Webinar: Cash Forecasting Survey Results 2019 – Too Much Processing, Not Enough Forecasting?

| 21-03-2019 | treasuryXL | Cashforce |

Even the most experienced treasury departments struggle to create accurate cash forecasts. By conducting the Cash Forecasting Survey 2019 we wanted to find out why companies face challenges that make the future uncertain.

In our upcoming webinar on the 27th of March at 16h00 CET (11h00 EDT), Nicolas Christiaen & Mark O’Toole will discuss the results, moderated by Bruce Lynn of  FECG.

By attending this webinar, you can expect to come away with:

• Current challenges that come with the process of generating cash forecasts
o Out of date technology?
o Overworked or undertrained staff?
o Conflicts between priorities and goals?

• The implications of inaccurate and inefficient estimates on the need for
o Maintaining “enough” liquidity
o Avoiding “too much” risk

• Insights into your peer’s cash forecasting methods

• Possible solutions to improve your current processes when faced with an uncertain future

Claim your seat here!

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Partnership Cashforce and BNP Paribas

| 03-10-2018 | Cashforce | treasuryXL |

BNP Paribas and Cashforce enter into a partnership to offer digital cash flow forecasting and working capital services to corporate treasurers. Through this partnership, BNP Paribas will offer to its clients Cashforce’s next-generation digital cash forecasting and treasury management solutions, focused on analytics, automation and integration. To further extend its commitment to this partnership, BNP Paribas also invested in Cashforce.

Pursuing the digitalisation of its Corporate clients’ user experience, BNP Paribas today announced it has sealed a partnership with Cashforce, a Fintech company that will allow the Bank to enhance client journeys within cash management and trade finance. Through this partnership, Corporates will experiment a digital, autonomous and cross-banking solution for their day to day transaction banking needs: by connecting its treasury department with other business and finance departments, and by offering full transparency into the cash flow drivers, accurate and automated cash flow forecasting and treasury reporting.

BNP Paribas continues to invest in its digital offering to treasurers and this partnership – which brings the transaction banking business another step closer to open banking – reflects its technology-centric focus and leadership. The platform is unique in its category because of the seamless integration with numerous ERP systems and financial data sources, the ability to drill down the transaction level details, and the intelligent AI-based simulation engine that enables multiple cash flow scenarios, forecasts and impact analyses.

“This partnership with Cashforce marks a new step in our digital transformation and illustrates our commitment to offering our clients the best-in-class solutions they deserve, wherever they come from. Forming agile partnerships with innovative Fintechs like Cashforce, who leverage new technologies such as AI, helps us to significantly accelerate the digitalisation of our customer journey in the area of transaction banking,” commented Jacques Levet, Head of Transaction Banking EMEA BNP Paribas.

“The partnership with BNP Paribas will further boost our international expansion and make more treasury departments work with accurate, efficient and best-in-class cash flow analytics and cash forecasting solutions. Also our working capital analytics engine will further strengthen the integrated banking and trade finance experience for BNP Paribas’s clients.”  added Nicolas Christiaen, CEO of Cashforce.

The platform will be available to clients through CENTRIC, BNP Paribas’ integrated digital banking platform that gives corporate & institutional actors instant access to the spectrum of BNP Paribas’ online financial services.

The full article can be read on the Cashforce website.

BNP Paribas also posted an article about the partnership which can be found here: https://group.bnpparibas/en/press-release/bnp-paribas-cashforce-enter-partnership-offer-digital-cash-flow-forecasting-working-capital-services-corporate-treasurers


Cashforce – Cash forecasting & Smart Treasury

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Does technology actually help you improve your cash management?

| 31-5-2018 | Nicolas Christiaen | Cashforce |

It is a question that many companies have been asking themselves for the past few years. Innovative, dedicated technologies may be very exciting, but the question remains: Are they worth the investment?

We believe the answer is yes, but understanding the technology & its shortcomings are key to exploiting its full potential. Companies that are missing today’s “FinTech train” might find themselves in precarious situations in the future. They risk becoming relatively less productive and might lack insights that their technology-driven competitors will have. This is certainly true when it comes to Cash & Working Capital Management. Technology is definitely an asset in today’s world, as it can help us driving value from working capital. Interconnectivity has risen significantly, with the surge of in-house banks, cash pooling, POBO, ROBO, etc., forcing treasury departments to keep up with the pace and find ways to manage complex treasury set-ups. On top of that, the number of transactions has grown to such a level that only high-level calculations can be done by humans. Technology helps companies to deal with this magnitude of data and reduces complexity by bringing visibility in companies’ cash flows.

Also, the surge of centralization (look at the number of centralized treasury teams) reduced the number of double tasks and improved the efficiency of Treasury Operations. However, at the same time, keeping treasury connected with the business is becoming the new challenge. In this continuous paradox, technology will prove helpful in connecting both worlds.

However, we need a good understanding of limits & shortcomings of technology too. Today’s systems are capable of calculating expected outcomes & action plans based on a set of parameters. However, technology is not smart enough yet to take into account all parameters (like macro-economic parameters, unexpected events, changes of policies) & and most of all human (= irrational) behavior.

There is a legitimate drive towards using technology, as complexity rises, as is the need for more transparency. Two interesting evolutions are simultaneously taking place: Niche players are betting on making the technology smarter, whilst corporates are getting better at smartly using that technology. There is no reason to believe this will stop in the near future.

 

 

 

Nicolas Christiaen

Managing Partner at Cashforce

 

Cashforce and smart cash forecasting

| 03-04-2018 | treasuryXL | Cashforce |

As stated in our last blog, on Tuesday 27th March 2018, treasuryXL attended a seminar in Amsterdam organised by TIS about optimizing cash flow. The last speaker at this event was Nicolas Christiaen, mananging partner at Cashforce. They are a fintech leader in Cash forecasting & Treasury solutions for corporates. They took the opportunity to explain to all the attendees what their product is and how it works. In this article we shall attempt to provide an insight into what we learnt.

Cashforce focuses on automation and integration within cash forecasting and treasury management systems. They connect the Treasury department with other departments within a business – offering full transparency into the cash flow drivers, resulting in accurate and efficient cash flow forecasting. They also offer a flexible forecasting method which we shall explain later.

Forecasting is a subject that can cause irritation within a company. It requires different departments to collaborate on a regular basis and provide consistent information which needs to grouped together to present a complete overview of the expected cash movements for the agreed time period. This input encompasses accounts payable, accounts receivable, procurement, projects, HR, treasury etc. All this information needs to be presented in a consistent format so that everything can be aggregated. Problems arise when data is not delivered, or delivered too late, or inaccurate.

The solution would appear to be a single method to extract all the relevant data from all the relevant databases and systems and to have this incorporated together with the correct running opening bank balances.

Cashforce have developed a platform that links into all the aforementioned databases and uses the agreed metrics within the different departments to arrive at a forecast. This leads to an integrated platform driven by your own systems. As the data parameters have been mapped and agreed beforehand, this means that it is possible to drill down to a very granular level to predetermined transaction details. This means you can go from the comprehensive level to overview per account, per client, per accounting group as the original chart of accounts has been embedded into the platform.

Included with the platform is a special functionality that takes into account the actual dispersal from a particular client and allows you to see how they actually performed as opposed to their agreed performance. These metrics can then also be used to adjust the forecast to the past behaviour of all component parts from the chart of accounts, enabling a forecast to be presented that reflects the actual results from the past.

It becomes possible to drill down on every single aspect with the forecast and interrogate an individual item. Furthermore, it is possible to make adjustments to the forecast and see the results, whilst also giving a data trail showing what changes were made and by whom. The ability to review different scenarios, whilst still retaining the original data, makes this solution unique from the standard cash forecasting systems.

This can lead to greater understanding of the drivers within a company’s cash, good visibility of the behaviour of an individual counterparty, more accurate ability to determine when additional funds are needed, together with the potential to map the effects of changing individual items and seeing their outcome to the complete forecast.

In conclusion, this is an original solution to an age old problem for cash management.

treasuryXL would like to thank Cashforce for illustrating their solution at this seminar. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

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Cash forecasting: A data story

| 17-01-2018 | Cashforce |

Have you ever heard the dogma that people only use 10% of their brain capacity? Fortunately, this statement is a myth, but a similar (and more truthful) argument can be made for data usage. Using the example of an oil rig, a 2015 McKinsey & Company report states that an organisation typically uses less than 1% of the collected data to make decisions. While intuitively not all data will be useful to include in the decision-making process, it’s fair to say that there is a huge untapped potential.

From advanced retargeting in the marketing world to tailored music suggestions on Spotify, data has been in an uplift, opening doors in almost every field. Corporate finance & treasury is sitting pretty as well: amongst other areas, integrating relevant data into your forecasting model can facilitate substantial improvements in the quality of your cash flow predictions.

In this exuberant amount of data, it’s important to distinguish internal from external data.

Internal corporate data

Put simply, the bulk of data involved in cash projections will be found internally. Standard forecasting models, mostly build in spreadsheets, often make use of a small part of these data. Both account balances grabbed from banking portals and user generated input contribute to fulfil the daily, weekly or monthly cash forecast. User generated data may contain sales budget & forecast, average incoming & outgoing cash flows, projected dividends, CAPEX investments, etc. This information is necessary however typically lacks accuracy.

When making smart use of additional internal business data, most of these estimates can be derived from other internal data that may lead to a higher degree of forecast accuracy and a maintainable forecasting model. Such internal data sources are numerous and contain information on sales & purchase orders, quotations from your CRM system, production planning & all kind of recurring activities that carry relevant information on your future cash flows. Additionally, treasury data can automatically be included as well, enabling your treasury department to be multiple steps ahead instead of running behind daily facts.

To maximize the potential of your internal (big) data, algorithms and calculations need to be added to the forecasting model. By incorporating customer payment behaviour, seasonality patterns, correlations between different types of cash flows… your predictions can easily benefit from fine-tuning of these basic parameters. Re-evaluating those assumptions can by looking at meaningful patterns that are present in the data, can help to make a smarter and more tailored forecast. As an example, by carefully looking at past payment periods, future payments for each customer can be estimated with a high degree of precision.

 External data

Finally, integrating external data in your forecasting model will typically not affect cash the forecast in the short-term. It can however be relevant for long-term cash projections and fine-tuning. Market sentiment and macro economical indices will be most useful here, as well as all ticker information on treasury & commodity futures.

After capturing all this data, it’s key to consolidate everything from several (usually incompatible) operational systems. Note that not only the amount of data and diversity of data sources are important, but the accuracy of input and up-to-date information as well.

Consequentially, through extensive modelling and analysis, an effective and accurate cash flow forecast can be created. For this you would need software that can handle advanced big data analytics in order to convey pattern recognition and forecasting. The lion’s share of prevailing software doesn’t have the necessary integration possibilities and processing power to efficiently effectuate these kind of complex consolidation and analyses. Fortunately, some are built with this data requirements in mind and do have these capabilities. These make room for generating a significantly better cash forecast.

The world of business is going through rapid advancement in this age of technology, and the financial discipline is not spared in this phenomenon. While this data story unfolds, the time has come to put your “corporate brain-capacity” to use.  Will you let this wealth of data create an unseen amount of value?

If you want to find out more about Cashforce and their services and products please refer to their company profile on treasuryXL.

 

Cashforce: Treasury year-end meetup

| 04-01-2018 | Nicolas Christiaen | Cashforce | Sponsored content |

Onderstaand een kort verslag van ons Treasury year-end meetup-event van eind 2017. 

Tim (Jonk – Thomson Reuters) en Martijn (Duijnstee – Cashforce) trapten af met een (uiterst!) korte terugblik op 2017 want alle ogen waren eigenlijk al gericht op het progamma waarin de 3. Top-challenges 2018 voor corporate treasurers de revue zouden passeren.

Nicolas (Christiaen – Cashforce) gaf inzicht in wat er bij komt kijken om, in 6 stappen, een daadwerkelijk nauwkeurig en geautomatiseerd 1. Cash forecasting-proces in te richten. No more Excel!

Bart-Jan (Roelofsz – HERE Technologies) kwam letterlijk net uit ‘de vlieger’ uit Chicago stappen en kon gelijk door naar het podium waar hij een bijzonder aansprekende presentatie gaf over 2. Financing in het algemeen en de transitie van bedrijfsactiviteiten en opbouw van het Treasury en Finance Team in een snel groeiende organisatie. Top!

Alex (Goraieb – Thomson Reuters) nam het stokje over en gaf ons meer dan een kijkje in de wondere wereld van 3. Risk Management. Een wereldreis in de achtbaan van volatiele markten en valuta, via de onderliggende techniek van trading in grote posities naar een lesje ‘hoe selecteer ik de beste bank’. Well done!

En toen was het snel! naar de borrel want in het kader van ‘Act Global, drink Local’ stond het Ijndejaarsbier van Brouwerij ‘t Ij koud en op fust te wachten, en wat had iedereen toch een dorst gekregen…

Tijdens de borrel werden er meerdere robbertjes uitgevochten tijdens de Kick-off 2018 games op de Cashforce-voetbaltafel.

Voor hen die er waren, dank voor jullie komst en voor hen die er niet waren: volgend jaar een nieuwe kans want wat ons betreft zeker voor herhaling vatbaar!

 

Nicolas Christiaen

Managing Partner at Cashforce

 

Re-inventing treasury workflows: Smart Treasury

| 3-8-2017 | Nicolas Christiaen | Cashforce | Sponsored Content |

While the role of the treasurer is changing, it becomes increasingly challenging to maintain the current workflows and simultaneously take on new demanding tasks. One of these often manual and time-consuming tasks is risk management. As seen in, among others, this year’s Global Treasury Benchmark Survey of PwC, the registration and management of financial instruments stands among the top 3 challenges on the agenda of the surveyed treasurers. In this article, we take a more in-depth look at possible optimizations in some key treasury workflows.

 

 

 

 

 

 


Example FX management workflow

Hedging your FX exposure risk made easy

A common problem is the lack of visibility on the existing (global/local) FX exposure risk.
In order to calculate the FX transaction risk, transactional data from the TMS & ERP systems need to be consolidated effectively. Typically, this happens to be a (very) painful exercise. With Cashforce, however, using our off-the-shelf connectors (for ERP & TMS) and our full drill-down capabilities, you have all FX exposures at your fingertips.

 


FX Exposure Management – Current positions & exposures

 

But there is more to it. Imagine that linked to your FX exposure, an automated proposal of the most relevant FX deal would be generated to properly hedge this risk. A grin from ear to ear you say?


FX Exposure Management – Suggested hedge

 

And what about forecasting FX exposures? It’s now all within reach!

FX Exposure Management – Future positions & exposures

 

Whether you choose to take on an intercompany loan, a plain vanilla FX forward or another more exotic derivative product, chosen deals could then be automatically passed on to your deal transaction platform, to effectively execute the deal without any hassle. After execution, deals will automatically flow back into the system. Consequently, a useful summary/overview will be generated to effectively manage all your financial instruments.


Workflow integrated cash forecast

Finally, integrated cash management

New financial instruments / deals will generate a set of related cash flows. Ideally, these are directly integrated in your cash flow forecasts. In Cashforce, this data is automatically integrated within the cash flow forecast module, and will be put into a dedicated cash flow category. Learn more one how to set up an effective cash forecast in this article or this webinar.


Cash flow forecast overview

 

The analysis possibilities are now limitless, thanks to the ability to drill down to the very transactional-level details. The real number crunchers strike gold here: the analysis features open doors to unlimited in-depth analysis and comparison of various scenarios (E.g. the simulated effects of various exchange rate movements).


Drill-down to the transaction level

 

Using our big data engine, the delivery of rich and highly flexible reporting is facilitated. It’s fair to say that the typical SQL server (which currently 95% of the TMS systems use) can’t hold a candle to this. Through an advanced ‘self-service’ interface, users can drill down completely into respective amortization tables, historical transactions and effortlessly create customized reports and dashboards. We’ll talk more about why we believe Big Data engines are crucial for any Treasury software in our next blog.

Integration with ERPs & payment platforms

Next to this, Cashforce will automatically generate the accounting entries (in the format of your ERP/accounting system) related to your deals. The appropriate payment files will be generated in a similar fashion.

So…

As might be clear after reading this article, we strongly believe that integrated data flows & a Big Data engine are the foundation of a new type of Treasury Management System that runs like clockwork and can serve effective treasury departments, but also renewed finance/controlling/FP&A departments.

You are curious to hear more about effective treasury management? We’ve recently recorded a webchat on how to set up an efficient cash flow forecast process.

 

Nicolas Christiaen

Managing Partner at Cashforce

 

Cash forecasting 2.0

| 8-3-2017 | Nicolas Christiaen | Cashforce | sponsored content |



Cash forecasting has been a hot topic in 2016 and it looks like it will keep this status in the years to come.  As Cash Specialist, I’m frequently asked about my vision on this subject. About a month ago, I presented my thoughts to an audience of Group Treasurers & CFOs at the ACT Smart Cash conference in London. During the Q&A, I was asked an intriguing question: “How does a cash management platform, such as Cashforce, differentiate itself from old school Treasury Management Systems in terms of cash forecasting?”

TMS vs. Cash Management/Forecasting platform

Classic Treasury Management Systems (TMS) are focused on inputting, maintaining & managing complicated financial instruments and managing bank connectivity. In other words, they focus on cash optimization from the treasury side.
Cash management & forecasting platforms, on the other hand, focus on cash optimization from the business side. Hence, they typically connect to a company’s ERP systems, in which you’ll find 90% of the company’s cash flows.
And guess what, it’s this refreshing vision on cash optimization that is now attracting the attention by more and more Corporate Treasurers worldwide: they call it “connecting treasury with the business”.

Difference No 1: Transparent cash forecasting

With a classic TMS, a Corporate Treasurer will typically consolidate cash forecasts from the different OpCo’s,  which are already consolidated from the underlying business transactions. So, there is no drill-down available into the business drivers, no assurance on the quality of the data/input/manipulations. This blurs a treasurer’s view on what’s actually happening on the business side, taking away the cash visibility into the company’s different OpCo’s.  Full drill down isn’t offered by a classic TMS due to two main reasons:

  • It is simply not designed for carrying millions of transactions on a daily basis, while cash management/forecasting solutions use a ‘big data’ approach and have built-in engines to process millions of transactions daily.
  • Connecting to each single ERP requires deep knowledge of each of these systems (to avoid long implementation times) and traditionally, Treasury Management Systems didn’t have a need to develop these connectors.

 Difference No 2: Collecting the data in a smart way

One of the pain points often linked to Cash Forecasting, is the lacking ability to merge all relevant data and apply smart logics to it. Indeed, it might be a challenge to connect to all data sources and, at the same time, to do this in a smart way. At Cashforce, our reaction to this issue is twofold: A smart logics engine takes care of the forecasting algorithms, while easy connections to ERPs and other systems (like HRM, CRM..) ensure the continuous supply of rich data.

Defining and applying smart logics are often a challenge to overcome and have an enormous impact on the accuracy of the cash forecast. For example, well-defined smart logics help you to better estimate actual payment times and hence improve the accuracy of a forecast. A TMS system often lacks this powerful ability and has no built-in smart engine for forecasting rules.

Difference No 3: Cash saving from the business instead of treasury optimizations

Finally, driving action from forecasts should be the main objective. Intelligent simulation engines enable companies to consider multiple scenarios and measure their impact. This gives users the power to report on cash saving opportunities and compare options to ultimately pick the better one. As a result, finance departments can be turned into business catalysts for cash generation opportunities throughout the company. In contrast, Treasury Management Systems are not designed to perform complicated business-driven cash simulations.

Complementary or Competitors?

New, often innovative cash management platforms, like Cashforce, are complementary to a TMS and tend to bring a lot of value in working capital intensive businesses. They are complementary, as they have a different focus: Treasury Management Systems look at the entire treasury spectrum in order to improve treasury processes. Cash Management/Forecasting platforms start from the business and want to enable finance departments to become a strategic partner on one of the key growth indicators, cash. On the other hand, for smaller companies, these platforms might be a good alternative for an often expensive TMS, when only limited financial instrument management functionality is required.

Nicolas Christiaen

Managing Partner at Cashforce