26-01-2022 | treasuryXL | Pieter de Kiewit | LinkedIn | Google tells me the statement “Trust is good, control is better” is from Lenin. Perhaps this says something about the Russian culture at that time, about Lenin himself and our thoughts about the statement might also tell us about ourselves. I looked this up because of the extra screening […]
18-01-2022 | treasuryXL | GTreasury |
CHICAGO – January 18, 2022 – GTreasury, a treasury and risk management platform provider, today announced the acquisition of Hedge Trackers, the leading provider of accounting, consulting, and software services to protect clients against financial risk. The acquisition joins Hedge Trackers’ hedge accounting expertise and SaaS solutions with GTreasury’s unparalleled treasury and risk management platform. The combination of the two companies provides customers with best-in-class, integrated risk management technologies while continuing to expand GTreasury’s SaaS ecosystem built for treasury teams and the office of the CFO.
“Most CFOs and treasury teams understand the criticality of exposures and forecasts, but the highest-performing teams recognize and act on the subtle nuances directly impacting exposure,” said Renaat Ver Eecke, the CEO of GTreasury. “These are key decisions that have an outsized effect on corporate finances. Our acquisition of Hedge Trackers creates a unique and exciting opportunity for organizations to significantly, confidently, and advantageously optimize their complex accounting. With GTreasury’s product development capabilities, we can accelerate the expansion of Hedge Trackers’ robust Capella software capabilities and our best-in-class risk management solutions to better meet the requirements of modern CFOs and treasury teams.”
CFOs and treasurers face increasing volatility around foreign exchange rates, interest rates, and commodity prices – all of which can result in significant corporate losses without the right strategy, technology, and execution. This is why hedging and risk management solutions, along with hedge accounting services, have experienced such significant growth. FX hedging solutions alone are expected to grow 40 percent in the next two years, according to a recent survey from Topline Strategy, a consulting firm that looks at business technology adoption trends.
“CFOs increasingly realize that hedging is critical for success in a global economy,” said Ver Eecke. “A well-run risk management and hedging program helps CFOs gain control and provide clearer financials despite volatile foreign exchange rates, interest rates, and commodity prices. This acquisition catapults GTreasury into a leading position in the industry: both companies will combine to help CFOs and treasury teams more easily adopt risk management solutions and protect their bottom line.”
Founded in 2000 by industry pioneer Helen Kane, San Jose, Calif.-based Hedge Trackers has amassed unparalleled domain expertise and technical depth in helping CFO offices establish hedging strategies, identify exposure, manage risk, and meet compliance and audit requirements. No public company has been required to restate earnings due to the derivative accounting and reporting practices implemented by Hedge Trackers. The company’s SaaS solutions are used by a wide range of companies, from pre-IPO businesses to the Fortune 100, and span across industry sectors including technology, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, retail, defense, energy, banking, and credit unions.
“Your top priority as CFO is determining what matters most in your organization’s financial statements,” said Helen Kane, CEO of Hedge Trackers. “Do you care about revenue? Operating income? With this acquisition, the combined GTreasury and Hedge Trackers teams will help CFOs and the teams they manage to think more strategically. The powerful combination of GTreasury and Hedge Trackers will deliver organizations the most comprehensive and intelligent solution for managing and mitigating financial risk. Hedge Trackers is a perfect fit for GTreasury, and we’re excited to now see all that we can accomplish together.”
GTreasury is committed to connecting treasury and digital finance operations by providing a world-class SaaS treasury and risk management system and integrated ecosystem where cash, debt, investments and exposures are seamlessly managed within the office of the CFO. GTreasury delivers intelligent insights, while connecting financial value chains and extending workflows to third-party systems, exchanges, portals and services. Headquartered in Chicago, with locations serving EMEA (London) and APAC (Sydney and Manila), GTreasury’s global community includes more than 800 customers and 30+ industries reaching 160+ countries worldwide.
11-01-2022 | treasuryXL | GTreasury |
For three decades, GTreasury has stayed ahead of treasurers’ pain points with new innovations in digital treasury.
Together with Strategic Treasurer, GTreasury surveyed hundreds of global treasurers for the 2021 Treasury Technology Survey Report. A must-read for any corporate treasurer, several findings are particularly eye-opening as treasurers (and the office of the CFO) navigate the next era in treasury technology.
In this comprehensive and transparent interview with Michele Marvin, Global VP at GTreasury, she discusses the ongoing evolution of digital treasury, how new acquisitions and partnerships have shaped GTreasury’s treasury technology ecosystem, and some of the most important findings of the recent treasury technology survey.
Read below for Michele’s thoughts to our nine questions.
Michele Marvin is a VP at GTreasury, a treasury and risk management platform provider. Prior to joining GTreasury in 2019, Marvin has held leadership roles at several large technology companies, including most recently at Flexera and Zebra Technologies.
GTreasury was one of the first treasury management system (TMS) providers to see the transformative potential of cloud technologies and the future-proof flexibility that a SaaS approach can deliver. Times change but our purpose has always remained the same: modernizing corporate treasury to enable customers to optimize liquidity, manage risk, gain more insight from their data, and maximize their day-to-day productivity. While the tools to accomplish these goals are always evolving, I would argue no one understands what treasurers need to be successful more than GTreasury. We live and breathe digital treasury, and understand that it takes a complete, connected ecosystem to drive true transformation.
Our platform is used by more than 800 organizations around the world and from across virtually all industries. Customers come to GTreasury either as they leap forward into SaaS-based digital treasury, or when they are seeking to replace alternatives that don’t have enough connectivity into banks and market data resources, don’t have the user experience that treasurers are looking for, or aren’t as advanced in their capabilities (such as AI-fueled cash forecasting).
We acquired Coprocess in March 2021, a longtime leader in intercompany netting. As with our previous acquisitions, the deal with Coprocess was spurred by customer feedback for netting capabilities fully-integrated into a treasury management platform, and by our own research. Coprocess brings GTreasury a true multi-tenant, SaaS-delivered solution that’s easy to scale. Users are up and running extremely fast, and it is highly configurable to treasurers’ unique netting process and organizational structures. We’ve also been continuing to make Coprocess a standalone solution for those who want to use intercompany netting outside of a TRMS.
We also recently partnered with Treasury Strategies to add the bank fee analysis technology NDepth into our treasury ecosystem. Corporate treasurers’ biggest expense is often bank fees, but few organizations are able to regularly monitor this expense with the accuracy and insight needed to effect change. With bank fee analysis now powered by NDepth, GTreasury customers have the most powerful bank account management tool, a repository of auditable electronic bank statements, and the mechanisms necessary to help treasurers connect with banks, internal systems, and other third parties.
Strategically, each of our acquisitions and partnerships bolsters the capabilities of our core products and supports further digitalization of the office of the CFO. That’s by design. We want to proactively stay ahead of treasurers’ pain points by providing a seamless, connected, and complete digital treasury experience, and we want to ensure that the right integrations and data access is available to empower the CFO’s office. We’ll continue to make purposeful acquisitions and partnership that support these goals.
The survey collected responses to 50+ questions from more than 250 treasurers (with a global sampling). This recent report was really the first-of-its kind to look at how far along organizations are in their digital treasury transformations, the technologies they are most excited about, and where resistance remains.
Significant technology adoption is anticipated. Payment factories, treasury aggregators, and TMS solutions are expected to realize 35% to 45% growth over the next two years.
Really the biggest shortcoming of legacy data formats is the formatting itself. Legacy data formats are inconsistent and can vary across different banks. They also store information held in single run-on strings, requiring customers to decipher messy text blobs to understand critical transaction information. Newer formats are far easier to work with. Systems can parse information into separate fields, making information much clearer to users, thus expediting processing and routing.
Treasury teams reap substantial benefits from these formatting advantages, including improved visibility of their cash position, easier cash tracking, and reductions in manual errors. Ultimately, clearer formatting increases operational efficiency, enabling daily reconciliation practices that minimize fraud and accelerate month-end closings.
We’ve been working with Strategic Treasurer throughout the lifecycle of its really fascinating and ongoing survey (The Global Crisis/Recovery Monitor), digging into treasurers’ responses to the pandemic. Two trends really stick out to me:
Ongoing economic uncertainty accelerated treasury projects that could add efficiency. In particular, digital automation and process optimization became must-haves as treasurers needed to provide reporting to executives at a faster rate. Most treasurers reported being on the road to more automation and treasury process modernization, but the pandemic kicked those initiatives ahead. Manual slowdowns that might have been tolerable pre-pandemic quickly proved to be a liability.
Cash visibility and forecasting became even more important (and will stay that way). Cash forecasting reporting became a daily event for many treasurers (more often than once-a-day in some cases), as businesses needed to make critical decisions against an ever-changing environment. Even as the pandemic subsides, many treasurers believe the pace and importance of reporting on cash visibility and forecasting won’t revert to pre-pandemic norms. Newer capabilities like AI-fueled cash forecasting (we added SmartPredictionsTM last year) will continue to make these reports more accurate and efficient to produce.
Also, for a specific story on how one of our customers, Canadian Tire, quickly shifted focus from historical data to real-time data because of the pandemic, check out Data-Driven Treasury in Global Finance.
The report is worth a read for any treasurer (and available for full download here). Among the findings likely to pique interest among treasurers and CFOs are:
Digital treasury ecosystems are rapidly becoming more integrated and more robust. For treasurers, this is enabling unprecedented efficiency. I was just speaking with a customer who leads corporate treasury at an international beverages company – he told me he and his team freed up 40% of their daily bandwidth following a migration to modernized treasury infrastructure. There are night-and-day gains to be made by modernizing treasury processes with the right technology.
The benefit here is that as new tools automate treasury minutiae, CFOs and treasury teams are gaining a free hand to focus on strategy. The role of the treasurer is evolving thanks to this increased capacity, and it’s exciting to see teams exploring new strategic territory where they can contribute and deliver value. Establishing netting processes and ensuring their excellence is a strong example of the advantages digital treasury can enable. Superior risk management along a more extensive time horizon is another. At the end of the day, digital treasury technology enabling improved cost controls and visibility is empowering treasury teams to introduce and optimize financial management processes in entirely new areas, and we’re eager to see it.
Get in touch with GTreasury to learn and explore more, click below.
27-12-2021 | treasuryXL |
Corporate Finance is the financing of a corporation’s activities through borrowing and investment. To raise capital for business needs, companies primarily have two types of financing as an option: equity financing and debt financing
Click on the image below to learn more about Corporate Finance.
| 30-11-2021 | treasuryXL | Pieter de Kiewit | LinkedIn | Over the last years, Treasurer Search found hundreds of treasurers. Our client contact persons are HR managers & internal recruiters, the CFO, Group Treasurer and sometimes even procurement. There is no standard first contact. Working with more than one often works best. This is what […]
16-11-2021 | treasuryXL | In 2017 we created the Treasurer Test, an online, peer-based assessment that measures the technical knowledge in treasury and the personality profile of the candidate. The idea for this originated from two important observations. First, in most labour markets there is no recognized qualification in treasury like CPA or CFA in […]
| 15-11-2021 | Eurofinance | treasuryXL | LinkedIn
More than 18 months have passed since treasury professionals around the world had to leave their offices at short notice due to the escalating covid-19 crisis. In April 2021, EuroFinance carried out a survey to find out more about the different ways the pandemic has affected treasury professionals. Alongside the adoption of remote working, the subsequent report highlights treasurers’ accelerated adoption of digital technologies, and the contribution that treasurers make to board-level decision-making during a crisis.
Want to see the full report?
22-09-2021 | Eurofinance | treasuryXL |
It’s free, It’s Virtual…
International Treasury Management is the annual meeting place for 1000s of the World’s most senior treasurers to learn and share experiences in valuable peer to peer discussions. With a reputation for ground-breaking sessions and world-class speakers, our 30th anniversary event will explore the boundaries of the profession, take a glimpse into the future of business, treasury and working life as well as offer the practical case studies on the treasurer’s top agenda items.
Only one treasury event can deliver the comprehensive mix of big picture global insight and granular treasury knowledge you need to make the right choices for the future.
Over the past 30 years since EuroFinance’s inaugural conference on International Cash and Treasury Management, much has changed. Treasurers have firmly become business partners, technology experts, risk managers and opportunity spotters. They often lead fundamental change within the company as markets, business models and technology shifts.
What next? This event will delve into how treasury operations can gear up for the future, having learned the lessons from the past. Where, who, what and how will the corporate be in the coming years and what is treasury’s role?
Keynote sessions will offer big-picture insight alongside themed streams including:
September 27th – October 1st | Virtual
13-09-2021 | treasuryXL | Pieter de Kiewit Just before starting my vacation I created a small overview of the recent successes of Team Treasurer Search. Next to the fact that we see the speed of placements picking up, I think it is striking how international our treasury labour market is. This is not only for […]
30-08-2021 | Maximo Santos Miranda | treasuryXL
Máximo holds a PhD in Economics and is graduated in Law. After 18 years working in International Cash Management in several multinationals coordinating local treasury units with the headquarters or implementing new ones all around the world, he is working as a university professor of finance, treasury and business strategies in several Universities and Business Schools in Spain. He is also a regular contributor in international media such as Forbes México, Forbes Centro America or Revista Gestión of Ecuador for the last five years.
“My first job in treasury was the best you can wish for”
As a researcher he has published more than 30 articles in research journals about banking systems, treasury, finance in general, fintechs or international sanctions and at the same time he is a referee in postgraduate research journals. He also collaborates with Think Tanks and international institutions in different ways.
After finishing my studies in economics, my intention was to work for a bank. In fact, my first professional steps were in banking. However, one day I saw a job offer that looked very interesting and I applied for it. Normally, I always prepare the job interviews in detail but this didn’t happen at that time. So, I went to the interview with no visibility of the company I was applying for. After a couple of quick interviews, I was selected as a treasury analyst for Cemex European headquarters.
Everything was perfect. My first job in treasury was the best you can wish for. I was part of the team of international cash management and Cemex at that time was in the middle of fast growth movements. Cemex acquired different subsidiaries worldwide and I was in the center of all those financial flows. There was much stress but the work atmosphere was fantastic and the promotion possibilities were reachable.
Most of my career in treasury has been focused on the international side and that provides an unpayable extra value. Thanks to being an international treasurer I have learned a lot about how treasury and finance work worldwide. I have had the opportunity to see how the banks work in many countries and how different companies from different sectors and industries adapt their cash management to their operative peculiarities and the markets where they are inserted.
International cash management is my greatest strength in the treasury world. Most of the time in my treasury career I have worked as a coordinator of local treasury units. That role has allowed me to see different approaches to similar issues in different countries.
In my first years in treasury, I had to coordinate the movement of funds (in three currencies) between different subsidiaries located in different countries and different banks on the same day. The number of funds moved was very high and the number of countries where the money passed through was also high (more than 20 countries in three continents). I was preparing the operation for a week and finally everything went fine. For me it was quite stressful as the operation was completed finally in 15 hours and it was necessary to compensate several delays in the intermediate transactions. When you prepare in detail a complex operation like that and everything is completed as forecasted you feel very proud of all the work done. After that operation, I have coordinated other operations quite similar but the level of stress has been much lower compared with the first one.
In the year 2005 Cemex sent me to Italy for three years to set up a new treasury unit in the country. For me it was a big challenge. First of all, because I didn’t speak Italian when I went there and soon I realized that to speak Italian is a key point if you want to do your job properly. Secondly because although I worked for a big multinational, the Italian subsidiary was quite small and the approach of the local banks was completely different to that I saw in the Cemex European headquarters in Madrid.
Things work if you prepare them in detail. You can have a very complex operation in your hands but if this operation is prepared in detail (forecasting different scenarios and alternative solutions) the final success is almost guaranteed. Good preparation is the key to success.
The function has changed a lot. When I started in treasury in the year 2001 the administrative workload was the most relevant part of the treasury function, at least in time-consuming. Today instead and thanks to technology the time spent on administrative issues have been reduced significantly. That reduction has allowed the treasurer to dedicate more time to other issues that generate more value for the company. A good treasurer today must know much more than before about technology applicable to the treasury function and must also have strategic thinking.
The treasury teams will be smaller in the future. The technology will reduce all the administrative treasury tasks to the minimum. The treasurer of the future should be focused on technology, strategic thinking and create additional value for the company. To reach that goal, the corporate treasurer should be passionate about the function and must be always informed of the latest developments in the market. The corporate treasurer should know the latest developments in technology, in treasury products, in treasury strategies… always learning. The treasurers of the future should communicate better and invest time in treasury education and build treasury networks to exchange knowledge with other colleges or experienced treasurers. To sum up, the treasurers of the future should increase their impact in the companies thanks to the technology developments.
Reach the treasury market in an easy way with treasuryXL. See how we can help you and download our Partner Program.
Join our Friday coffee break and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for the latest treasury news, vacancies events & more!
