3 Ways Liquidity Planning Technology Improves Cash Flow Forecasting Results

03-01-2023 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

The treasurer and CFO are today more closely linked to strategic financial objectives for the CEO, ensuring finance teams provide informed guidance on navigating risks and opportunities. This year, a revolutionary practice area and innovative technology is transforming the value of short and long-term cash flow forecasting with more certainty and analytics, empowering finance with a strategic liquidity planning toolset.

By Brian Blihovde
Senior Direct, Product Marketing

Source

The treasurer and CFO are today more closely linked to strategic financial objectives for the CEO, ensuring finance teams provide informed guidance on navigating risks and opportunities. This year, a revolutionary practice area and innovative technology is transforming the value of short and long-term cash flow forecasting with more certainty and analytics, empowering finance with a strategic liquidity planning toolset.

Modern technology solutions are driving value across cash flow forecasting and strategic planning through inclusion of more information from different sources, using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and flexible scenario analysis. These user interfaces, reporting and analytics provide finance with better identification of free cash flow targets, improve EBITDA, and deliver views and analysis of total working capital levels.

Creating Engagement and Clarity in Liquidity Decisions

New technology solutions for liquidity management planning create forecasts and analyses on actuals and planned cash flows to include liquidity instruments from debt to working capital programs. When the combination of cash, planned or committed financial flows (AP, AR, treasury) are used as an integrative planning tool with analytics, decision-making for the CFO is more accurate and based on today’s and tomorrow’s reality. Forecasted transactions originating from purchase requisitions, orders and finally invoices are a much better source of forecasted flows than spreadsheet estimates.

Liquidity planning tools and features created as part of an advanced solution gives finance the ability to see exact components of working capital and cash flow forecasts further out to deliver clarity on whether debt or other sources of liquidity will be too expensive. Identification of the mix of liquidity needed and the availability of planned sources or uses further helps the treasurer plan the intersection of borrowing levels, cash flows and confidence parameters for various scenarios and comparisons. The ability to quickly adjust parameters within a planned liquidity model with established, accurate cash management baselines, makes the job easier and faster for not only treasury and FP&A, but gives the CFO quick strike decisioning on the planned mix of cash and debt to fund operations or strategic decisions.

Achieving Optimal Levels of Liquidity

Global economic volatility continues to impact multinationals across a variety of indices and continued strategies by central banks to slow inflation with interest rate increases translates into significantly increased costs of borrowing. For finance organizations that provide liquidity as a net short-term borrower, it is extremely important treasurers can assess the mix of debt and the most advantageous debt instruments, or working capital programs, available. Treasury teams can directly impact greater overall financial performance by optimizing the cost of liquidity and keeping the right levels of available debt and free cash for investments. Modern liquidity planning solutions create better long-range views of available debt vehicles in cadence with cash and other programs to help prescribe the correct mix of long and short-term borrowing. Identifying where short-term debt has carrying costs over other sources of liquidity while also reducing the number of overall debt instruments (facilities or other lines) reduces costs that affect net earnings. Liquidity tools that incorporate the complete set of debt vehicles coupled with cash and forecasted flows create more ability to lessen reliance on borrowing, reducing and optimizing debt levels – all significant contributors to a stronger EBITDA.

Expanding C-Suite Confidence with Future Analytics

In a recent cash forecasting webinar, 90% of attendees stated that they “lose confidence in their forecasts within three months.” Regardless of a static or rolling forecast scenario, lack of confidence in your firm’s future cash and liquidity levels hinders the ability to fund longer-term, accurate strategic decisions without having more of a backup in the form of higher credit limits available to shore up potential liquidity shortfalls.

The new cash forecasting features and capabilities available in new liquidity planning tools are creating better capabilities to manage longer-term liquidity questions:

As the economy continues to spiral, uncertainty will bring down the values of organizations who are incapable of managing the rate at which volatility impacts EBITDA – a consequence of legacy thinking and systems. CFOs and treasurers who are taking a new tact in leveraging liquidity across the enterprise, are finding success in minimizing impacts to their income statement and have an unobstructed vision for how they can unlock near and long-term growth.

 

Three Reasons to Add Real-time Payments to Your B2B Payments Mix

15-12-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

If you are reading this, you are likely already exposed to the hype surrounding real-time payments. Whether you believe in the hype or not, it is inevitable that real-time payments will become ubiquitous globally in the near term.

By Rishi Munjal
VP, Product Strategy, Payments

Source

The last two decades have shown that countries with a strong mandate for real-time payments tend to have robust adoption. For example, emerging economies like India and Brazil that have implemented central bank mandates are outpacing developed nations like the U.S in terms of customer adoption.

In 2017, The Clearing House launched the RTP® network, the U.S.’s first real-time payment infrastructure. However, the adoption of real-time payments in general remains low, currently representing 0.9% transaction volume and 0.5% spend, according to the ACI Prime Time for Real-Time report. Specifically, for B2B payments the adoption is even lower. In this blog, I will explore three simple reasons a corporation should consider real-time payments as part of its payment mix. I will stay away from industry-specific use cases, as these were covered in my previous blog.

1. Rebalance your payment mix towards lower-cost and comparable payment types.

While finance organizations strive to keep the costs of operations low, they often only consider direct costs of payments. This practice creates a distorted comparison that can become a reason for inaction. Thus, it is important to measure both direct costs (e.g., provider fees, card interchange, etc.) and indirect costs (e.g., labor, technology, and support costs).

Using industry benchmarks provides a good starting point. The 2022 AFP Payments Cost Benchmarking Survey indicates that the median cost range for sending and receiving RTP® is comparable to ACH and cheaper than wires. Replacing qualifying volume of wires with RTP® can save tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, on an annual basis. You can realize these cost savings without giving up on irrevocability—a key benefit of wires. Kyriba clients’ success stories show tangible cost and productivity gains from such a strategy. If you are receiving card payments, you can save on interchange, which can be as high as 2.5%. With real-time payments, you get instant access to good funds and avoid chargebacks.

Median cost range to pay and get paid

Source: AFP® Payments Cost Benchmarking Survey, 2022

2. Improve cash visibility and liquidity.

Complementing real-time payments with real-time balance and transaction reporting improves cash visibility. This can be especially important if you make a lot of contingent payments. This includes business activities that are dependent on treasury receiving funds. For example, treasury may want to wait until certain funds have been received before releasing a particular payment. Cash visibility can be beneficial if you are being charged intraday credit or your bank does not permit intraday overdrafts.

Wider businesses may also benefit by triggering business activities based on contingent payments. For example, a supply chain team may want to hold on to a shipment until payment is received, accelerating their logistics process. In scenarios that need cash advance or cash-on-delivery, the buyer can make a real-time payment after inspecting the goods. Both parties win. The buyer reduces operational risk, and the seller reduces inventory and improves their working capital position.

With real-time payments, you are no longer beholden to the cut-off times, weekends and holidays. This means that payments can be made as late as possible. So, companies can meet emergency payments to meet any shortfall, and keep lower precautionary balances.

3. Speed up payment digitization and get the most value from your investments in modernization.

Payment processes are complex, and digitizing payments takes time. There are multiple reasons for this. Payment processes for large organizations often involve many roles; initiating, authorizing, and reconciling payments are typically handled by different parties, thereby drawing things out. Approval workflows can also be very complex, involving globally distributed teams. Technology teams may still have direct ownership of managing payment formats and bank connectivity.

When it comes to payment digitization, the U.S. has been behind other countries. Paper checks still account for 42% of payments disbursed by organizations, according to AFP research. The ubiquity of checks, inertia, and in some cases, tradition, continue to hold U.S. B2B payments back.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, payment digitization became even more essential. And since B2B payments are moving away from paper checks, then it only makes sense to complete those transactions as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Real-time payments leverage modern technology, especially APIs, as they transmit data instantly without the need for file downloads. By complementing real-time payments with automated bank account validation and payment policy screening corporates can set aside suspicious transactions for review while all other payments travel seamlessly. The value of payments modernization, including embracing real-time payments, lies in the endless possibilities it will bring to your future business growth.

Conclusion

Don’t dismiss real-time payments simply because they are new. Kyriba offers the most comprehensive coverage of real-time payments globally and we have taken an API-first approach, allowing CFOs and treasurers to inject real-time data-driven decision making into all financial operations. Whether you are an existing customer seeking to introduce real-time payments into your payment mix or a prospective customer seeking to digitize payments and treasury operations, we are ready to assist you in your journey. Contact us today.

Status of Real-time Payments Globally

Status of Raal-time Payments Globally

Source: Prime Time for Real-Time ACT Worldwide,2022

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Footnotes:

  1. Calculated total cost for issuing a paper check on a per Item Basis (in-house or outsourced)
  2. Calculated total cost for receiving a paper check on a per item basis
  3. Initiating and receiving ACH transaction (internal and external costs)
  4. The median transaction cost for initiating and receiving RTP payments on a per item basis
  5. Calculated cost for sending and receiving wire payments on a per-item basis
  6. Total calculated cost for outgoing payments made (including personnel, IT technology, compliance, audit, etc.) via a card (procurement, T&E, and virtual) per transaction
  7. The internal median cost range for receiving credit card transactions (including personnel, IT technology, file connectivity, encryption, audit, PCI DSS compliance, etc.)
  8. The external median cost range for receiving credit card transactions (including issuer/acquirer/processor interchange, assessment, monthly fees, etc.)

Currency Impact Report October 2022

15-11-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

According to a recent Kyriba report, the earnings of North American firms will suffer a shocking $34 billion fall in Q2 2022 as a result of headwinds. When compared to previous quarters, headwinds rose by 3583% since Q3 2021 and by 134% from the prior quarter.

Source

Currency Impact Report

The average earnings per share (EPS) impact from currency volatility reported by North American companies increased from $0.03 to $0.10.

The USD is at a 20-year high, and when combined with volatility and interest rate changes, many corporations have seen their currency risk double or triple, as well as their hedging expenses double.

Kyriba’s Currency Impact Report (CIR)

Kyriba’s Currency Impact Report (CIR), a comprehensive quarterly report which details the impacts of foreign exchange (FX) exposures among 1,200 multinational companies based in North America and Europe with at least 15 percent of their revenue coming from overseas, sustained $49.09 billion in total impacts to earnings from currency volatility.

The combined pool of corporations reported $11.82 billion in tailwinds and $37.27 billion in headwinds in the second quarter of 2022.

Highlights:

  • The average earnings per share (EPS) impact from currency volatility reported by North American companies in Q2 2022 increased to $0.10.
  • North American companies reported $34.25 billion in headwinds in Q2 2022, a 134% increase compared to the previous quarter, and 3,583% increase since Q3 2021.
  • European companies reported a 68% percent increase in negative currency impacts, with companies reporting $3.02 billion in FX-related headwinds.
Download the Report

Crisis After Crisis, Treasury Steps into the Advisor Role

24-10-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

From the 2008 global financial crisis to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, treasury departments have served as strategic advisors regarding capital structure, liquidity and finance operations. Without the guidance and leadership of treasury management in these critical moments, many organizations would not have survived. But it begs the question—what can companies do on an ongoing basis to best position themselves for when the next crisis happens?

By Andrew Deichler
 Content Manager, Strategic Marketing

Source

The Company Vaccine

Treasury is often viewed as a bit of a niche area. Even though virtually every company has some semblance of a treasury department and the function has been around for a long time, many departments outside of finance don’t really know what treasury does. That’s essential for understanding the value of the function.

But as Lee-Ann Perkins, CTP, FCT, assistant treasurer for Specialized Bicycle Components, explained, they suddenly have a wake-up call when a crisis occurs. “During COVID and the financial crisis, treasury became that department that had a chance to shine,” she said. “I think, myself and other treasury folks, used that opportunity to really raise the profile of the treasury department.”

In the case of the pandemic specifically, companies relied on treasury to immediately get them into a better liquidity position and procure PPP loans if needed. “Treasury was the department that ran with those projects,” Perkins said. “We have the relationships with the banks, and we understand the importance of covering liquidity and covering covenants.”

Much of what treasury does is forward-looking—constantly future-proofing the organization. And in crises like the pandemic or the current supply chain shortage where cash is paramount, the C-suite looks to treasury to make sure the company can withstand future shocks. “I think, along with the heads of accounting, finance and tax, treasury has become known as our own department that can provide useful answers to the C-suite,” Perkins said. “During COVID, I made this analogy that the treasury department should really be the ‘prevention’ department. We want to be the vaccine that’s out there to prevent you from needing the medicine in the first place.”

But for the vaccine analogy to really be accurate, shouldn’t treasury already have that voice as an advisor? There will always be another crisis around the corner, but if companies are already listening closely to what treasury has to say, they might be able to weather those events much more efficiently than if they were asking for treasury’s advice at the last minute.

Building Strategic Relationships

Perhaps the most important relationship a treasurer can have in an organization is with the CFO. The CFO is typically the one that represents finance (and treasury by extension) in meetings with the CEO and the board. But if a treasurer has a good relationship with the CFO, that CFO may bring the treasurer into those conversations, explained Jim Gilligan, former assistant treasurer for Evergy and currently senior vice president of MFR Securities. “If you have a CFO that recognizes the strategic value of treasury in those executive discussions, then that goes a long way towards becoming a strategic partner,” he said.

The treasurer’s personality and skill set are also important factors in this regard; treasurers shouldn’t just hope the CFO notices them. “If you have a personality that allows you to interject yourself in those sorts of strategic discussions, then that could help to get you a seat at table,” Gilligan added. “If you’re not that type of personality or your CFO does not necessarily recognize that specific skill set, then you’ve got to find a way to get yourself noticed.”

Getting noticed by the CFO and senior leadership isn’t easy. Treasury professionals can establish themselves by adding value in other areas of the business that they may not typically have much interaction with. For example, payment processing is handled through customer service at many companies. Customer service representatives may not be aware of some of the new payment rails and capabilities that have cropped up in recent years, like real-time payments. By getting involved and helping customer service adopt some of these new payment methods, treasury can show a lot of value, Gilligan explained.

Treasury can also better establish itself by developing relationships with the operational teams and inserting itself in the annual budget process, explained John Dourdis, CTP, a corporate treasurer most recently with Conair. “Say, ‘I want to be part of that.’ Because I think that gets a lot of attention with regard to CEOs and COOs,” he said. “That’s important to give yourself that visibility that treasury isn’t always going to have.”

Dourdis noted that, whatever the company’s business might be, treasury is not going be top of mind for operations. But operations and the C-suite might look to treasury sooner if it inserts itself in the budget process. And that can lead to treasury being involved in other areas, like the forecast update process.

Treasury would also be wise to get involved in 12-18-month strategic cash flow forecasting. CFOs have been prioritizing this area in recent years but have mostly relied on FP&A to do so, while leaving treasury to handle short-term forecasts. Treasury departments should reach out to FP&A to see how they can help in the process. With treasury’s overall proven track record of developing accurate forecasts, both FP&A and the CFO may welcome their input.

Treasury departments can also help companies with large debt burdens as interest rates begin to rise. With the era of inexpensive debt coming to a close, organizations could face strict enforcement of loan covenants. Treasury’s knowledge of covenant compliance and forecasting should help immensely in this regard; a bank may agree to amend a loan and add new covenants if financial projections are strong.

Strategy and Technology

Technology can play a key role in helping the treasury department establish itself further. With the latest treasury management software, team members can spend less time doing manual work and more time contributing strategically.

Easton Dickson, vice president and global treasurer for Bain & Co., believes that technology can improve the situation drastically. He has observed treasury teams spending copious amounts of time reacting to daily operations. And with a company as big as Bain that operates in over 40 countries, that means that any day of the week, treasury may have to resolve a mini-crisis in any part of the world, while maintaining its ongoing M&A activities, due diligence, etc.

“Operationally you’re bogged down,” he said. “And so, I think whatever we can do to streamline and automate processes will make it so much easier because it’s freeing up time.”

Those times of crisis typically shine a light on areas where companies need to sharpen their edges. “Maybe you’re underinvesting in technology and relying too heavily on manual processes,” explained Dana Laidhold, treasurer for Nasdaq. “You realize, now we need to move faster, and we’ve got tons and tons of people running manual processes that could be automated.”

But often in those chaotic moments, it can be too late to course correct. A treasury department that suddenly needs to provide liquidity positions to senior leadership on a weekly or even daily basis is going to be sufficiently challenged if they are relying solely on Excel. And at that point, there’s also no bandwidth to begin a treasury management system implementation project.

“I hope finance leaders have learned, having gone through the Great Recession and the pandemic, that it’s really important to think ahead,” Laidhold said. “It’s so much harder to backpedal than it is to build smartly along the way.”

It’s therefore incumbent on the treasury team to communicate to senior leadership what insights it needs to deliver and the right technology that can make that information more accessible and accurate. Treasury should vocalize the problems that it may need to solve in the future and whether it will need greater capabilities to do so.

Laidhold hypothesized that there might be a question that doesn’t need to be answered currently, but somewhere down the line it could become important. And there’s a type of analysis that treasury would need to do, but it doesn’t have the data or technology to do it yet. “So how do we plan today to be in the position to be able to do that? I think it’s myopic to assume that whatever situation you’re in now you’re going to be in forever,” she said.

Taking Action

The treasury department needs to be proactive if it wants to be seen as a strategic partner outside of times of crisis. That means adding value wherever possible, establishing strong relationships with senior leadership and other departments, and making the business case for technology that will improve its efficiency. Crises are happening more rapidly. Companies will be in much better shape for the next one if treasury is already at the table, providing necessary insights.

Learn More:

  1. AFP Treasury in Practice Guide: Treasury Opportunities in Strategic Cash Forecasting
  2. eBook: Perfecting the Cash Forecast
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5 Steps to Automate (and Optimize) Your FX Risk Management Program

03-10-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

Companies of all sizes and industries with FX exposures are being impacted by global trade complexities. New dynamics are putting CFOs and treasurers’ FX strategies and their ability to explain results to the test. Automating an FX management program provides numerous advantages. Diminishing the need for manual involvement frees corporate risk, treasury, finance, and accounting teams from sourcing information manually from multiple systems, compiling and uploading it into spreadsheets and finally attempting to put all of this into a management report that is timely.

By Brian Blihovde
 Senior Director, Product Marketing

Source

Companies of all sizes and industries with foreign currency exposures are being impacted by a number of global trade complexities. For many, supply chain disruptions, interest rate, and price index increases are taking a toll on profitability. For many others, the impact from increased foreign currency headwinds is becoming the glaring reality unveiling weaknesses in FX risk management programs. CFOs are having a more challenging time predicting income statement impacts in both directions: favorable and adverse; neither direction is good, particularly for publicly traded enterprises. New dynamics are putting CFOs and treasurers’ FX strategies and the ability to explain results, to the test. Using leading practices supported by leading solutions helps CFOs and finance leaders overcome these challenges of reliance upon manual, spreadsheet-based workflows.

Whether your organization is starting, advancing, or reassessing your individual FX risk programs, there are levels of benefits, value and success metrics tied to how exposed and how uncertain your levels of fx risk management are. For instance, are you able to identify exposures, aggregate and categorize them? Are those balances generated from automated journal entries or is there a manual component? Across your systems, how well are market exchange rates used and applied across the ERP, GL, procurement, billing, or FP&A modules? How often? Finally, and probably one of the most overlooked attributes, how long does it take and the number of staff who participate in attempting to gain access to even a partial picture of your FX risk? How efficient is the draw of FX data? Ultimately much effort is put into converting that data into information and what do the lags in the timeliness of the information you, as CFO are using to make decisions? The answer lies in a company’s ability to invest in technology and process transformation that can stem from that investment.

Automating the FX Management Process

Diminishing the need for manual involvement or onerous workarounds, frees corporate risk, treasury, finance and accounting teams from sourcing information manually from multiple systems, compiling and uploading into spreadsheets and finally attempting to put all of this into a management report that is timely. The giving them more time to analyze information, track exposure trends and proactively seek out other opportunities to eliminate risk. Ultimately, automation transforms how treasury professionals are perceived within an organization, allowing them to be seen as a key resource in strategic planning. The implementation of an FX management program provides numerous advantages, but the three high-level areas for the entire finance organization and business divisions exist:

  1. A complete picture – Gain a clear understanding of how currency is impacting the entire organization and create reports to analyze exposures in real time
  2. Maximum control of the business – Gain confidence in data quality and exposure accuracy to be able to detect underlying details that are not obvious in manual spreadsheet environments
  3. Informed business decisions – Incorporate historical business cycles, trends and the business insights gained from having detailed data to make better hedging decisions and drive better FX management results
  4. Growth and Scalability / Integrating M&A – business expansion, in the form of acquiring new business units and attempting to run consolidations on them is hard enough. Automation through leading technology can help take advantage of acquisitions and eliminate delays in synchronization from outlier processes or legacy mismatches in risk policy

FX Risk Management Automation: Implications for your Organization

The use of technology does not merely indicate that the application of technology will result in system integration and process automation. Yes, this is one of the starting blocks of taking good processes and creating time-saving opportunities to generate better decision-making with cost-savings optimization. One focus of FX Hedge Management optimization will involve operational cost savings, but another focus should be on taking more of a role in assessing overall strategic success of your hedging through currency pair correlated VaR analyses and scenario analyses. Having more analytical power from technology automation can speed access to better information on your overall cost of hedging foreign currency risk.

Evaluating your FX Risk Program Operations

When evaluating your FX management programs, organizations should consider which of the following aspects of their FX workflow requires better efficiency and effectiveness:

  • Data collection automation can eliminate manual time spent on the collection of exposure data and enable teams make better decisions based on the most accurate information
  • Calculation and analysis of exposures automatically determines the impacts of rate changes, identify impacts that surpass materiality thresholds, and pinpoint accounting or posting issues
  • Hedging and trade preparation processes are pre-proposed from exposure information to ensure corporate decision strategy or policy application and trades are automatically prepared for submission following hedge approval
  • Compliance automation enables the standardization of compliance practices and ensures that documentation contains historical audit trails for reporting purposes
  • End-to-end workflow automation eliminates manual processes and human error for an improvement in both efficiency and security

Expanding Analytical Capabilities

Technology solutions should undergo assessment for various capabilities that are part of leading analytical aspects of the FX Risk program. For instance, portfolio VaR analyses can help companies create portfolio views or dive into targeted gross/net exposures while considering the cost of a hedge across specific currency pairs, portfolios. Automation for running simulations helps determine top hedging scenarios that your risk managers can analyze to determine what currency pairs to hedge and what the resulting net exposure and portfolio value at risk will be. Access to automated dashboards and FX business intelligence gives your treasury and finance leaders the ability to Identify strategies to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of your exposure management and hedging programs across specific parameters and filters. If you cannot choose various exposures, legal entity slices, or currency selections, you are not optimally running an automated or efficient FX program. Finally, FX trade desk workflow automation and confirmation capabilities for the back-office is often under-estimated as entering and executing FX trades is part of operational or physical workflows attributed to the program. However, the implications to generating entries, integration to trading or confirmation platforms makes this an integral part of FX Risk processes.

5 Steps to Create an FX Automation Roadmap

The goal is the create a plan and roadmap to optimize and transform the way your finance organization collects, analyzes, aggregates, and mitigates risk from foreign currency exposures. One suggested approach is to work with FX Advisors to help you understand where you are and how to get there. As always, having a plan, success measures tied back to value drivers helps programs succeed.

FX Improvement Steps Objectives, Guidance
1.
Identify Systems, Sources of Exposures
Often, there are a wide array and extensive network of foreign currency denominated transactions; and extremely unlikely to be creating offsets that could qualify as natural hedges. The inventory of systems in an extensive matrix is a very good starting point.
2.
Assess Integrity of your FX data, GL accounts, & source postings
Once the system landscape is understood, how well are the controls on your ERPs, ancillary systems and manual transactions coming from sub-ledgers? Are your financial statements subject to shifts from erroneous transactional impacts?
3.
Select and deploy technology targeting automation
Consolidating technology platforms into one risk management platform, allows finance organizations to save significant, material cost amounts and increase profitability from merely being accurate in their hedging activities. Fully automating your FX management program with technology, which entails modernizing data collection, exposure consolidation, calculation and analysis, and hedging recommendations, ensures an organization is operating in step with current FX best practices.
4.
Target a full, end to end solution
Your technology solution should provide for:
  • direct ERP data extraction and aggregation
  • exposure and risk analysis generation
  • automated risk transfer
  • VaR correlation analytics and scenario analyses
  • trade execution connectivity to banking portals and trading platforms using state-of-the-art, highly secure SaaS solutions
5.
Customizable, Flexible Business Intelligence
Reporting and dashboards create relevant and valued analytics at your fingertips with real-time speed and automation.

Kyriba’s FX Advisory Services professionals give you leading practice advice and guidance in identifying, assessing, measuring, and implementing positive FX Risk Management results across your people, processes and systems. Learn how to improve and transform your FX Risk Management profile into more predictable and effective hedging results

Learn more about Kyriba’s leading FX Risk Management solution and our FX Advisory Team today. Reach out to our team of FX Risk Management professionals at: [email protected]

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Could Stablecoins Drive Payment Innovation?

12-09-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

Despite the current market volatility, cryptocurrencies(1) are slowly seeping into everyday transactions,(2) driven largely by small businesses. There are an estimated tens of thousands of businesses that are accepting cryptocurrencies as payments roughly representing about 0.01% of businesses worldwide.

By Rishi Munjal, Vice President Product Strategy, Payments, Kyriba

Source

Could Stablecoins Drive Payment Innovation?

Large corporations have stayed away from cryptocurrencies with a few exceptions(3) where the use is limited to holding cryptocurrencies in treasury. The treatment of cryptocurrencies as an “indefinite-lived intangible asset”(4) poses an accounting risk, forcing companies to write down(5) the value of these assets when their value plummets.

Global Cryptocurrency Acceptance Chart

The level of adoption is by no means impressive. Meanwhile, challenges with high-fees, scalability and volatility will continue to limit broad adoption of cryptocurrencies as a form of payment. Such limitations pose an important question for CFOs and treasurers: Are cryptocurrencies worth paying attention to?

Stablecoins and the Future of Payments

The answer is yes, given the potential for innovations that can shape the future of payments for corporates and merchants alike. This is especially true for Stablecoins(6), as they present an opportunity to lower fees, reduce barriers and drive better services like instant cross-border payments. The promise hinges on a stablecoin’s ability to maintain its peg to a specified asset (typically U.S. dollars), or a pool or basket of assets, and provide perceived stability when compared to the high volatility of unbacked crypto-assets.

Since the launch of BitUSD in 2014 on the BitShare(7) blockchain, stablecoins have evolved into public and private stablecoins. Public stablecoins exist in two forms. Reserve-backed or custodial stablecoins are backed by cash-equivalent reserves such as deposits, Treasury bills and commercial paper. These are issued by intermediaries who serve as the custodians of the cash equivalent assets and offer a 1-for-1 redemption of their stablecoin liabilities for the asset it is pegged against.

Algorithmic stablecoins (e.g.,UST) rely on mechanisms other than cash-equivalent reserves to stabilize their price. The peg to a specified asset is achieved by overcollateralized crypto and/or smart contracts that defend the peg by automatically buying or selling the stablecoin. These public stablecoins provide liquidity across the thousands of cryptocurrencies currently in the market. The private institutional stablecoins use tokenized deposits held by the bank for efficiently providing internal liquidity or liquidity for the bank’s wholesale clients between accounts held at the same bank. These coins (e.g., JP Coin) form a closed loop payment network similar to the ones offered by wallet providers like PayPal.

Stablecoin Guidance

Stablecoins have had their share of troubles(8) and collapses(9) in their short history. These risks were well understood by regulatory agencies. However, the explosive growth in cryptocurrencies has made it difficult if not impossible for regulators(10) to keep up. Outside of the ad-hoc enforcement actions against crypto firms by the SEC(11), the industry continues to operate largely outside of regulations. Given the complexity of the crypto ecosystem, it is pragmatic for regulators to start with Stablecoins as they are relatively simpler and have real applications. It is therefore not a surprise, that despite the market turmoil, New York became the first U.S. state to issue guidance for Stablecoin issuers.

The Virtual Currency Guidance(12) provided by the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) outlines redeemability, reserve and attestation requirements for entities issuing U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins. The industry has been waiting for long-overdue commonsense regulations for reducing systemic risk and providing a fertile ground for stablecoin issuers and other fintechs to drive broad innovation in financial services and payments.

Table 1: Key points from The Virtual Currency Guidance provided by the New York DFS

Backing and Redeemability
  • Fully backed by safe reserve assets like T-Bills, Notes and Bonds
  • Market value of the reserve is at least equal to the nominal value of all outstanding units of the stablecoin as of the end of each business day
Reserve
  • Segregation of reserves from the proprietary assets of the issuing entity
  • Must be held in custody with U.S. state or federally chartered depository institutions and/or asset custodians.
Attestation
  • American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (“AICPA”) standard
  • Examination of management’s assertions at least once per month by an independent Certified Public Accountant (“CPA”) licensed in the US

Kyriba has taken a forward looking posture in this space, for example via partnership with Copper to offer corporate treasury direct access to Copper’s award winning digital asset investment platform, and the ability to manage liquidity across fiat, crypto and money market funds.

While the specific time-horizon on when a trend would become meaningful is not easy to predict, CFOs and treasurers can preserve optionality by partnering with providers that stay at the forefront of payment market trends.

More to Read:

  1. API: Copper Integration
  2. Blog: The Top 5 Trends for CFOs in 2022
  3. Blog: Digital Currencies: Not Ready for Corporate Treasury

References

(1) FSB defines all private sector digital assets that depend primarily on cryptography and distributed ledger or similar technology as crypto-assets and not currencies; for this article the two terms are being used interchangeably.
(2) Map of Cryptocurrency ATMs and Merchants, Coinmap.org
(3) Public companies holding bitcoin, Coingecko.com
(4) Accounting for and auditing of digital assets
(5) MicroStrategy Posts a Loss After Taking Bitcoin Impairment, Bloomberg 2/22
(6) Financial Stability Board, Crypto-assets and Global “Stablecoins”
(7) Whitepaper: BitShares – A peer-to-peer polymorphic Digital Asset Exchange
(8) Terra Luna timeline; TerraLuna UST collapse – What Happened?
(9) CFTC fines Tether and Bitfinex for misleading claims; Panics and Death Spirals: A history of- failed stablecoins
(10) Stablecoin risks and potential regulations, BIS Working Paper 11/2020
(11) Crypto Assets and Cyber Enforcement Actions, notes seven enforcement action for the period Jan – April 2022
(12) Guidance on issuance of US Dollar backed stablecoins, New York Department of Financial Services, Jun 2022

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What Does Real-time Connectivity Mean for Your Organization?

08-08-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

Nowadays if you work in treasury, probably not a day goes by without you seeing a social post or article from your subscribed newsletters on the topic of real-time Bank API. It stands for the future of bank connectivity, and it will change the way data is exchanged between corporates and banks. Trent Ellis, Senior Solution Engineer at Kyriba, spends his time assisting clients to evaluate what works the best for them from a solution point of view, with both their current and future business needs in mind. In his discussions with clients and prospects, bank connectivity has always been a focus area and recently he noticed a growing interest in real-time Bank APIs.

 

By Trent Ellis, Senior Solution Engineer

Source

When it comes to real-time bank connectivity, the first thing I usually tell my clients is that it’s important to delineate between the different data flows such as inbound balance reporting, transaction details, confirmation reporting and outbound payment initiation. When an organization plans to make real-time bank connectivity a reality, the first thing they should do is to look at their data flows from daily operations. Identify and determine what data would benefit from a real-time update? Which items are critical for that real-time treasury decision making? Where are you going to maintain the balance and transaction data once it is received or payment data prior to it being transmitted to the bank?

Next, because many banks have grown their footprint by acquisition, bank accounts held in different regions (even regionally within a country) can be on different platforms with different technology. Therefore, within a single bank, API readiness can have a different status for different subsets of bank accounts based on branch and geographic location.

Now that the bank may have made an API connection available, how are you going to connect to it? Do you look at internal technical expertise and availability? Do you look to a third-party vendor? Consider a specialist that just does API connections or a TMS vendor that has other integrated modules and additional functionality beyond just the bank connection for statements and/or payments?

Real-time Bank Reporting, what does this really mean?

Banks are now offering bank balance API’s as well as transactional statement APIs, but sometimes not (yet) both. It’s more than likely not the same as what you would get from that same bank in the form of a BAI or MT940 standard bank statement as banks are still working on what data becomes available through the API. Bank balance reporting is important for real-time liquidity monitoring but will not always help your treasury or AP team confirm the status of a cleared payment, or the status of an important cash credit.

Yes, an API can deliver data in real-time but is the underlying platform that holds that data providing real-time data? Some banks are providing their “real-time” data on a predefined schedule throughout the day which means it is not what most would consider “real-time”. True real-time reporting requires process changes at the bank. Decreasing update time from day to hours or within the hour is an improvement that is easier to absorb without restructuring the process.

Real-time payments, what does this really mean?

Real-time payments are payments that are cleared and settled nearly instantaneously. Real-time payments are generally facilitated by domestic or regional payment infrastructures on a 24x7x365 basis including weekends and holiday.1

Many may not be aware that globally real-time payment infrastructures have been around for as long as 40+ years, and real-time payments can be enabled via FTP or API based on Bank / FI’s offerings and the connectivity option preferred by the corporate customer. Relatively, it has been a recent development in the US payment ecosystem. In November 2017, The Clearing House launched the first real-time payment infrastructure RTP® network in the US, built on the same Vocalink technology that powers the UK’s Faster Payment System. The RTP® network was built for financial institutions of all sizes and serves as a platform for innovation allowing financial institutions to deliver new products and services to their customers. Financial Institutions can integrate into the RTP® network directly, through Third-Party Service Providers (TPSPs), Bankers’ Banks and Corporate Credit Unions.2 The US Federal Reserve will be launching its real-time payment infrastructure FedNowSM in the 2023 – 2024 timeframe.

Globally real-time payments are growing at a double-digit growth rate across all major markets. Adoption of real-time payments will continue to be use case specific, especially for use cases that are underserved by existing payment infrastructures. In the long-term, we should expect real-time payments to be an important part of corporate’s payments mix alongside other traditional payment systems. Like other real-time payment infrastructures globally, the RTP® network has been increasing its transaction limits, which currently stands at $1million. This makes it more relevant for B2B / Corporate payment use cases – a very good example from our client HUNT Companies being the intracompany transfers for efficient deployment of working capital. However, this also means that if you need to make payments with value greater than $1million, you would need an alternative type or method for the time being. You cannot rely on the RTP® network as your only means to make payments and will still require connections for other payment types such as Wire, ACH and international formats.

Recommendations to clients

The world is certainly migrating towards real-time bank connectivity, but organizations will ultimately require various connectivity strategies to fit different geographical and banking technology. In 2022, most real-time Bank APIs are an incremental addition to existing connection methods and formats for both statements and payments. Currently, Bank APIs are not a replacement for other options, which are still required to get a complete picture of prior day statement activity and/or ability to send all required payments. Therefore, my recommendations to my clients always remain the same:

  • Identify and evaluate your data flows.
  • Where does real-time data make sense?
  • Talk to your banking partners and understand their offerings in detail.
  • Ask the question: Do your internal requirements align with the bank’s offerings?
  • Where are you going to house the data that is received/transmitted via the real-time Bank connectivity?
  • Talk to vendors that have teams of people that do this every day and evaluate their perspectives and subject matter expertise.

Find out more details on Bank APIs from the Kyriba Developer Portal, and watch any time an on-demand webinar on everything you need to know about APIs: Bank Connectivity and Beyond.

1 Real-Time Payments: Everything You Need to Know. Paymentsjournal.com. 2021
2 The RTP® Network: For All Financial Institutions. The Clearing House.

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The Role of AI in Liquidity Management | Webinar | July 21

13-07-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

 

Join this 15-minute bitesize webinar with a leading Kyriba Liquidity Management specialist to learn how artificial intelligence and machine learning are being applied in today’s liquidity management processes and how they will affect the future of treasury.

 

 

Emerging technologies are changing the way finance functions operate, opening up new opportunities for treasury and enabling teams to deliver increased value to the organization. As a new decade emerges, executives are looking to artificial intelligence and machine learning as a means for enhancing overall operations.

 

In this session he will discuss:

  • Difference between Business Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
  • Why are AI Solutions needed for best-in-class enterprise liquidity management ?
  • What Kyriba offers
  • Challenges of building AI forecasting solutions within an organization

 

Register Here

 

Perfecting the Cash Forecast

21-06-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

 

By Bob Stark, Global Head of Market Strategy

Source

The number one treasury issue that causes CFOs the most potential concern is unreliable cash visibility and forecasts, according to a Nov. 2018 CFO Publishing survey, “3 Key Areas Where CFOs Say Treasurers Need to be More Strategic.”

Every organization talks about forecasting more effectively, but few allocate sufficient people, time, and technology to build an effective program. Understanding the importance of an accurate cash forecast that can be relied upon for key financial decisions is critical to making the right investments in forecasting. While there are many reasons to forecast, such as protecting against currency volatility, there are a few key areas that should be addressed to help CFOs and treasurers further make the connection between accurate cash forecasting and bottom-line financial performance.

So, what is cash forecasting? Cash forecasting, when performed accurately, enables greater certainty of projected cash balances. Longer term investing, reduced borrowing costs, more effective hedging programs and better mobility of global cash, cash positioning is concerned with today and often the next five business days. The purpose is to manage daily liquidity to ensure shortfalls are covered and surpluses are concentrated to earn some yield on excess cash. 

Cash budgeting is performed by finance teams such as FP&A and is more focused beyond one year – although with increased emphasis on free cash flow guidance, the reconciliation of indirect budget-based forecasts with direct cash flow forecasts is increasingly managed quarterly. 

Cash forecasting typically extends cash positioning with horizons anywhere from one week to one year. Forecasting leverages multiple data sources to increase confidence in the projected cash balances so that better cash decisions can be made. The value of forecasting is based upon the value of those better decisions.

So why forecast? Ineffective cash forecasting costs money and impacts shareholder value. A poorly executed program drives a number of negative consequences so it is critical to understand the link between effective cash forecasting and bottom line financial performance. Excuses such as “we’re cash rich” or “interest rates are too low” no longer satisfy investors who demand that cash be deployed or returned to them. Without adequate visibility of forecast cash and where cash needs to be deployed to meet growth targets, CEOs and CFOs risk looking foolish in front of shareholders and analysts. 

The volatility in global currencies shows no signs of abating, meaning that the pressure on CFOs to maintain the value of foreign cash inflows and outflows persists. Companies can experience earnings per share losses from unexpected and unhedged currency impacts or have difficulty in maintaining (let alone increasing) return on cash in a post-Basel III environment. 

Forecasting cash will allow segregation of operational and non-operational cash into time buckets as well as deliver the needed accuracy to allocate cash to longer duration investment strategies. This will help preserve previously realised investment returns or help to find an alternative for cash balances that are no longer wanted by your bank!

Certainty in projected cash balances drives the CFO’s ability to anticipate and prepare for corporate actions and strategic investments. For example, without confidence in cash forecasts, the CFO and treasurer are not relied upon to contribute to key M&A decisions such as providing guidance on the components of cash, debt and equity to calculate a total acquisition cost.

When cash is held globally, share buybacks or dividend hikes are a challenge. Often CFOs find it cheaper to borrow cash domestically than repatriate funds – yet this analysis requires certainty into projected cash balances. Confidence in the forecast is critical to optimize business value; CFOs need an effective cash forecast in order to make commitments on how to reinvest cash to meet organic growth targets. Lack of confidence will lead to unnecessary borrowing or equity financing.

Consolidation of data – Finding the right information and determining the most efficient (i.e. automated) way to integrate it into a consolidated forecast system is key. 

While automation is important, data quality is also paramount to success. When building the forecast, each line item may be sourced in different ways. The source of the information will determine the best way to build the forecast for each line item. For example, many treasury teams prefer to import accounts payable data directly from the ERP while for receivables information they may wish to extrapolate historical data and model using a linear regression. For treasury teams to be effective, it is important that all methods be fully automated and secure so that initial setup, maintenance, and daily execution to build the forecast are easy and can be maintained by the user (and not require re-programming).

Collaboration – Making decisions on the best data to build the forecast also requires determining who to collaborate with to smoothly access that key information. In many cases, treasury does not have direct authority over the people that own systems and/or business responsibilities that offer that data Yet, treasury relies upon this outside information to build a comprehensive forecast, so good internal communication skills are critical to receiving quality information in a timely way. Accounts Payable, FP&A, IT, Regional Controllers all forecast projections for decentralized organizations. Many treasury teams plan, with their CFOs, a top-down collaboration model that builds effective cash forecasting into the team’s objectives and compensation. This draws attention to the forecasting objectives and motivates each team to fulfill their roles.

Measurement – The most important – and often overlooked – step is the measurement of forecast accuracy. Implementing a process to measure forecast accuracy at a detailed level to identify the source of variances is critical to improving quality and ultimately reducing forecast variances. Equally important is implementing a feedback loop – to systems and to people – that ensure that forecast data is improved based on variances that were identified. The feedback loop is especially important when non-treasury resources are contributing to the forecast to ensure that the right behaviors and cash forecast numbers are positively reinforced while opportunities for improvement are well communicated. This is especially effective when feedback is aligned to KPIs and quarterly objectives of those outside of the treasury team.

Key to success – A forecast variance analysis should be detailed with multiple ‘snapshots’ taken. If only a summary picture is reviewed (e.g. how effective was forecasting over a 3-month period) then a lot of the variability is hidden within that timeframe. Measuring daily, weekly, or bi-weekly will help uncover the ups and downs between forecast and actuals that might otherwise go unnoticed. Fortunately, the business intelligence features of a TMS such as Kyriba offers the data visualization and analytics required to offer this level of detail. Cash forecasting is especially important if you are “cash rich” with a high percentage of non-operational cash deposits. Multinationals with significant foreign revenues must forecast better, so they can hedge effectively and deliver cash predictability to their stakeholders. The key to forecasting is flexibility so that you have many options to model the different streams of forecast data. The accuracy of your data will determine if importing, regressing, extrapolating, or other methods of calculations are needed to build your forecast effectively. 

Without measuring forecast accuracy, it is impossible to know if you are good at forecasting. Data visualization helps focus on important variances – whether by category, time bucket, or geography – and isolate what data needs to be improved for future forecasting. ROI of cash forecasting is very high.

In summary, the value of forecasting is driven by what your organization can do with additional cash. The value of cash can be measured by investing longer with higher returns on cash, repaying debt, earning yield from early supplier payments, or investing in new organizational projects. Perfecting the cash forecast means freeing up cash from working capital and directing towards these higher value uses.

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REMINDER WEBINAR | The Evolution of Open banking, Connectivity and Real time: How will APIs change the Treasurer’s daily life?

06-06-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

Live session | June 14 | 11 am CET

Do you know how to take use of APIs’ benefits for small, medium, and large companies? APIs are a real-time catalyst for providing CFOs and treasurers with a 360-degree perspective of their liquidity management. Discover everything there is to know with our partner Kyriba; our next live session will take place on June 14 at 11 a.m. CET.

Join the panelist discussion to hear from experts in the field

  • Pieter de Kiewit, Owner of Treasurer Search is moderator of this session. With his passion for treasury and his wide industry knowledge he is the obvious person to ask the right questions to the experts.
  • Patrick Kunz, owner of Pecunia Treasury & Finance and highly valued treasuryXL expert. With Patrick’s impressive career within the World of Treasury, you can really say that he lives and breathes Treasury.
    Patrick is performance driven. He is an open minded, outgoing, rational person who is comfortable communicating and convincing on all levels of management. Patrick has worked with both international corporates from all fields of business as well as national non-profit organisations.
  • Félix Grévy, VP Product, Open API and Connectivity, Kyriba
    Felix Grevy has more than 20 years of experience working in Financial Technology and held various roles in product development, sales and product management.
    He has been working on API for the last 5 years, building and launching successful API platforms. He has joined Kyriba in 2020 to lead the API and connectivity strategy

We will go around several questions:

  • Who should, own/build the API; Bank, customer or TMS provider? If a bank builds one should it be open source?
  • How can APIs contribute to accounting or controlling, in situations where there are intraday statements, but accounting is only able to process them with end of day statements? Two-way traffic: API’s for both statements / Camt for instant payments
  • How does the CFO leverage the instant payments vs instant acknowledgement?
  • APIs vs Swift. How do they operate together?

Registration

Discover everything there is to know about APIs and how to unify data in a single platform to deliver key insights.

Register today for the next event on API and its advantages.