27-05-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

Live session | June 14 | 11 am CET

How to benefit from the advantages of APIs, for small, medium, or large companies?

APIs are a key work in Treasury Management Systems and the link to multibank platforms. APIs are a catalyst in real time to grant CFOs and treasurers a 360 view of their liquidity management.

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.

21-04-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

By Brian Blihovde, Senior Director, Product Marketing

Source

Bank Connectivity is Only the Beginning of the Transformation Journey

CFOs looking to optimize their processes and systems view APIs as a gateway to enterprise-wide liquidity and the organization’s financial capabilities and health. Finance transformation starts with bank connectivity, leading to real-time decision-making, but the opportunities do not stop there. Bank connectivity and payments help finance deliver more complete, real-time information to all parts of the business. This is the benefit from composable financial systems and design. CFOs, treasurers, and their IT counterparts must all collaborate, consider and plan how transformations continue to drive impacts beyond bank connectivity for all of finance and business units as well.

Finance and the business units to include manufacturing, warehousing, inventory, sales, and distribution all comprise enterprise-level functions contributing important strategic decision-making information. APIs should be used to drive transformation, resilience of data, efficiency, and real-time reporting. Strategic liquidity decision-making will improve once IT and finance can collaborate.

Legacy Systems Don’t Exist with New Data Unification Strategies

CEOs and CFOs are finding it harder to justify an entire re-do of their systems landscapes. CFOs should not look at their systems as “legacy” as API integration can take data and transform it into information and expanded decision-making capabilities. This API-driven unification of data from systems available and stored within various databases and systems across the organization. Legacy is an outdated concept when leading-edge, comprehensive APIs are introduced as technology enablers.

Information, today, is compiled, rationalized, and optimized with APIs regardless of the source system or application; definitions of “legacy” are not relevant any longer. CFOs and finance leaders make decisions with aggregated data transformed into business intelligence repositories from the information they have today and at reduced timelines with leading APIs.

Doing More with Less: APIs Beyond the Bank

Treasury and finance can do more when they use a vendor with integrative API capabilities beyond payments and banking alone. Integrating procurement, ERPs, GLs, and other third-party systems delivers the data unification needed for a comprehensive decision-making platform. Today, APIs go beyond banking and payments for integration across:

• Investment Portals
• FX Trading Platforms & Hedge Management
• Market Data Providers
• Supplier Services (for Working Capital Programs)
• Security Profile and Governance Management

Taking Next Steps

To obtain better, and more accurate access to finance information, APIs link the systems used to compile and compose this data into an automated and real-time systemic process. When synchronous ERP, ancillary and core treasury systems collectively feed into the strategic cash flow forecasting process and BI dashboards, the result is a comprehensive view of mid and longer-term flows equaling less effort, more insight and better decision-making.

Enterprise views of cash and liquidity begin with bank connectivity as it provides the needed access to payments, cash and liquidity availability and should always be real-time. However, it is not the end of the story; today’s organizations require more prescriptive, forward-looking capabilities only delivered with information flows like procure to pay and order to cash cycles from the entire unified financial landscape. These holistic, API-integrative systems can generate the business information and intelligence needed to quickly make better decisions and speed the success of today’s organization.

To learn more on how new leading APIs are becoming the standard for how finance and treasury become more than information stewards, but rather catalysts and centers of excellence for better strategic decision-making for their greater organizations – www.kyriba.com.

24-01-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |

By Bob Stark, Global Head of Market Strategy

Instant payments, payments fraud, and pandemic-led digital payments transformation projects have changed the B2B payments journey for CFOs and CIOs. IT teams recognize that new connectivity methods, such as APIs, are required to integrate their ERP platforms with banks, neobanks, and non-bank payment channels while finance departments are seeing the value of new options for instant payment delivery, including Venmo, SEPAInst, and The Clearing House’s Real-Time Payment network.

While the way payments are transmitted from ERP and treasury systems to beneficiaries is clearly modernizing, internal audit and governance teams are instructing finance and IT counterparts that their legacy payment processes are introducing operational risk. Combined with real-time payment settlements, older payment workflows are increasing the possibility of irrevocable mistakes, or worse, fraud. Payments transformation is the answer.

As with any payments project, the first question to be answered is: what is the desired business outcome? What measurable value can be quantified? Generally, for payments transformation initiatives there are three value drivers:

1. Reduced bank and transaction costs
2. Improved efficiency
3. Reduced likelihood of mistakes and fraud

Reduced Bank and Transaction Costs

For many organizations, a digital payments transformation means they can reduce the reliance on expensive payment methods. Checks are a perfect example, where the total cost of ownership is reduced by 50% or more because of the immense internal processing and reconciliation times to send and receive checks.

Same Day ACH – fueled by recent increases in transaction limits – and real-time payments are becoming less expensive alternatives to wire payments, driving down the cost to remit faster payments. Further, payment-on-behalf-of (POBO) models allow for payment in local currencies, reducing currency translation costs, while also introducing the opportunity to net multiple payments to like suppliers and consolidate multiple payment systems into a single payment hub.

Most importantly, bank connectivity can be fully outsourced, which extracts immense cost from IT budgets, where ERPs and other internal systems were connected through hard-coded FTP scripts or reliant on expensive internal SWIFT infrastructures. Whether banks support APIs, FTP, regional networks, or SWIFT, payment connectors from ERPs and treasury to bank are pre-developed with tens of thousands of bank payment formats built into the product to eliminate any custom development to current platforms or when migrating ERPs to the cloud.

Certainly, reducing IT’s role in bank connectivity will save hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, especially when considering the banking industry’s harmonization of bank formats to XML ISO 20022. This initiative, alongside banks’ movement to APIs, would mean years of redevelopment by IT teams to rebuild protocols and formats from ERP to the bank. Payment hubs make this a non-issue, slashing costs while simultaneously eliminating time to market bottlenecks.

Improved Efficiency

Efficiency takes many forms, but the most obvious is the automation of manual processes. Legacy processes require unnecessary time to initiate, approve, review, validate documentation, confirm the authenticity of payment requests, screen for additional compliance requirements (e.g., OFAC screening), and log in to multiple systems to send, confirm, and reconcile payments. For smaller organizations, this can be dozens of hours per week; for larger organizations, the productivity improvements are valued in the $100,000s.

In addition to manual payment initiation and processing, internal collaboration between payments and treasury teams adds complexity that can be better managed. Too many organizations leave excess cash in bank accounts as they lack real-time visibility into payment amounts. This inefficiency is magnified as payments are remitted faster (or even in real-time), meaning cash managers can no longer fund payments the next day. Payables, receivables, and treasury teams must have complete data unification to minimize the amount of cash allocated for working capital. One client, HCSC, reported reducing working capital from $4.0 billion to $25 million by automating internal and external cash visibility.

Fraud Prevention

With 90% of CFOs reporting in 2021 that fraud was the same or worse than it was in 2020, CIOs are collaborating with CFO counterparts to build increased resilience to payments fraud. The initiative goes by different names – payments compliance, payments governance, fraud prevention – the effect is the same. Organizations need to transform their processes to “catch up” to real-time payments. There are four critical tenets that form the base of every payments governance and compliance program:

• Standardization – The key to eliminating unauthorized payments – even if accidental in nature – is to ensure a standardized set of controls that prevail without exception. Controls could include payment approval scenarios, extra layers of authentication, procedures if approvers are remote and/or unavailable, and specific actions if modifications to the payment are required. The organization’s payment policy should be digitized and enforced by the payment hub software to ensure these controls are consistently applied.
• Real-Time Payment Screening – Many organizations require payments to be screened against sanctions lists and bank account validation databases prior to sending those instructions to the bank. A simple exercise to verify that the bank account belongs to the intended payee should be part of every payment journey.
• Digitized Payment Policy – The organization’s payment policy should be digitized for real-time compliance checks. Examples could include payments being made outside of approved countries, the first payment to a new bank account, irregular payment amounts, etc. Every payment should be screened in real-time so that any non-compliant or suspicious payments can be stopped and quarantined in real-time to be reviewed by authorized approvers. As payments continue to diversify across multiple channels (e.g. wires, ACH, checks, real-time) and become more real-time, organizations cannot rely on treasury staff scanning every payment in real-time; nor can they expect their banks to be the last line of defense.
• Artificial Intelligence – Machine learning is perfectly suited to provide an additional layer of protection by instantly determining if a payment is an anomaly against historical payment patterns. Machine learning algorithms are easily trained using structured payment data from an existing treasury system, ERP, or payment hub to find irregular payments that should be further reviewed. This can be done individually or within payment batches to minimize the impact on the settlement of payment runs.

Additional reading: 15 Minute Guide to Payment Hubs

While fraud prevention is oftentimes the leading requirement driving payments transformation projects, other benefits including outsourced connectivity, enterprise liquidity visibility, process standardization, and multiple cost reductions should not be overlooked as these features will likely pay for the payments project with a lightning-quick ROI. And fortunately, transforming payments can be a large, collaborative project or select capabilities can be implemented incrementally, increasing the value and risk protection within weeks.

27-10-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |

Payment errors and compliance violations cause significant losses for businesses of all sizes. Fraud alone cost companies more than $42 billion last year, according to PwC’s Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey.

The repercussions are wide-ranging, from arduous public disclosures and legal fees to reputational damage. Some are the result of attacks by elite cybercriminals, while others are simple mistakes made by careless or inexperienced employees. Kyriba’s Payments Fraud Solution delivers confidence that payment fraud attempts, errors and policy violations are captured, identified, and eliminated, saving your organization time, effort, and money.

Have a read of Kyriba’s Fact Sheet to learn more about payment errors and how Kyriba can help you.

20-09-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |

To say that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way treasury departments and companies operate is a massive understatement. Treasury, a function already accustomed to ‘doing more with less,’ began operating remotely—often with a skeleton crew as companies were forced to reduce headcount.

Once mass distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine began, companies quickly began to strategise over what their post-pandemic workforce might look like. While the rise of the Delta variant has thrown a wrench into many organisations’ plans to reopen, eventually, that new work model will take shape. And it might look drastically different than what has come before.

Here are a few things to consider.

A hybrid work environment will very likely be the new normal.

Research from Harvard Business Review found that 70 percent of companies—including giants like Google, Citi and HSBC—are moving to a hybrid model. Just as treasury teams needed to adapt quickly to operating from home, now they’ll have to adjust to having some team members in the office while others are remote.

CFOs have an eye on emerging technologies.

The remote working environment brought on by the pandemic prompted, or perhaps forced, many organisations to digitise their processes. In a hybrid work environment (that could revert back to a fully remote one if COVID-19 variants continue to emerge), finance chiefs will continue to call for better technological solutions. New research from Gartner found that 82 percent of CFOs plan to increase investments in digital capabilities. CFOs named artificial intelligence (AI) as the technology that they expect to have the most impact over the next three years. Kyriba users can apply AI and machine learning (ML) to key cash management tasks like reconciling prior day bank files with their expected cash positions. For organisations that process high volumes of transactions, handling this process manually can take hours. Kyriba’s solution can identify and resolve discrepancies in minutes, and it learns from the data so that eventually, little to no human interaction is required.

Treasury’s role expanded considerably throughout the COVID-19 crisis. 

More than 80 percent of treasury professionals said that greater value was assigned to treasury during the pandemic, according to the 2020 AFP Strategic Role of Treasury Survey. Furthermore, nearly 70 percent of respondents believe that treasury’s role will continue to be of greater significance. To maintain that influence over other, other departments, treasury professionals may need to revisit their soft skills. Just as employees may have faced difficulty giving presentations over Zoom, they may also find presenting in-person or to a mix of in-person and remote employees to be equally challenging.

Regional treasury centers might no longer need to be regional. 

While it can be convenient to house a treasury center to manage cash and FX hedging in a region with unique regulations, the COVID-19 pandemic may prompt organisations to rethink that approach. Since the onset of the pandemic, those remote working has surged; the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that 42 percent of the U.S. labor force currently works from home. And perhaps more importantly, it’s been incredibly successful for both employers and workers, according to PwC’s U.S. Remote Work Survey. Ultimately, this could mean that treasury teams may no longer see a need to centralise their operations regionally even after the pandemic ends.

Continuous remote work means fraud threats will remain elevated.

According to the 2021 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, business email compromise (BEC) scams increased last year. This was likely due to the remote work environment making it more difficult to verify emails with colleagues. Security will continue to be paramount for treasury, particularly if it moves to a permanent model where some employees regularly work from home. Treasury teams will need to continue to use strong controls like multifactor authentication, single sign-on and virtual private networks to ensure that only the appropriate people have access to their systems. Additionally, treasury employees must be even more meticulous about setting approvals for payments so that fraud attempts will be thwarted. With Kyriba Payment Fraud Detection, treasury can stop fraud in real-time. Users can set pre-defined detection rules, to screen for suspicious transactions. Additionally, ML algorithms can identify and quarantine dubious payments for further review.

The cloud provides a failsafe for business continuity planning (BCP). 

Cloud-based treasury management systems aren’t only efficient modules to help treasury teams track cash and liquidity. They are also a key cog in BCP. Cloud-based solutions like Kyriba’s are hosted offsite in multiple locations, allowing your treasury department to function regardless of whether your team is working in the office or from a dozen different locations. So even if a new COVID-19 variant emerges, treasury teams can continue to function without interruption.

Making a Game Plan

While it’s unclear how soon offices will begin opening back up en masse, now is the time for treasury teams to begin planning for the shift. When the pandemic first hit, treasury functions had to respond quickly, and they did as best they could. Pivoting in this next phase won’t be seamless, but with the right protocols and technology in place, treasury teams can make smooth transitions.