Tag Archive for: technology

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


 

 

Cash Flow Forecasting Methods to Choose from

04-05-2022 | treasuryXL | CashAnalytics | LinkedIn | The number of forecasting methods available might seem infinite. When a broad range of statistical, demand, driver, and AI/ML forecasting techniques are considered, it’s hard to know where to start.

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

Live Webinar: An Interactive Cash Forecasting Discovery Session

Live Webinar: An Interactive Cash Forecasting Discovery Session 22-03-2022 | treasuryXL | CashAnalytics | LinkedIn | Do you spend more time compiling and reconciling your team’s cash forecasts than you spend analyzing the output? If so, you’re *definitely not alone.*

Cash Flow Forecasting Factors to Consider

10-03-2022 | treasuryXL | CashAnalytics | LinkedIn | The cash forecasting process involves planning and predicting a variety of different types of cash flow — from expected customer receipts to tax payments due to the government.