Tag Archive for: corporate finance

Start your International Treasury Management and Corporate Finance course in September 2020

29-5-2020 | by Kendra Keydeniers | Francois De Witte | ATEL

The treasurer is the custodian of the company’s daily liquidity. He manages, anticipates and secures cash flows by ensuring that financial needs are covered.

This cursus will give the ability to assist directly and practically the treasurer of large corporates or to take over the treasury responsibilities in a SME.

The various modules will allow acquiring an in-depth knowledge of the various areas of the “Corporate Treasure” profession.

Registration

This course will start late September 2020. It includes 13 training modules and 5 intermediary exams. It is necessary to complete this form before your official registration. Registration will be closed early September 2020.

Objectives

At the end of this programme, the participant will able to:

  • assist directly and practically the treasurer of large corporates
  • take over treasury responsibilities in a SME.

The various modules will allow to acquire an in-depth knowledge of the various areas of the “Corporate Treasurer” profession.

Programme

Module 0: Introduction to Treasury Management
Speaker: Benjamin Defays / Treasury Manager

  • Corporate Treasurer’s responsibilities
  • Cash management (bank account opening, closing, KYC, Cash pooling, Payments and bank connectivity)
  • Liquidity management (importance of working capital management,
  • Risk management (foreign exchange, fraud, credit risk)
  • Trade finance (general context, intro to bank guarantees and letters of credit)

Module 1: Financial Maths (Focus on treasury & corporate finance)
Speaker: Hugues Pirotte / Professor of Finance at Solvay Brussels School

  • Focus on treasury & corporate finance
  • Time Value of Money
  • Vocabulary
  • Compounding intervals
  • Discount and annuity factors

Module 2: Advanced Excel workshop for treasurers (Dedicated to treasury)
Speaker: Hugues Pirotte / Professor of Finance at Solvay Brussels School

Module 3: Corporate Finance
Speaker: Mikael Pereira / Associate, Finance

  • Valuations
    • M&A’s
    • Portfolios
  • Corporate Financing
  • Corporate Investments

Module 4: Cash Management (domestic and international)
Speaker François De Witte / Consultant

  • Payments (Process, Tools)
  • Liquidity Management
  • Cash-Flow Forecasting
  • In-House Banking
  • Banking Relationship

Module 5: Trade Finance
Speaker: Benjamin Defays / Treasury Manager

  • General contact, cultural aspects
  • Why trade finance in treasury
  • Bank Guarantees, Burgschafts, Surety Bonds, Letters of Credit, Cash against Documents
  • Alterative security instruments
  • Disruptive technologies

Module 6: Credit Control
Speaker: Anca Vasiliu / Counterparty Risk Manager

  • Concepts & Practices/Types of Credit Risks
  • Understanding Financial Statements and Ratios
  • Credit Scoring/Ratings – S&P, Bloomberg models
  • Collecting overdue receivables – setting priorities
  • Strategies dealing with overdue invoices
  • Debt collection services development

Module 7: Pension / Insurance 

  • General introduction on insurances and pensions
  • Typology of insurances
  • Risk management via insurances
  • Saving via insurances

Module 8: Compliance

  • KYC, GDPR, EMIR, Bale III
  • International sanctions and their impact on transactions & overall business activities
  • Anticorruption (FCPA, UK Bribery Act)
  • EU competition law compliance
  • INCOTERMS
  • Drafting a contract (main considerations)

Module 9: Risk Management
Speaker: Patrick Verspecht / Group Treasurer

  • FX, Interests
  • Counterparties
  • Others (Reputation, etc…)

Module 10: Regulations / Accounting
Speaker: Quentin Bodart / Senior Finance Engineer

  • Emir, Mifid 2, Basle II and III,
  • Dodd Frank, GDPR, Fatca, Section 385…

Module 11: Treasury Accounting
Speaker: Quentin Bodart / Senior Finance Engineer

  • Accounting for Derivatives
  • Hedge Accounting, IFRS9 (all from a treasury side)

Module 12: Technologies
Speaker: Patrick Verspecht / Group Treasurer

  • New Technologies
    • Blockchain, Crypto-currencies, Smart Contracts
  • Treasury Console (Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters)
  • TMS, Fintechs

Module 13: Cyber Fraud

  • Why Cyber fraud needs to be considered as a major risk
  • Identify the consequences of a cyberattack
  • Main fraud schemes
  • How to protect against fraud

Some homework might be proposed for some modules, there will be continuous control in the form of intermediary exams (under the form of QCM) and a final exam will be sanctioned by an attestation delivered by ATEL (The Luxembourg Association of Corporate Treasurers).

There might also be one or two “extra-activity”, such as a visit in a bank trading room or/and a special guest speaker addressing the cursus participants on a specific subject (still to be defined, optional events).

Target Audience

Anyone willing to acquire an in-depth knowledge in corporate treasury and wishing to exercise this knowledge in practice.

Prerequisites

  • Basic background in finance or accounting
  • For the Advanced Excel workshop, a preliminary (good) knowledge in Excel is required

Course Material

The course material can be downloaded free of charge via your portal the day before the start of the course (download the Client Portal User’s Guide here).

Certificate

At the end of the programme, the participants will receive a “Certificate of Attendance” delivered by the House of Training, and an attestation of “Exam Success Pass” delivered by ATEL.

In order to get certified, an 80% rate of attendance and a 60% average score on the examinations are required.

The participants will also receive a one-year free membership to ATEL (www.atel.lu) giving a number of advantages.

Register here

 

 

 

 

 

 

Online Round Table: COVID-19 Reality Corporate Treasurers

| 15-05-2020 | VU Amsterdam |

This is a cost-free online event on 24 June 2020 and will start at 7:00 PM CET.

What is the covid-19 reality for corporate treasurers in various environments and how to deal with this new reality?

This is the topic of the Corporate Treasurers Online Round Table that will be organized by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for potential students and alumni of the postgraduate Executive Treasury Management & Corporate Finance programme. Four experienced and educated registered treasurers (RT) will speak from their experience and, in dialogue with the participants, try to look into the future.

Speakers work in various industries: retail, tourist, trading, logistics and manufacturing, which all feel covid-19 consequences in their own way. They will inform the audience how their first reaction was and that of their company. About how they manage the crisis and show resilience, how they recover from first effects, and how they have adjusted or will adjust to the new reality.

Event details

The event will take place in the evening and will last 75 minutes. The round table will be kicked off with brief introductions and presentations. Input from participants is expected and appreciated. Just like classes at the university, interactions will connect theory & day-to-day reality and raise the quality of the round table. All are expected to leave the event with practical do’s and don’ts. Herbert Rijken on behalf of the VU will be your host, Pieter de Kiewit will moderate the session.

Date, time and pre-registration

This is a cost-free online event on 24 June 2020 and will start at 7:00 PM CET. As this is an interactive event, the organizer, VU Amsterdam, has the right to select who can (not) join. Further details will be shared with participants in due time.

 

Pre-register here 

 

 

 

 

Online Open Evening: Treasury Management & Corporate Finance by VU Amsterdam

| 30-04-2020 | VU Amsterdam |

VU Amsterdam, will host an Online Open Evening on May 13, to provide you with the opportunity to get to know more about the post-graduate programs. You will have the opportunity to ask questions by means of an online livestream webinar.

Continue to read about the Treasury Management & Corporate Finance program, and to register for the Online Open Event on Wednesday May 13, 2020 from 18:15 pm to 19:15 pm CEST.

Treasury Management & Corporate Finance

The post-graduate Executive Treasury Management & Corporate Finance program combines two finance disciplines, as these disciplines are inextricably connected and largely overlap:

  1. Treasury Management
  2. Corporate Finance.

It is a unique program that has been running for more than 20 years at VU Amsterdam. The curriculum consists of 6 modules, each comprising approx 8 lecture days on Thursdays (from 15:30 – 20:00). It is an intensive and efficient 18-month program. Participants successfully completing this post-graduate executive program are awarded with the title of Registered Treasurer, a well-known and widely recognized within the world of Treasury professionals.

This program offers the following key benefits

  • Broad perspective on the Corporate Treasury and Finance disciplines
  • Master level and state of the art
  • Interactive Sessions
  • Useful Career development opportunities in a different setting
  • Get Connected to the treasury community

In order to learn more about this program, ask questions during a livestream webinar, get to taste the experience at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, our Partner VU Amsterdam, invites you to join the Online Open Evening.

Program

  • 18:15 hrs: Welcoming ☕
  • 18:30 hrs: Information on Treasury Management & Corporate Finance
  • 19:15 hrs: End of session

Date, time and registration

Date: 13 May, 2020

Start: 18:15 – 19:15 CEST

Register Now and safe your virtual seat

 

 

 

Yvonne Wijnberg shares her Register Treasurer experience

| 13-03-2020 | by treasuryXL | Yvonne Wijnberg

 

The Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam is proud to announce that they honored 13 new Register Treasurer (RT) graduates. The graduated RT’s of March 2020 were part of the 22nd class. One of the graduates is Yvonne Wijnberg. Yvonne is Treasury Manager at the fast-growing, international non-food discounter, Action. She shares her story with us about her RT experience from start till end.

 

Investing

The Treasury Management & Corporate Finance post graduate programme is 1.5 years of investing in yourself and your career. For sure if you have been out of school for as many years as I have, it is not easy to get back in the process of studying  for exams, but once you are back in the routine, it brings you so much more than you expected.

Switch to treasury

After a career in Corporate Accounting I decided that I needed a change, so 12 years ago I made the switch from Corporate Accounting to Treasury. It was not easy to start from scratch again after working for over 10 years already, but I have never regretted the change a single day.

My career has never been a speedy process and I have made a few sidesteps along the way, but in the end it got me to where I am today. In March 2020 I finished the post graduate programme for Treasury Management & Corporate Finance at VU university Amsterdam.

 

Enrichment

When I started in September 2018, I was worried I might be the oldest there, fortunately this was not the case. The group was a pleasant mixture of sexes, ages, experience and disciplines. Not only people who work in corporate Treasury joint the programme, but also consultants, bankers, controllers and tax professionals were part of the group. This is one of the reasons why the programme is so interesting. Getting to know my fellow students and interact with them was an enrichment to my development and network.  But also the lectures from professionals over a wide spread of topics is something that has added value to my daily operations.

The programme is diverse. Some courses focus on cases, while others are more theoretical. But the complete programme gives a solid basis of all subjects that can cross your path in Treasury. And as always, one course will appeal more to you than another. If you’re working in groups on assignments the learning point is not only the assignment itself, but also in broadening your view and making you more aware of other options then the once that seems most logical to you.

Part of the programme is also that you need to write 2 academic papers. For me this was the biggest challenge. But in the end this was a good way to broaden my knowledge on 2 subjects that will help me in my work.

Why the RT-programme

The reason for joining the programme was maybe a little different for me than for most. With more than enough practical experience I found myself lacking the theoretical basis which made me insecure at times. The programme has given me broader theoretical knowledge that helps me in my daily practice. This allows me to make decisions more easily and with more confidence.

During the programme at times it was hard, not only for yourself but also for your loved ones. And you always have the challenge of dividing your time between work, family and study. But in the end it is all worth it!

 

 

Yvonne Wijnberg

Treasury Manager at Action

 

 

 

 

Graduated as a RT and ready for a new treasury challenge?

Being a RT opens doors to new challenges more easily. Are you looking for an interim or a permanent position? Do you want to work in a small business or rather prefer a big corporation? If you want to make a switch in your career and you are open for a new adventure than I would highly recommend to contact our partner Treasurer Search. Treasurer Search is a successful treasury recruitment company, founded 10 years ago with consultants that have experience in treasury recruitment up to 20 years.

Do you have any questions about the RT programme? Are you a RT who want to share your career development via an interview? Or do you have any other related questions or remarks about the RT topic? You can contact me directly via:

Kendra Keydeniers
Community & Partner Manager at treasuryXL

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exclusive interview with FX specialist Arnoud Doornbos about FX Risk Management

6-1-2020 | by Kendra Keydeniers | Arnoud Doornbos | Ilfa Group

On January 23rd, 2020 Ilfa and Global Reach are organising a masterclass on foreign exchange risk management. FX experts Michael Jansen of Global Reach and Arnoud Doornbos of Ilfa will guide you through the design of a FX risk management program and demonstrate which opportunities a program like this has for your organisation.

Go to event and register for the masterclass. Places are limited so we recommend to secure your spot today.

treasuryXL is delighted to share our exclusive interview with one of the organizers and FX specialist, Arnoud Doornbos of Ilfa.

What is Foreign Exchange Risk Management?

Foreign exchange risk management strategy or FX hedging strategy are terms used to define all the measures devised by businesses or investors to protect the value of their cash flows, assets or liabilities from adverse fluctuations of the exchange rate.

Hedging is used by companies to manage their currency exposure. If a company needs to buy or sell one currency for another, they are exposed to fluctuations in the foreign exchange market that could affect their costs (or revenues) and ultimately their profit.

By booking a hedge, companies protect an exchange rate against a specified sum of currency for a desired timescale, providing companies with certainty.

There are a range of products that can be used for hedging, depending on the companies objective and the exposure they are trying to protect.

Typically, a company would hedge their foreign exchange (FX) exposure to protect its profit margin from market volatility. Hedging is most common in companies that have an exposure to a secondary currency and have fixed prices on their products or services.

What are the types of Foreign Exchange risk?

Foreign Exchange exposure is classified into three types:

  • Transaction exposure deals with actual foreign currency transaction.
  • Translation exposure deals with the accounting representation
  • Economic exposure deals with little macro level exposure which may be true for the whole industry rather than just the firm under concern.

Currency risks can have various effects on a company, whether it operates domestically or internationally. Transaction and economic risks affect a company’s cash flows, while transaction risk represents the future and known cash flows. Economic risk represents the future (but unknown) cash flows. Translation risk has no cash flow effect, although it could be transformed into transaction risk or economic risk if the company were to realize the value of its foreign currency assets or liabilities. Risk can be tricky to understand, but by breaking it up into these categories, it is easier to see how that risk affects a company’s balance sheet.

What are the most common critical Foreign Exchange risk problems that companies make?

Businesses that operate internationally or domestically must deal with various risks when trading in currencies other than their home currency.

Companies typically generate capital by borrowing debt or issuing equity and then use this to invest in assets and try to generate a return on the investment. The investment might be in assets overseas and financed in foreign currencies, or the company’s products might be sold to customers overseas who pay in their local currencies.

Domestic companies that sell only to domestic customers might still face currency risk because the raw materials they buy are priced in a foreign currency. Companies that do business in just their home currency can still face currency risk if their competitors operate in a different home currency.

What critical elements of Foreign Exchange risk are often overlooked?

One of the critical elements of the currency risk that are overlooked is the correct identification of the type of FX risk. A distinction must be made between certain and uncertain cash flows in FX. With certain cash flows, the company has to deal with a linear risk that must be covered with a linear financial hedging instrument, an FX forward. With an uncertain cash flow, risk profile is not linear and it is dangerous to use FX Forwards to hedge. FX Options are better financial products to hedge.

If the company does not include FX Options in its Treasury policy, the second best option is to use FX forwards for, for example, 50% of the principal sum of the underlying risk.

Anticipated and committed exposure cycle

How can you measure Foreign Exchange risk and the different types?

There are many ways to measure foreign exchange risk, ranging from simple to quite complex. Sophisticated measures such as ‘value at risk’ may be mathematically complex and require significant computing power.

Register of foreign currency exposures

A very simple method is to maintain a register of exposures and their associated foreign exchange hedges. Basically the details of each hedge are recorded against its relevant exposure. This type of approach may also assist with compliance with accounting standards.

Table of projected foreign currency cashflows

Where the business both pays and receives foreign currency, it will be necessary to measure the net surplus or deficit for each currency. This can be done by projecting foreign currency cash flows. This not only indicates whether the business has a surplus or is short of a particular currency, but also the timing of currency flows.

To properly determine the FX risk, account must be taken of the differences in sensitivity of the incoming and outgoing FX cash flows.

Sensitivity analysis

A further extension of the previous measure is to undertake sensitivity analysis to measure the potential impact on the business of an adverse movement in exchange rates. This may be done by choosing arbitrary movements in exchange rates or by basing exchange rate movements on past history.

Value at risk

Some businesses, particularly financial institutions, use a probability approach when undertaking sensitivity analysis. This is known as ‘value at risk’. While it is useful to know the potential impact of a given change in exchange rates (say a USD one cent movement) the question will arise: how often does this happen? Accordingly, we can do a sensitivity analysis using past price history and apply it to the current position. Then, given the business’s current position, and based on exchange rates observed over the last two years, it can be 99 per cent confident that it will not lose more than a certain amount, given a certain movement in exchange rates. In effect, the business has used actual rate history to model the potential impact of exchange rate movements on its foreign currency exposures.

What steps do you need to make to create a Foreign Exchange strategy?

Transaction risk is often hedged tactically (selectively) or strategically to preserve cash flows and earnings, depending on the companies treasury view on the future movements of the currencies involved. Tactical hedging is used by most firms to hedge their transaction currency risk relating to short-term receivable and payable transactions, while strategic hedging is used for longer-period transactions.

Translation, or balance sheet, risk is hedged very infrequently and non-systematically, often to avoid the impact of possible abrupt currency shocks on net assets. This risk involves mainly long-term foreign exposures, such as the firm’s valuation of subsidiaries, its debt structure and international investments. However, the long-term nature of these items and the fact that currency translation affects the balance sheet rather than the income statement of a company, make hedging of the translation risk less of a priority for management. For the translation of currency risk of a subsidiary’s value, it is standard practice to hedge the net balance sheet exposures, i.e., the net assets (gross assets less liabilities) of the subsidiary that might be affected by an adverse exchange rate move.

Translation risk is for a large part a Finance issue. Within the framework of hedging the exchange rate risk in a consolidated balance sheet, the issue of hedging a companies debt profile is also of paramount importance.  The currency and maturity composition of a firm’s debt determines the susceptibility of its net equity and earnings to exchange rate changes. To reduce the impact of exchange rates on the volatility of earnings, the company may use an optimization model to devise an optimal set of hedging strategies to manage its currency risk.

What is, in your perception, the biggest benefit of a working Foreign Exchange strategy?

Foreign exchange risk management is thus fundamental but it is often considered to be too complex, expensive and time-consuming. Nonetheless, with a simple, tailored monitoring activity, it can neutralise currency fluctuations and bring the following benefits: Securing marketing margins. Optimising cash-flow estimates.

What is your best advise for companies dealing with Foreign Exchange risk?

This Forex market is open 24 hours a day, 5 days a week and with a daily volume of $ 6.6 trillion the most liquid and largest financial market in the world. For most companies, FX risks are non-core risks The objective of most companies is not to be an FX trader. By correctly identifying and quantifying the FX risks and then neutralizing them with the correct financial FX hedging instruments, companies will have little or no trouble with currency fluctuations on the financial FX markets. The implementation of the correct procedures forms the basis of good FX risk management and will make opportunistic behavior of management disappear.

 

Arnoud Doornbos

Associate Partner Ilfa

FX specialist

 

 

 

 

 

TIS is growth champion for the third time in a row and is carrying its success story forward

| 03-12-2019 | TIS |

FOCUS BUSINESS and Statista rank the cloud-based payment expert among the fastest-growing and most promising companies in Germany. 

Walldorf, 28. November 2019. Above-average growth in turnover and staff as well as new and innovative ways of making corporate payment processes simpler and safer – with these qualities TIS (Treasury Intelligence Solutions GmbH) has now established itself on the list of the 500 FOCUS business growth champions for the third time in a row

Statista, the Hamburg-based statistics portal, had created a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing German companies for FOCUS BUSINESS, a well-known business magazine in Germany. 12,500 companies with particularly strong growth in sales or workforce were extracted from two million commercial register entries. The companies must have their principal place of business in Germany and have achieved organic growth. Based on these criteria, a shortlist of 1,654 firms was created and from this ultimately a top 500 ranking of champions who achieved average annual revenue growth of 52 % between 2015 and 2018. The list of 500 growth champions for 2020 was published in edition 3/2019 of the FOCUS BUSINESS magazine.

The fact that TIS is now listed in the ranking for the third time in a row is primarily thanks to the confidence which customers have placed in  its cloud-based payment  platform. The consistent upward trend of TIS also proves that rapid growth is essential in the big context of digitalization. Through features like ERP-integration, payment automation, process standardization, and a single login for all stakeholders to manage bank accounts and payments, TIS customers benefit from improved simplicity and security in handling all their payment transactions and gain greater insight into their cashflow data.

Jörg Wiemer, CSO and co-founder of TIS, proudly tells to the press: “We are delighted and very proud to be among the winners in the FOCUS growth ranking once again. We could only achieve the impressive business performance with the commitment of an outstandingly performing team in TIS, to whom I owe my special thanks. We are continuously working towards the acceleration of our further growth in Europe and in the USA with a solution that is highly appreciated by our customers.”

About TIS

TIS (Treasury Intelligence Solutions GmbH), founded in Walldorf, Germany in 2010, is a global leader in managing corporate payments. The Financial Times named TIS as one of “Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies” for 2019.

Offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the TIS solution is a comprehensive, highly-scalable, cloud platform for company-wide payments and cash management. For businesses, TIS creates a community of trust and empowers customers to make better decisions with 100% real-time cashflow visibility. Key benefits are lower costs, risk prevention, a higher degree of transparency and fast worldwide roll-outs. For banks and partners, TIS generates growth and revenue opportunities through continuous innovation for better payment experience.

The TIS solution has been successfully used for many years in both large and medium-sized companies, including Adecco Group, Hugo Boss, Fresenius, Fugro, Lanxess, OSRAM and QIAGEN. More than 25% of DAX companies are already TIS customers.

The high level of security and deep integration of the platform with existing ERP systems is certified by ISO-27001, SAP, SOC 1, SOC 2, and TISAX.

Your World of Payments. One Login.

Visit TIS.biz

Ready for automated payment transactions? Fully integrated in a few days

| 26-11-2019 | TIS |

Treasury Intelligence Solutions GmbH (TIS) is the leading cloud platform for managing corporate payments, liquidity and bank relationships worldwide. The company delivers SMART PAYMENTS to help customers make BETTER DECISIONS.

TIS is web-based. That means you don’t have to install any software locally. Save yourself high IT and ERP maintenance costs and connect TIS to your ERP system in a secure, simple and straightforward manner.

Cloud-based: This is how TIS is integrated.

Simple implementation and intuitive operation.

Many companies have to fight against non-transparent and decentralized payment processes due to the accumulation of organizational and IT structures. TIS understand this problem and can provide a solution to both issues. The TIS platform is web-based and is available productively across the whole company in just a few days. It can be integrated seamlessly into your ERP system via a plug-in. Every user, all over the world, can log in to the platform straightforwardly and manage the business processes for the areas for which they are responsible.

TIS Agent: Support for all ERP versions.

No changes to your ERP systems are needed.

Integration of the TIS Corporate Payment solution is independent of your ERP system. Interfaces for ERP systems other than SAP are either already available or they can be easily deployed by using the TIS Agents. Furthermore, interfaces to banks are already available and additional interfaces are continuously being integrated. Connection to your ERP systems can therefore be achieved straightforwardly.

Cost-efficient.

Fast ERP rollouts and lower maintenance requirements.

Reduce your costs by deciding for the introduction of a SaaS solution.  Systems that are located on your own servers will have considerably larger implementation expenses, risks and will involve major IT projects.

There are also expensive maintenance requirements. Every time the payment and bank statement processes between the ERP or accounting systems and the banks are standardized, your IT system will have to be involved. TIS enables fast and cost-effective ERP rollouts, without large IT costs, via the web-based solution. You will therefore save money and simplify your bank communications in the long term.

Particularly easy SAP integration.

TIS Bank Transaction Manager has been officially approved and certified by SAP.

As a certified partner of SAP SE, we guarantee that our SaaS solution is completely compatible with the SAP Business Suite. This means that TIS can integrated seamlessly via an SAP certified plug-in with

SAP ERP

SAP Business ByDesign

SAP S/4HANA

Once TIS has been incorporated into an ERP system, the user no longer has to save the bank files locally and transmit them to the bank. Payments are now triggered in the SAP environment and transmitted directly to the TIS cloud platform. Inversely, bank statements go from the bank to TIS and are collected there by the ERP system. As a SaaS solution, the platform is connected seamlessly to your ERPs, and you can design your national and international payment transaction process efficiently and in a future-oriented manner.

TIS Bank Transaction Manager

Integration of the TIS solutions is thus quick and easy. As soon as the TIS Bank Transaction Manager has been integrated into your business processes, you can centralize your payment process and increase your processing speed and data quality. Reduce errors from manual input and gain valuable time via standardized automation. Depending on what type of support in payment management you require, you can manage your payment processes entirely in accordance with your needs using additional TIS modules.

Visit TIS.biz

Cash Management in the Age of Digital Transformation

| 15-11-2019 | TIS |

Treasury Leaders Summit – London 2019

The Treasury Leaders Summit provides senior treasury and finance professionals with access to in-depth research, analysis and the opportunity to discuss key issues impacting the profession with senior level peers.

Our partner TIS will also be part of this Summit. Visit TIS at their stand and discuss your business case.

TIS Co-Founder, Jörg Wiemer, will hold a session about “Cash Management in the Age of Digital Transformation”. This will take place on Tuesday, 19th November at 4.30 PM GMT.

Also, do not miss our session on Day 2 with our customer HUGO BOSS. Get valuable insights on how they found the perfect-fit solution for their corporate payments processes.

This session will take place at 12.30PM GMT.

Request a meeting by filling out the form here.

Date:
19th – 20th November 2019

Location:
Leonardo Royal Hotel London City, 8-10 Coopers Row, London, EC3N 2BQ

 

Top 10 Treasury Priorities in 2020

| 29-10-2019 | TIS |

It’s webinar time! Our partner TIS will organize their next webinar on November 20, 2019.

The evolution of the Treasury function continues to accelerate with process automation and AI touching all aspects of Treasury Operations, and expectations to deliver more value across the enterprise.

How do you leverage technology to mitigate time spent on non-value add activities?

How do treasury professionals build the right relationships to deliver forecasts that matter, manage cash and bank relationships, and manage financial risks while communicating with impact to deliver business analysis that impacts performance?

Join Giancarlo Laudini, SVP Global Sales & Marketing Operations, TIS and Ernie Humphrey, CEO, 360 Thought Leadership Consulting to discover our ten priorities for Treasury teams for 2020 to tackle in order to deliver strategic value while facilitating a culture of collaboration and data-driven decision making within and beyond Treasury

 

Register here!

Date: Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Timing: 5.00 PM – 6.00 PM CET

 

 

 

 

 

 

How are largest European companies managing their financial risks?

17-10-2019 | Stanley Myint | BNP Paribas

The second edition of the “Handbook of Corporate Financial Risk Management” has just been published by Risk books. The handbook is written with all risk management professionals, practitioners, instructors and students in mind, but its core readership are Treasurers at non-financial corporations. It contains 43 real life case studies covering various risk management areas. The book aims to cover both financial risk management and optimal capital structure and its contents.

Motivation for the book

This Handbook is based on real-life client discussions we had in the Risk Management Advisory team at BNP Paribas between 2005 and 2019. We noticed that corporate treasurers and chief financial officers (CFOs) often have similar questions on risk management and capital structure and that these questions are rarely addressed in the existing literature.

This situation can and should lead to a fruitful collaboration between companies and their banks. Companies often come with the best ideas, but do not have the resources to test them. Leading banks, on the other hand, have strong computational resources, a broader sector perspective, an extensive experience in internal risk management, and the ability to develop and deliver the solution. So, if they make an effort to understand a client’s problem in depth, they may be able to add considerable value.

The Handbook is the result of such an effort lasting 14 years and covering more than 700 largest European corporations from all industrial sectors. Its subject is corporate financial risk management, ie, the management of financial risks for non-financial corporations.

While there are many papers on this topic, they are generally written by academics and rarely by practitioners. If we contrast this to the subject of risk management for banks, on which many books have been written from the practitioners’ perspective, we notice a significant gap. Perhaps this is because financial risk is clearly a more central part of business among banks and asset managers than in non-financial corporations. However, that does not mean that financial risk is only important for banks and asset managers. Let us look at one example.

Consider a large European automotive company, with an operating margin of 10%. More than half of its sales are outside Europe, while its production is in EUR. This exposes the company to currency risk. Annual currency volatility is of the order of 15%, therefore, if the foreign revenues fall by 15% due to FX, this can almost wipe out the net profits. Clearly an important question for this company is, “How to manage the currency risk?”

The book blends real corporate situations across capital structure, optimal level of cash, optimal fixed-floating mix and pensions, which are particularly topical now that negative EUR yields create unpresented funding opportunities for corporates, but also tricky challenges on cost of cash and pensions management

One reason why corporate risk management has so far attracted relatively little attention in literature is that, even though the questions asked are often simple (eg, “Should I hedge the translation risk?” or “Does hedging transaction risk reduce the translation risk?”) the answers are rarely simple, and in many cases there is no generally accepted methodology on how to deal with these issues.

So where does the company treasurer go to find answers to these kinds of questions? General corporate finance books are usually very shy when it comes to discussing risk management. Two famous examples of such books devote only 20 – 30 pages to managing financial risk, out of almost 1,000 pages in total. Business schools generally do not devote much time to risk management. We hope that our book goes a long way towards filling this gap.

Website

We invite the reader to utilise the free companion website which accompanies this book, www.corporateriskmanagement.org There, you will find periodic updates on new topics not covered in The Handbook. Much like the book this website should prove a useful resource to corporate treasurers, CFOs and other practitioners as well the academic readers interested in corporate risk management.

About the authors

Stanley Myint is the Head of Risk Management Advisory at BNP Paribas and an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. At BNP Paribas, he advises large multinational corporations on issues related to risk management and capital structure. His expertise is in quantitative and corporate finance, focusing on fixed income derivatives and optimal capital structure. Stanley has 25 years of experience in this field, including 14 years at BNP Paribas and previously at McKinsey & Company, Royal Bank of Scotland and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. He has a PhD in physics from Boston University, a BSc in physics from Belgrade University and speaks French, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian and Italian. At the Saïd Business School, Stanley teaches two courses with Dimitrios Tsomocos and Manos Venardos: “Financial Crises and Risk Management” and “Fixed Income and Derivatives”.

Fabrice Famery is Head of Global Markets corporate sales at BNP Paribas. His group provides corporate clients with hedging solutions across interest rate, foreign exchange, commodity and equity asset classes. Corporate risk management has been the focus of Fabrice’s professional path for the past 30 years. He spent the first seven years of his career in the treasury department of the energy company, ELF, before joining Paribas (now BNP Paribas) in 1996, where he occupied various positions including FX derivative marketer, Head of FX Advisory Group and Head of the Fixed Income Corporate Solutions Group. Fabrice has published articles in Finance Director Europe and Risk Magazine, and has a master’s degree in international affairs from Paris Dauphine University (France).

Content:

Introduction

1 Theory and Practice of Corporate Risk Management *

2 Theory and Practice of Optimal Capital Structure *

PART I: FUNDING AND CAPITAL STRUCTURE

3 Introduction to Funding and Capital Structure

4 How to Obtain a Credit Rating

5 Refinancing Risk and Optimal Debt Maturity*

6 Optimal Cash Position *

7 Optimal Leverage *

PART II: INTEREST RATE AND INFLATION RISKS

8 Introduction to Interest Rate and Inflation Risks

9 How to Develop an Interest Rate Risk Management Policy

10 How to Improve Your Fixed-Floating Mix and Duration

11 Interest Rates: The Most Efficient Hedging Product*

12 Do You Need Inflation-linked Debt

13 Prehedging Interest Rate Risk

14 Pension Fund Asset and Liability Management

PART III: CURRENCY RISK

15 Introduction to Currency Risk

16 How to Develop an FX Risk Management Policy

17 Translation or Transaction: Netting FX Risks *

18 Early Warning Signals

19 How to Hedge High Carry Currencies*

20 Currency Risk on Covenants

21 Optimal Currency Composition of Debt 1:

Protect Book Value

22 Optimal Currency Composition of Debt 2:

Protect Leverage*

23 Cyclicality of Currencies and Use of Options to Manage Credit Utilisation *

24 Managing the Depegging Risk *

25 Currency Risk in Luxury Goods *

PART IV: CREDIT RISK

26 Introduction to Credit Risk

27 Counterparty Risk Methodology

28 Counterparty Risk Protection

29 Optimal Deposit Composition

30 Prehedging Credit Risk

31 xVA Optimisation *

PART V: M&A-RELATED RISKS

32 Introduction to M&A-related Risks

33 Risk Management for M&A

34 Deal-contingent Hedging *

PART VI: COMMODITY RISK

35 Introduction to Commodity Risk

36 Managing Commodity-linked Revenues and Currency Risk

37 Managing Commodity-linked Costs and Currency Risk

38 Commodity Input and Resulting Currency Risk *

39 Offsetting Carbon Emissions*

PART VII: EQUITY RISK

40 Introduction to Equity Risk*

41 Hedging Dilution Risk *

42 Hedging Deferred Compensation*

43 Stake-building*

Bibliography

Index

Note: Chapters marked with * are new to the second edition