rate is reached. If your payment isn’t time-sensitive, you can avoid potential volatility in the future.

  • Forward contracts. Lock in today’s exchange rate and send the payment on a set future date. If you have an upcoming transfer and don’t want to worry about the markets fluctuating, take care of it now for peace of mind later.

  • Risk management. Don’t have the time or the resources to devise a risk management strategy on your own? With our 25 years of experience in the currency markets and dedicated team of currency experts, we can help you to strategise the right one for your business.

How to get started

Signing up for an Xe Business account is completely free, and will take just a few minutes. Interested in learning what the process entails? Contact our expert Maurits Houthoff for quick and transparant information.

Webinar recording: Cashforce & TIS are Partnering Up to Deliver Best-of-Breed Technology

| 17-03-2021 | treasuryXL | Cashforce | TIS

Cashforce & TIS are partnering up to deliver best-of-breed technology. Watch the webinar recording with Nicolas Christiaen and Joerg Wiemer and get to know more about this best-of-breed approach and how this partnership can help you tackle your challenges in cash flow forecasting and corporate payments.

 

 

 

5 concrete tips for preventing Payment Fraud

| 16-03-2021 | treasuryXL | Nomentia |

Payment fraud has become a real and permanent threat for companies of all sizes. No company can afford to close their eyes on the risks – fraudsters target all industries, and large and small businesses alike. It is the eleventh hour to start focusing on the safety of your payment process if you want to avoid financial damage.

The good news is that the fraudsters prefer easy targets, so even raising awareness on the topic in your organization is a step in the right direction. With this blog, I want to share 5 concrete tips for preventing payment fraud and improving the safety of your organization’s payment process.

Get rid of risky task combinations

Do you know who has access to your payments at each stage of the process? Risky task combinations may have formed overtime without anyone noticing that a single person can, for instance, create a new payment in the system and approve it to be paid. Overly broad user rights leave unnecessary room for both malpractice and costly mistakes. Applying strong user rights management – the four-eye principle, for example – is a quick way to reduce the risks. You should require double approval also on the changes made in the vendor master data, as well as user rights.

Build your payment process on best practices

Design a secure payment process with best practices approach. Establishing a “no PO, no pay” principle where invoices are approved for payment only if they have a purchase order number or if they are paid to registered suppliers supports preventing payment fraud. You can improve the safety of manual payments when you utilize the ready-made templates of a payment system and demand multi-factor identification from the person who makes the spontaneous request for payment. Many CFO attacks could have been prevented if the origin of an email payment request had been confirmed via another channel.

Automate and focus on end-to-end safety

You would be surprised if you knew how many companies have gaps in their payment process, creating payment fraud risk. For example, if the payment file batches are waiting to be uploaded to bank in a folder or file share, it leaves the data open for tampering even if the process up to that point had been secure. Eliminating manual phases through automation is one of the best ways to increase safety as it reduces not only the risk of fraud but also the risk of mistakes.

Improve transparency

Standardized and harmonized practices build up transparency, which makes spotting and preventing payment fraud easier. Create a uniform, company-wide process for handling payments and make sure that there are no routes round it. By centralizing all your bank connections to a single system, you will take transparency to another level, and, in addition, you are able to better control the risk related to data transfer and system management.

Keep an eye on deviations

It is not rare that payment fraud is discovered only by accident. As a part of good risk management, you need to focus also on the measures that help you spot the fraudulent payments that manage to go through your defenses. Keep an eye on payments that are going to unknown bank accounts or that are made outside normal payment schedule. Your payment system should support you in risk management and filter out deviations from your payment flows before they are paid. Machine learning and artificial intelligence will soon create new possibilities for recognizing and managing deviations in accounts payable in a more real-time and automated fashion.

Preventing payment fraud in an ever-changing threat landscape requires that you take a comprehensive and proactive approach. I recommend that you download and read our e-book, where we take a look at this topic in detail, and provide you with all the different perspectives a corporate payment process should be examined from. In the e-book, you will find best practices and concrete advice you need to keep your organization from falling victim to payment fraud.

About Nomentia

Nomentia is a Nordic powerhouse for global cash management. We believe in a world in which businesses can make the right decisions no matter how unpredictable the times are. Our SaaS-based platform offers solutions for cash forecasting and visibility, global payments with bank connectivity, reconciliation, in-house banking, guarantees, and FX dealing. We serve 2,300+ clients in over 100 countries processing more than 200 billion euros annually. Cash is king!

Meet Jukka Sallinen

 

 

How to anticipate Liquidity risks to secure the Cash Flow

15-03-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |

For the past 10 years we have lived with an overabundance of liquidity. In most people’s minds, abundant liquidity means constant availability. But the subprime crisis, the European debt crisis and now the COVID pandemic have shown the opposite to be true.

In a world of extreme volatility, liquidity flows can be interrupted overnight. And for financial managers therein lies the paradox. Despite its overabundance, it has never been more crucial to secure, diversify, monitor and optimise liquidity.

Prepare for the unthinkable.

In this environment, liquidity is obviously strategic, but above all it must be seen as a volatile and fragile resource, especially vulnerable to market disruptions whose occurrence and scope are unforeseeable by definition as well as by their very nature. The health crisis showed us that nothing is safe from a complete, abrupt halt, not even cash flow from operations, across every sector.

CFOs must now prepare their companies for the unthinkable! They will need to spend more and more time and energy to activate every possible source of liquidity by monitoring prices, availability, term, currencies and security packages for each of these sources. They will do this with a constant focus on optimisation, and above all must be ready to make snap decisions about sources that have run dry. It’s a massive undertaking. In a world of extreme volatility, Active Liquidity Management will make tomorrow’s leaders stand out from the crowd.

 

Contact Kyriba directly for more information.

Rent a Treasurer, Plans & Success

| 03-03-2020 | treasuryXL | Pieter de Kiewit

You might remember our previous blogs about the Rent a Treasurer. In this joint effort with Treasurer Search, we make high calibre treasury expertise available for organisations with treasury exposure without a specialist on board. Treasurer Search is in constant communication with the treasury labour market and knows who has what expertise and is available. treasuryXL has a wider network that includes CFOs of mid-sized companies and a very strong communication machine. Combining both enables the Rent a Treasurer service.

What we notice in our market research is that treasury is not well known by these CFOs, so they do not put it on their priority list. But CFOs do understand quickly the upside when speaking with and learning from a treasurer. Often not wanting extra headcount is mentioned as a reason not to act upon treasury opportunities. And many specialized treasury consultants are a better match with multi-billion corporates and costly. So mid-sized companies often rely on bankers and auditors. But many bankers focus too much on revenue and the knowledge of auditors is often not deep enough.

Currently we work with a core team of eight bringing the Rent a Treasurer concept to the next level. Six team members cover various subsets of treasury tasks and complement each other. Kendra represents treasuryXL and I work on behalf of Treasurer Search. We are the support. Our goal is to organise more meetings with CFOs and help them successfully save costs, mitigate risk and create opportunities through appropriate treasury solutions. We tell interesting stories, on a regular basis, to decision makers who might be interested and we will increasingly do so.

It gives me great pleasure to inform you that one of the team members,  Niki van Zanten, currently works as a Rent a Treasurer on two different assignments where FX risk has the most prominent focus. With the first client, he has been able to save substantially on cost already in his first week. Niki is the perfect example of an expert who learnt in the Champions League, with Cisco & Philips, and applies his knowledge helping mid-sized companies.

If you want to know more about Rent a Treasurer or introduce us to your business network, please let me know. I am convinced many more can benefit from good treasury. We will keep you updated.

 

 

Pieter de Kiewit

Owner at Treasurer Search

 

 

 

Kyriba Webinar: How Connectivity-as-a-Service Can Help In ERP Migration

25-02-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |

4th March • 2pm GMT • 3pm CET

In this webinar Kyriba and Deloitte will discuss some of the challenges and time constraints faced in bank connectivity and outline how Kyriba’s Connectivity-As-A-Service can accelerate global banking connectivity projects by more than 80%.

The agenda will follow:

  • The Connectivity-as-a-Service challenges
  • The Kyriba Connectivity Network
  • A case study on implementation with Deloitte

REGISTER NOW to understand more of the issues related to cost-control, deployment, security and bank connectivity when embarking on large-scale ERP cloud migration projects.

Date:

March 4, 2pm GMT/ 3pm CET

Contact:

Nomentia Webinar: Payment Templates

| 15-02-2021 | treasuryXL | OpusCapita |

Live Demo: Unleash your payments with payment templates

Maybe not quite unleash but the better word might be superpower. Because payment templates are truly what will take your set-up to the next level. We are continuing our popular live demo webinar set-up where our solution managers will provide a quick deep dive into one topic and how this is working in our solution.


Payment templates allow you to publish templates for manual payment that you can use to process payments.

In this webinar we will show you how you can:

  • Lock and hide fields, and mark the desired fields required. You can also define whether a section is automatically expanded or not when a payment template is selected.
  • What type of security settings you can and possibly should set up for payment templates.

And on top of that we will provide a practical application to how those templates can make your daily life easier.

When?

  • February 18th, 2021
  • 13:00 CET / 14:00 EET

Who should attend?

Cash Managers, Treasurers, and anyone looking to optimize their payment processes.

Meet the speaker

Jouni Round

Jouni Kirjola

Jouni is Solution Manager at Nomentia and has over 10 years of experience in corporate cash management and has deep expertise in cash forecasting, payment factories and in-house banking, and process development. Previously Jouni has worked in product management, consulting and R&D.

Register Here

About Nomentia

Nomentia is a Nordic powerhouse for global cash management. We believe in a world in which businesses can make the right decisions no matter how unpredictable the times are. Our SaaS-based platform offers solutions for cash forecasting and visibility, global payments with bank connectivity, reconciliation, in-house banking, guarantees, and FX dealing. We serve 2,300+ clients in over 100 countries processing more than 200 billion euros annually. Cash is king!

Nomentia – Treasury Trends 2021

| 10-02-2021 | treasuryXL | Nomentia |

Recently, Nomentia held a webinar about the key Trends in Treasury and Cash Management. The recording of this webinar “Treasury Trends 2021” is now available for you on demand. Feel free to rewatch it as much as you like!

Watch The Webinar

About Nomentia

Nomentia is a Nordic powerhouse for global cash management. We believe in a world in which businesses can make the right decisions no matter how unpredictable the times are. Our SaaS-based platform offers solutions for cash forecasting and visibility, global payments with bank connectivity, reconciliation, in-house banking, guarantees, and FX dealing. We serve 2,300+ clients in over 100 countries processing more than 200 billion euros annually. Cash is king!

The Case for a Global Payment Hub

02-02-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |

Global corporate payments technology is changing at a rapid pace. So rapidly, in fact, that internal IT-managed platforms are not able to keep up and the challenges that ensue are left for the IT team to sort out.

These challenges include:

  • Insufficient Controls
    It is up to IT to protect assets from digitized fraud capabilities that are able to penetrate the standard four-eye principal and, in order to do so, IT will need to enhance controls.
  • Custom Banking Formats
    Each bank has its own specific requirements that, even within the same bank, may differ depending on payment type and bank branch location. The number of custom formats needed can make it difficult for IT to meet all global banking format customization requirements.
  • Infrastructure Costs
    The cost of building and maintaining payment connectivity infrastructure, especially given the customization requirements, can easily exceed what a company anticipated.
  • Delayed Project
    Established bank connections will need to be rebuilt as ERPs migrate to the cloud, which can greatly delay the project. And, rebuilding the connection is often made more difficult as employees leave and retire, taking with them the tribal knowledge of how the original architecture was deployed.

Let’s evaluate some of these in the context of the return on investment (ROI) your organisation would achieve by deploying a connectivity as a service global payment hub.

Enhancing Controls

The most common vulnerabilities to fraud include technical, process and simple human mistakes – and, worst case scenario, internal collusion. All of these become significantly more vulnerable when corporations rely on internally built systems and processes that depend on human control workflows with multiple checkpoints.

Today’s fraudsters are more sophisticated, able to easily penetrate corporate infrastructure and pass internal human dependent control workflows. They utilize social networks to penetrate organisations with phishing schemes that include email, as well as deep fake voice simulation software via phone that can sound exactly like your CFO or CEO requesting payment execution.

The best payment hub solution will aid the human dependent controls with machine learning technology, bringing to their attention anomalies that they must further investigate.  The solution must be able to keep up with technical assets at the fraudster’s disposal – for example, based on history alerts related to banking change and volume as well as OFAC exception.  Payment hubs with machine learning capabilities have demonstrated the ability to reduce corporate fraud exposure by at least 70%.

Payment Connectivity Complexities  

Global banking format customization requirements are extremely complex with very limited, if any, corporate tribal knowledge related to the technical architecture and deployment. Each bank has their own specific requirements. In many cases, there may even be differences of formats within the same bank depending on branch locations. The cost of building and maintaining payment connectivity infrastructure given the customization requirements can be in the millions of dollars.

Payment hubs eliminate this cost in several ways:

  • IT no longer has to manage bank connectivity with outsourced development and maintenance of bank payment formats to the hub solution. Developing this internally can take up to 9 months for each bank at a cost of up to $150K+ per bank, not including any ERP consultant fees.  A payment hub solution will be able to deploy connectivity within weeks and provide 24/7/365 maintenance and support at a fraction of the cost.
  • Multiple systems that previously sent payments to banks can be consolidated down to one. IT will only have to manage one format which is to the payment hub.
  • Treasury can optimise banking services and remove duplication caused by the multitude of systems (including treasury and ERPs) that connected to the banks. This will standardise and enhance controls and auditability of internal workflows.

ERP Cloud Transformation

If you are considering an ERP cloud transformation or are in the process of the transition, all of the bank connectivity that is established in the current environment will have to be re-built.  Given the considerations highlighted earlier tied to the complexities, re-building all of the connections internally will be costly and risk go-live.

Connectivity as a service with the right payment hub will de-risk and accelerate cloud transformation projects. In fact, payment hub solutions provide a more than 80% improvement in time-to-value related to payment go live. This return on investment is inclusive of internal man-hour efforts, external consultant fee elimination, as well as the speed of bank on boarding timelines from up to 9 months to only a few weeks.

In conclusion, payment hubs enhance controls and keep up with the ever-changing fraud environment, eliminate any risk tied to business continuity due to internal infrastructure or tribal knowledge, and finally enable a successful ERP cloud transformation deployment eliminating any risk to internal timelines or objectives.