Tag Archive for: Cashforce

TIS acquires Cashforce, an AI-powered provider of cash management and forecasting solutions.

17-06-2022 | treasuryXL | Cashforce | TIS

 

Revolutionizing Global Liquidity Management for Treasury and Finance

 

Treasury Intelligence Solutions (TIS), a global leader in enterprise payment optimization, today announced their acquisition of Cashforce, an AI-powered provider of cash management and forecasting solutions.

This acquisition will see Cashforce’s leading cloud solution – currently deployed at many of the largest and most sophisticated corporate treasuries in the world – become integrated with TIS’ SaaS payments platform. This unified solution will provide enterprises with an unmatched suite of capabilities for cash management, global payments, and fraud mitigation along with superior connectivity, workflows, and reporting functions.

Over the past few years, TIS and Cashforce have collaborated closely to provide a complementary offering for treasury and finance teams. These efforts were met with immediate success in the market as demand for improved cash management and forecasting tools has risen sharply. Now, TIS’ acquisition of Cashforce presents the perfect opportunity to integrate both products together as part of a more complete offering.

For the thousands of enterprise treasury and finance practitioners who currently use TIS, this acquisition provides access to faster and more accurate cash reporting, forecasting, and working capital management. To date, cash positioning and forecasting are still being performed manually by many treasury groups, which represents a major pain point for CFOs and business leaders when attempting to make strategic financial decisions. However, the robust capabilities provided by Cashforce eliminate many of these inefficiencies and ultimately enable companies to gain quick and accurate insights into their financial position based on reliable payments and liquidity data.

According to Erik Masing, Group CEO of TIS, “Cashforce has been a premier partner of TIS for several years and has contributed significantly to the cash forecasting and management capabilities we offer clients. The acquisition is a natural extension of our business and will allow TIS to further integrate Cashforce’s solution with our platform in order to offer advanced forecasting and data management capabilities to all our clients. This means enterprises can significantly reduce complexity in their global payments and cash management tech stacks by leveraging standardization and transparency afforded by a single, elegant solution.”

 

 

For Cashforce, the acquisition means that existing clients can now supplement their robust forecasting capabilities with TIS’ industry-leading payments and bank connectivity features. As explained by Nicolas Christiaen, Founder and CEO of Cashforce, “Giving businesses complete visibility over their cash and liquidity data has always been the core objective of Cashforce. While we have spent years perfecting our capabilities in this regard, TIS has been strengthening their suite of payments, bank connectivity, and cash management tools. When combined, these two sets of capabilities form the ideal solution for global treasury and finance teams to achieve full control and visibility over their entire payments and liquidity architecture – including all entities, back-office systems, and banks.”

With the added capabilities of Cashforce’s solution, TIS now offers a single, scalable cloud platform for clients to address needs in the following areas:

  • End-to-end payment processing and bank statement management
  • Global bank connectivity and financial messaging
  • Real-time cash positioning and liquidity management
  • Multifaceted cash forecasting, cashflow analytics, and working capital management
  • Bank account management and bank documentation management
  • Payment compliance and sanctions screening control
  • Treasury security, regulatory compliance, and fraud mitigation tools

For more information on TIS’ acquisition of Cashforce and the advantages our combined solution will provide to enterprise treasury, finance, and executive teams, contact us at [email protected] or by using the information found on our website.

 

About TIS

TIS is reimagining the world of enterprise payments through a cloud-based platform uniquely designed to help global organizations optimize payments, manage cash visibility, and mitigate risk. Corporations, banks, and business vendors leverage TIS to transform how they connect global accounts, collaborate on payment processes, execute outbound payments, analyze cash flow and compliance data, and improve critical outbound payment functions. With $2 trillion in payments processed annually, the TIS corporate payments platform helps businesses improve operational efficiency, lower risk, manage liquidity, gain a strategic advantage – and ultimately achieve enterprise payment optimization.

Visit us for more information at https://www.tispayments.com.

 

 

 

 

Closing Loops: Connecting FX Hedging and Cash Forecasts

08-06-2022 | treasuryXL | Cashforce | LinkedIn |

 

How one member uses Cashforce to save time and money on FX trades—and helped create an automated hedging process.

One assistant treasurer at a recent NeuGroup virtual interactive session said that her primary project for 2021 is “to make treasury as no-touch as possible.” This is a common theme for treasurers recently, though it’s not always clear where to start. Her first step was to seek potential connections in existing processes and platforms—which led to an overhauled and streamlined process for foreign exchange hedging.
  • The member already was using Cashforce, a fintech that allows deeper analysis of cash flow, to assist in cash flow forecasting, and saw potential in connecting it to Citibank’s CitiFX Pulse platform through the company’s TMS.
  • Through collaboration with Cashforce, Citi and her TMS, she was essentially able to turn the company’s hedging policy into an algorithm that reads the forecast and will potentially execute or propose trades all on its own.

From forecasts to forex. The member said this is only possible because Cashforce can forecast at a high level of granularity. The AT said she was “really lucky” that the tools work together so well.

  • “The forecast at that level of detail is a forecast in document currency,” she said. “And because I can have forecasting at nearly an invoice level, I know what that currency is going to be.”
  • Through the forecast, she said, the company is able to see what its FX position is going to be. “Then if I layer over what hedge I might already have in place, it will be able to tell me what are my gaps,” she said.
  • “The idea is to send it out so that we could auto-trade to fill the gaps below a certain threshold, let’s say 100 grand or less, and review above that just to check the data before we trade.”

A closed loop. Nicolas Christiaen, Cashforce’s CEO, said that, before this project, the member’s process was “very disconnected,” but all it took was connecting the dots.

  • “On the data input side, the ERP, TMS, P&L and bank statements are now put through [Cashforce’s] transformation layer, which results in a cash flow forecast,” he said. “As is very specific in this case, it’s a forecast by currency, by month.”
  • Currently, the company then uploads this forecast back into its TMS for review, and manually executes FX trades based on the company’s hedging policy.
  • “When these hedges are executed, the hedge amounts will pass back into Cashforce via the TMS, closing the loop,” Mr. Christiaen said.

A step further. With the proposed system that the member has designed with Citi, the company could include its hedging policies as a rules-based program in CitiFX Pulse that can read this forecast.

  • It would then “put in place the instruments used for the hedges for the thresholds that need to be taken into account,” Mr. Christiaen said. “Which ultimately results in a proposal.”
  • The chart below demonstrates the vision: As the data feeds into Cashforce, which outputs a forecast, that forecast is reviewed by the member and uploaded to CitiFX Pulse, which can automatically execute or propose FX hedges.

Constant change. Automation is “an awful lot to bite off,” the member said, and recommends starting slow on this kind of process:

  • The first step is to test what systems you already have. “A lot of us have pockets in the organization of different systems that can be leveraged. Some of them can’t do what they say they can or aren’t quite what you need—but sometimes you get lucky, as we did.”
    • She said it is also an opportunity for treasury to work with fintech partners to build exactly what it needs.
  • Collaboration and clear communication with IT is “super important,” which she learned the hard way. “Despite really clear instructions from Cashforce on the size of server we would need, [IT] gave us a quarter of that size and we now need a bigger size,” the AT said.
  • She warns that, although automation opportunities are promising, it’s not always smooth sailing. “Be aware of the opportunities, but also be aware of the work: automation is doable but takes an awful lot of time.”
  • “As the business changes, the structure changes as well,” she said. “The only constant within treasury is change.”

Article originally published by Neugroup here.

 

 

Recording Live Discussion Session | More reliable cash forecasting in a fraction of the time

01-06-2022 | treasuryXL | CashAnalytics | LinkedIn |

 

Recently, treasuryXL partnered with CashAnalytics on a LIVE discussion session about how much time, effort, and money can be saved by adopting a data-driven approach to cash forecasting.

During this session, Conor Deegan CEO of CashAnalytics was joined by Ron Wessels, owner of Term Finance and Interim Head of Tax & Treasury at Systal Technology Solutions, and Pieter de Kiewit, Owner of Treasurer Search. They have presented battle-tested methods for increasing the reliability of your data, breaking free from tedious forecasting processes, and freeing up more of your time for analysis.

Click on the image above to view the recording and learn how cash flow automation

 

Cuts your manual workload and reporting timelines by over 90%

Provides detailed insight into transaction-level data across all your entities

Frees you from Excel-based processes that are riddled with human errors

 

Forecasting Through Disruption

11-05-2022 | treasuryXL | Cashforce | LinkedIn |

 

Despite the disruption to customer behaviour brought by the Covid-19 crisis, Pearson developed a consolidated forecasting process that has enabled it to speed up invoicing, accelerate £60m in cash flow and meet its 2020 targets.

Source

Cash flow forecasting has long been recognised as a major challenge for corporations – and learning company Pearson, which has over 20,000 employees and reported sales of £3.4 billion in 2020, is no exception. “One of the challenges with forecasting is to understand what your assumptions are when producing the forecast,” explains Group Treasurer James Kelly. “When you’ve got lots of people producing forecasts independently, and then consolidating them, you need to have a consistent approach.”

Getting people to produce a forecast on time can be difficult, while treasury teams often spend precious time pursuing clerical accuracy. And as Kelly adds, “it is important to have enough detail in your actuals to really understand whether the hypotheses that were ventured in your forecast have actually come to pass.”

Forecasting during a pandemic

The latter is particularly important in times of uncertainty – and few things are as unpredictable as the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. For many organisations, the crisis meant that cash flow forecasting became significantly more challenging overnight, not least because disrupted customer behaviour meant that forecasts based on historical sales patterns could no longer be relied upon.

For Pearson, with the company’s professional test centres forced to close due to lockdowns, a major challenge came in the form of refunds that had to be issued to customers for tests that had been booked in advance – a situation that was complicated by the differing ways that customers could respond. Some rebooked straight away; some requested an immediate refund, and others waited for a couple of weeks before requesting a refund. And when requesting a refund, customers could either apply to Pearson directly, or request a refund via their credit card companies. All these different scenarios impacted the company’s short-term modelling.

The path to better forecasting


While the challenges were considerable, Pearson’s treasury had already been on a journey to more effective forecasting before the pandemic began – indeed, the automation of cash forecasting formed part of a treasury and cash management optimisation project that won a EuroFinance Treasury Excellence Award in 2019. The company subsequently adopted Cashforce’s AI-powered forecasting system, and continued to work on improving its processes. However, when the pandemic started it was clear that a more comprehensive approach was needed.

“What was interesting about Covid was that some of the basic models that we built around predictable cash flows broke,” Kelly comments. “We were able to keep using some of our models for things like payroll – but on the receipt side, a lot of things that had previously been predictable now became unpredictable.” What this meant was that the forecasting ability of the system almost became redundant – “and the benefits of the solution became more about hypothesis testing, and as a consolidation engine that allows you to build different scenarios.”

With the onset of the pandemic, each business produced a high, medium and low sales forecast, which the treasury team used to build its own set of forecasts. While this exercise was initially carried out using Excel, the treasury’s Cashforce-based 12-week forecast demonstrated good levels of accuracy, as well as integrating with key group systems. As such, the system was selected as the basis for the new approach to producing short, medium and long-term forecasts in 16 categories, later expanded to include 120 subcategories.

Building a map of cash flows

By combining this data with information from the company’s ERP system, Pearson has been able to generate detailed reports, test hypotheses and converge its low, medium and high scenarios, thereby building a detailed map of what is happening with cash flows.This proved useful early in the crisis when predicting how many customers would opt to request an immediate refund and re-book later. After initially modelling a range of scenarios, Pearson then used data from the first week to narrow the range. “Overall, we saw a significant proportion of customer request refunds in the first two weeks, mainly through their card companies,” comments Kelly. “We then started to see a stabilisation. By the end of the year, advance bookings were back to their normal level, with significant pent-up demand for many tests.”

Pearson’s functional currency is GBP, so with considerable variability in the company’s US profits another question was how to use the forecasting information to hedge currency risk. Again, this drew upon the low, medium and high scenarios: forward contracts were used to hedge committed or highly probable foreign currency flows for the low scenario, with collars and options used to provide protection for the medium and high scenarios.

Benefits of the project


Pearson has seen numerous benefits as a result of its enhanced forecasting process. Preparing forecasts centrally has freed up significant time for the operating companies, as well as enabling forecasts to be updated daily, instead of weekly or monthly. And Kelly notes that forecasts are now significantly more accurate than they were in 2019, despite uncertainty relating to the pandemic.

Further, Pearson has been able to use insights from the forecasting process to drive better performance in its working capital metrics – in particular, lower DSO, lower variability in DSO, and faster invoicing speed. These initiatives accelerated over £60m of cash flow in 2020, enabling Pearson to achieve its objective of delivering operating cash flow of over £300m, despite the pandemic.

Above all, the crisis has acted as a catalyst for Pearson to rethink the nature and purpose of forecasting. As Kelly concludes: “Whether the forecast is right or wrong becomes less important than understanding why it’s right or wrong. So the game we were playing wasn’t to get the forecast right on any particular day, but to have a good understanding of the business over time – which then enables you to get it right.”

Pearson will be presenting at the 30th anniversary International Treasury Management Virtual Week from Sept 27 – Oct 1. Registration is free for corporate treasurers. Click here to find out more and reserve your place.

Register free

 

 

Reminder Live Discussion Session | More reliable cash forecasting in a fraction of the time

27-04-2022 | treasuryXL | CashAnalytics | LinkedIn |

 

A friendly reminder that tomorrow at 3 PM CET (April 28th), we’ll be collaborating with CashAnalytics.

Date & time: April 28, 2021 at 3 pm CET/ 2 pm GMT | Duration 45 minutes

Join Pieter de Kiewit (Treasurer Search), Ron Wessels and Conor Deegan (CashAnalytics) who will talk about how cash flow automation can:

👉 Cut your manual workload and reporting timelines by over 90%

👉 Provide detailed insight into transaction-level data across all your entities

👉 Free you from Excel-based processes that are riddled with human errors Register now so you don’t miss out on this valuable discussion from industry leaders with over 65+ years of combined experience!

 

Click on the banner for registration.

Meet the speakers

Conor Deegan

CFO and Co-Founder
CashAnalytics

Pieter de Kiewit

Owner
Treasurer Search

Ron Wessels

Group Treasurer

Join Us to Learn How Cash Flow Automation…

  • Cuts your manual workload and reporting timelines by over 90%
  • Provides detailed insight into transaction-level data across all your entities
  • Frees you from Excel-based processes that are riddled with human errors

The Treasury Dragons vs Cash Forecasting | Best-of-breed Cashforce

14-04-2022 | treasuryXL | Cashforce | LinkedIn |

 

Have you seen the Treasury Dragons vs. Cash Forecasting session yet? Watch the replay now to learn which cash forecasting solution is right for your business. This session is for treasurers who want to enhance their cash forecasting but aren’t sure which technology will work best for their company. In this session, Nicolas Christiaen compares and contrasts best-of-breed Cashforce with alternative options.

ABOUT THIS EVENT

Cash flow forecasting is the process of predicting the flow of cash in and out of a business over a period, generally the responsibility of the corporate treasurer. An accurate cash flow forecast helps companies predict future cash positions, avoid cash shortages, and invest any surplus cash to generate extra income.

Generating an accurate forecast involves collecting information from multiple sources. It’s often still a manual process using spreadsheets and multiple bank downloads. However, today, there are many solutions available which can automate and streamline cash flow forecasting for corporate treasury.

This Treasury Dragons online session on Tuesday, April 5th 2022 at 3:00 PM (BST) looks under the hood of these cash forecasting systems in a live Q&A with real corporate treasurers.

Among the solution providers we’ll be featuring are:

This is the latest in a series of online debates in which treasury technology firms present their solutions to our ‘Dragons’ – and to you.

In short, sharp presentations you will see the highlights of each treasury-enhancing system on offer – and then the solution providers will face some challenging questioning from our panel of treasury tough nuts.

It’s the fastest way to get up to speed on what’s really on offer.​

 

Nicolas Christiaen

Managing Partner at Cashforce

 

 

Live Discussion Session | More reliable cash forecasting in a fraction of the time

13-04-2022 | treasuryXL | CashAnalytics | LinkedIn |

 

TreasuryXL is partnering with CashAnalytics to discuss how much time, effort, and money you can save by adopting a data-driven approach to cash forecasting.

Date & time: April 28, 2021 at 3 pm CET/ 2 pm GMT | Duration 45 minutes

Join our expert panelists as they present battle-tested methods for increasing the reliability of your data, breaking free from tedious forecasting processes, and freeing up more of your time for analysis.

If your team spends more than a few hours each week creating forecasts, this is an event you won’t want to miss.

Click on the banner for registration.

Meet the speakers

Conor Deegan

CFO and Co-Founder
CashAnalytics

Pieter de Kiewit

Owner
Treasurer Search

Ron Wessels

Group Treasurer

Join Us to Learn How Cash Flow Automation…

  • Cuts your manual workload and reporting timelines by over 90%
  • Provides detailed insight into transaction-level data across all your entities
  • Frees you from Excel-based processes that are riddled with human errors

GTreasury Acquires Hedge Trackers, the Global Leader in Hedge Accounting Software and Consulting

18-01-2022 | treasuryXL | GTreasury |

CFO demand for financial risk solutions is soaring; the deal gives GTreasury industry-leading hedge accounting technology and expertise

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 Drive Unprecedented Demand for Hedging Solutions

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.”

Hedge Trackers Brings GTreasury Unparalleled Expertise

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.”

About GTreasury

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Partner Interview | VP of GTreasury, Michele Marvin: 9 questions & answers on treasury technology innovation

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.

Introduction Michele Marvin

 

 

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.

 

 

INTERVIEW

 

1. How has GTreasury’s treasury and risk management system evolved with the industry?

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.

2. How would you describe GTreasury’s customer base?

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).

3. GTreasury has made headlines this year for its acquisitions and partnerships – how have these fit into the company’s roadmap and strategy?

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.

4. GTreasury and the treasury consulting firm Strategic Treasurer recently released the 2021 Treasury Technology Survey Report. Before getting into the data itself – who was surveyed?

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.

5. What were some of the key findings that treasurers should pay attention to?

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.

  • APIs are becoming must-have capabilities. Seventy-three percent of corporate treasury groups indicated that APIs are critical to their current processes. Machine learning capabilities are also drawing outsized focus from treasurers further along in their modernization initiatives.
  • The gap between cash forecasting importance and reality is high. While cash forecasting is very important to 84% of treasurers, only 38% indicate they are performing at a high rate of accuracy.
  • Fraud prevention gains a heightened focus. Thwarting fraud is a top focus for 77% when considering the application of new technology in product development. Treasurers also report high demand for incorporating automation into fraud prevention processes.
  • Resistance to formats remains. Comparing legacy formats to newer and more enriched formats like XML, treasurers showed surprisingly high levels of resistance to adoption.

6. What are the benefits that treasury teams are missing out on by still using legacy data formats?

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.

7. GTreasury is also uniquely connected to how a broad set of treasurers have responded to ongoing pandemic-related business uncertainties. What are a couple stories or trends that have emerged from that research and from speaking with treasurers across the world?

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.

8. Speaking of cash forecasting, GTreasury and Strategic Treasurer also just put the 2021 Cash Forecasting & Visibility Survey. What were some of the key takeaways that treasurers will want to pay attention to?

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:

  • Treasurers want real-time global cash position updating. The majority of treasurers are seeking global cash positions that can update on a real-time or intraday basis, but many report being stuck with weekly (or less frequent) updates. Just seven percent of survey respondents are currently achieving real-time cash position updates.
  • The use of AI and ML in cash forecasting is nascent but accelerating. While just 6% of respondents are currently using AI/ML for forecasting, the report indicates that number should swell to 27% of organizations within the next two years.
  • More budget is being allotted for treasury and forecasting technology. Over the next year, more than 35% of companies plan “extremely heavy spending” on treasury systems and forecasting.

9. What excites you most about where digital treasury is headed?

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.

 

 

 

 

 

2022: A new start?

21-12-2021 | treasuryXL | Cashforce | LinkedIn

Nicolas Christiaen of Cashforce looks ahead to a year of challenge and opportunity for treasury. 

If there is one constant in business, it’s the fact that change will always happen – whether we like it or not. And the past half decade has seen more transformative disruption than much of the previous half century. Markets, models, economies – all have seen seismic shifts. And that’s before we were hit with a global pandemic.

It doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that the coming year promises to throw up a whole new set of challenges for treasurers across the UK. How they address those challenges may determine how well positioned their businesses are to capitalise on the eventual recovery.

Clearly, the volatility that has characterised the previous two years isn’t going anywhere. What we have seen is that, while many treasurers and their teams have adapted to the new world we are now living in, COVID-19 is not over yet and there is a constant flow of new variables. COVID variants emerge periodically, and the different approaches to containing the virus will continue to cause volatility in the markets.

It’s fair to say that the treasury teams most likely to prosper in the coming year will be those that have not only demonstrated operational transformation or transactional excellence, but those that have also focused on continual improvement and the nuts and bolts of treasury activities – whether that means reviewing risk management processes or implementing new technology.

There’s little doubt that there remains the potential for further disruptions in global supply chains, which will inevitably bolster the demand for more visibility into cash. So, what will that mean for treasurers? From the conversations we’ve had with our clients across a range of sectors, our belief is that scenario analysis will continue to be top of mind for treasury teams over the next 12 months as new macroeconomic variables drive the need for multiple forecasts.

 

Technology for treasurers

 

The key to surviving the uncertainty will be to adopt technology that fits acute needs within a treasury’s view and then to implement it. On the adoption side, it amazes us that in 2021 we still see critical treasury processes and information housed in spreadsheets.

The good news is that the funds available for ‘Office of the CFO’ software as a service solutions (including cash management, treasury and forecasting solutions) have increased and are still growing. Even better is that ‘best-of-breed’ solutions, which typically have lower barriers of entry, are surging, as the ‘one-size-fits-all’ type of solution is shown to be excellent in some areas but simply not viable in others.

Finally, it is also worth noting that the longer we have to live with COVID-19, the more normal it will become to acquire technology in front of a computer screen (rather than meeting face to face).

On the implementation side, internal IT processes and architecture alignments are still a roadblock to implementing even niche solutions. The reason is simple: there is not enough IT capacity, due to a general lack of IT skills in the marketplace. A war for IT resources results in increased internal costs and pushes out project time frames. Digital transformation programs, while beneficial in the long term, seem to guarantee that business users of technology won’t realise tangible benefits for many months. Therefore, more focus should be put on quick wins or proof of concepts and building further from there.

While there are certainly challenges to adopting and implementing technology effectively, the need for visibility (and the automation to support scaling that visibility up), security, validation and auditing has not decreased. We feel that the above will continue to drive conversations with treasury technology providers.

Ultimately, treasurers occupy a unique position: they are, in many ways, the first line of defence in protecting businesses from the headwinds that can buffet them in stormy times. We firmly believe that by adopting the right approach to technology investment, they will continue to play their vital role.

 

Nicolas Christiaen

Managing Partner at Cashforce