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GTreasury Adds Victoria Blake as Chief Product Officer; Ashley Pater Becomes General Manager at Hedge Trackers
21-06-2022 | treasuryXL | GTreasury | LinkedIn |
The product leaders bring veteran experience into their new roles, as GTreasury expands its treasury and risk management solutions and services for treasury teams and the office of the CFO
CHICAGO, Ill. – June 21, 2022 – GTreasury, a treasury and risk management platform provider, today announced that it has named Victoria Blake as GTreasury’s Chief Product Officer, and Ashley Pater as General Manager at Hedge Trackers. Recently acquired by GTreasury, Hedge Trackers is the global leader in accounting, consulting, and software services that protect clients against financial risk.
Victoria Blake joins GTreasury with more than 20 years of experience and success in product leadership roles across several SaaS and technology companies. Blake comes to GTreasury from Zapproved, where she served as the Vice President of Product. During her tenure at the e-discovery software provider, she led high-level strategy development, product definition, and market-facing thought leadership and vision. Before Zapproved, Blake was responsible for defining next-generation cloud services offerings as the Vice President of Product Management at Metal Toad, an AWS Consulting Partner. Blake has also held product management and leadership positions at WebMD Health Services, Jive Software, and Walker Tracker.
As GTreasury’s Chief Product Officer, Blake will lead the company’s global product and UX teams in developing and delivering innovative new solutions for GTreasury’s customers and partners. From modern automated treasury and transaction management to AI-powered SmartPredictions™ cash forecasting and visibility, GTreasury’s SaaS platform empowers treasury teams and the office of the CFO with the future-proof technology and capabilities required to drive confident financial decision-making. GTreasury has also continued to expand its broad ecosystem of connected partner technologies, via API integrations with ERPs, banks, and other external providers where instant data connectivity maximizes customer efficiencies.
“GTreasury has built its reputation as a leading treasury and risk management platform by harnessing innovative cloud, AI, machine learning, and emerging technologies that move our industry forward,” said Victoria Blake, CPO, GTreasury. “Just as importantly, GTreasury has always focused on product usability and ensuring that its powerful tools are always easily accessible and seamlessly connected for the teams that rely on them. I look forward to building on what GTreasury has created over the past three decades, and delivering even more next-generation tools to make CFOs and treasury teams more successful.”
Ashley Pater is now the General Manager of Hedge Trackers after more than a decade of leadership roles within GTreasury. Pater most recently served as GTreasury’s Chief Product Officer, where she was responsible for aligning product vision and strategy to the company’s business objectives. Pater previously held leadership positions in GTreasury’s marketing and account management functions, focusing on building global brand awareness, lead generation, event management, and cross-sell programs.
Pater will oversee daily business operations and lead growth strategy around Hedge Trackers’ FX, interest rate, and commodity price risk management services and consulting. Pater will also ensure alignment and integration opportunities within the broader GTreasury organization. Hedge Trackers offers best-in-class expertise and technical depth in meeting today’s unprecedented demand for effective hedging strategies, identifying exposure, managing risk, and meeting compliance and audit requirements. Under Pater’s leadership, Hedge Trackers will focus on bolstering its risk management expertise and bringing new solutions to market across the company’s risk product suite.
“Combining the strengths of GTreasury and Hedge Trackers makes us the clear market leader when it comes to both our treasury risk management products and our consulting acumen,” said Ashley Pater, General Manager, Hedge Trackers. “Today’s CFOs and financial leaders understand that risk management and hedging capabilities are critical to navigating volatile markets and achieving larger business goals. I’m excited to further our solutions and insight to equip customers with the solutions required for effectively and cost-efficiently managing their risk.”
“Both Victoria and Ashley possess the clarity of vision required to advance our GTreasury and Hedge Trackers products to meet our customers’ evolving needs today and well into the future—and both bring relevant, experienced, and proven leadership to accomplish those goals,” said Renaat Ver Eecke, CEO, GTreasury. “I’m glad to welcome Victoria and Ashley into their new roles and look forward to what’s to come from GTreasury and Hedge Trackers.”
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. Visit GTreasury.com
Perfecting the Cash Forecast
21-06-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |
By Bob Stark, Global Head of Market Strategy
Source
The number one treasury issue that causes CFOs the most potential concern is unreliable cash visibility and forecasts, according to a Nov. 2018 CFO Publishing survey, “3 Key Areas Where CFOs Say Treasurers Need to be More Strategic.”
Every organization talks about forecasting more effectively, but few allocate sufficient people, time, and technology to build an effective program. Understanding the importance of an accurate cash forecast that can be relied upon for key financial decisions is critical to making the right investments in forecasting. While there are many reasons to forecast, such as protecting against currency volatility, there are a few key areas that should be addressed to help CFOs and treasurers further make the connection between accurate cash forecasting and bottom-line financial performance.
So, what is cash forecasting? Cash forecasting, when performed accurately, enables greater certainty of projected cash balances. Longer term investing, reduced borrowing costs, more effective hedging programs and better mobility of global cash, cash positioning is concerned with today and often the next five business days. The purpose is to manage daily liquidity to ensure shortfalls are covered and surpluses are concentrated to earn some yield on excess cash.
Cash budgeting is performed by finance teams such as FP&A and is more focused beyond one year – although with increased emphasis on free cash flow guidance, the reconciliation of indirect budget-based forecasts with direct cash flow forecasts is increasingly managed quarterly.
Cash forecasting typically extends cash positioning with horizons anywhere from one week to one year. Forecasting leverages multiple data sources to increase confidence in the projected cash balances so that better cash decisions can be made. The value of forecasting is based upon the value of those better decisions.
So why forecast? Ineffective cash forecasting costs money and impacts shareholder value. A poorly executed program drives a number of negative consequences so it is critical to understand the link between effective cash forecasting and bottom line financial performance. Excuses such as “we’re cash rich” or “interest rates are too low” no longer satisfy investors who demand that cash be deployed or returned to them. Without adequate visibility of forecast cash and where cash needs to be deployed to meet growth targets, CEOs and CFOs risk looking foolish in front of shareholders and analysts.
The volatility in global currencies shows no signs of abating, meaning that the pressure on CFOs to maintain the value of foreign cash inflows and outflows persists. Companies can experience earnings per share losses from unexpected and unhedged currency impacts or have difficulty in maintaining (let alone increasing) return on cash in a post-Basel III environment.
Forecasting cash will allow segregation of operational and non-operational cash into time buckets as well as deliver the needed accuracy to allocate cash to longer duration investment strategies. This will help preserve previously realised investment returns or help to find an alternative for cash balances that are no longer wanted by your bank!
Certainty in projected cash balances drives the CFO’s ability to anticipate and prepare for corporate actions and strategic investments. For example, without confidence in cash forecasts, the CFO and treasurer are not relied upon to contribute to key M&A decisions such as providing guidance on the components of cash, debt and equity to calculate a total acquisition cost.
When cash is held globally, share buybacks or dividend hikes are a challenge. Often CFOs find it cheaper to borrow cash domestically than repatriate funds – yet this analysis requires certainty into projected cash balances. Confidence in the forecast is critical to optimize business value; CFOs need an effective cash forecast in order to make commitments on how to reinvest cash to meet organic growth targets. Lack of confidence will lead to unnecessary borrowing or equity financing.
Consolidation of data – Finding the right information and determining the most efficient (i.e. automated) way to integrate it into a consolidated forecast system is key.
While automation is important, data quality is also paramount to success. When building the forecast, each line item may be sourced in different ways. The source of the information will determine the best way to build the forecast for each line item. For example, many treasury teams prefer to import accounts payable data directly from the ERP while for receivables information they may wish to extrapolate historical data and model using a linear regression. For treasury teams to be effective, it is important that all methods be fully automated and secure so that initial setup, maintenance, and daily execution to build the forecast are easy and can be maintained by the user (and not require re-programming).
Collaboration – Making decisions on the best data to build the forecast also requires determining who to collaborate with to smoothly access that key information. In many cases, treasury does not have direct authority over the people that own systems and/or business responsibilities that offer that data Yet, treasury relies upon this outside information to build a comprehensive forecast, so good internal communication skills are critical to receiving quality information in a timely way. Accounts Payable, FP&A, IT, Regional Controllers all forecast projections for decentralized organizations. Many treasury teams plan, with their CFOs, a top-down collaboration model that builds effective cash forecasting into the team’s objectives and compensation. This draws attention to the forecasting objectives and motivates each team to fulfill their roles.
Measurement – The most important – and often overlooked – step is the measurement of forecast accuracy. Implementing a process to measure forecast accuracy at a detailed level to identify the source of variances is critical to improving quality and ultimately reducing forecast variances. Equally important is implementing a feedback loop – to systems and to people – that ensure that forecast data is improved based on variances that were identified. The feedback loop is especially important when non-treasury resources are contributing to the forecast to ensure that the right behaviors and cash forecast numbers are positively reinforced while opportunities for improvement are well communicated. This is especially effective when feedback is aligned to KPIs and quarterly objectives of those outside of the treasury team.
Key to success – A forecast variance analysis should be detailed with multiple ‘snapshots’ taken. If only a summary picture is reviewed (e.g. how effective was forecasting over a 3-month period) then a lot of the variability is hidden within that timeframe. Measuring daily, weekly, or bi-weekly will help uncover the ups and downs between forecast and actuals that might otherwise go unnoticed. Fortunately, the business intelligence features of a TMS such as Kyriba offers the data visualization and analytics required to offer this level of detail. Cash forecasting is especially important if you are “cash rich” with a high percentage of non-operational cash deposits. Multinationals with significant foreign revenues must forecast better, so they can hedge effectively and deliver cash predictability to their stakeholders. The key to forecasting is flexibility so that you have many options to model the different streams of forecast data. The accuracy of your data will determine if importing, regressing, extrapolating, or other methods of calculations are needed to build your forecast effectively.
Without measuring forecast accuracy, it is impossible to know if you are good at forecasting. Data visualization helps focus on important variances – whether by category, time bucket, or geography – and isolate what data needs to be improved for future forecasting. ROI of cash forecasting is very high.
In summary, the value of forecasting is driven by what your organization can do with additional cash. The value of cash can be measured by investing longer with higher returns on cash, repaying debt, earning yield from early supplier payments, or investing in new organizational projects. Perfecting the cash forecast means freeing up cash from working capital and directing towards these higher value uses.
Treasury & Banking in India
20-06-2022 | treasuryXL | ComplexCountries | LinkedIn |
This call took place against the background of the war in Ukraine – but it was a useful chance to catch up on the ever-improving situation in India.
India has always been complex, with many regulations and poor clarity. This is clear from the comments below, where participants often have different experiences on the same topic. But, overall, the economy is working well, people are making profits (this was not always the case), and regulations are becoming more user-friendly, even if they remain challenging.
Source
Business structure: most participants have one legal entity which faces customers, and a different one which acts as an international shared service centre, invoicing other companies in the group on a cost plus basis. This can lead to inefficiencies in cash management: everyone struggles with domestic cash pooling and intercompany loans, while the shared service centre has guaranteed profits and cash generation. One participant has all activities in the same legal entity, which makes life easier.
Intercompany loans within India create transfer pricing and tax challenges: there is a required or recommended interest rate of 8%, compared to deposit rates of 4% to 4.5%.
Cross border cash pooling and intercompany loans are generally very difficult: many approvals are required. Dividends are subjected to withholding tax of 15%, which is sufficient to deter some, but not all, participants from paying dividends. However, this is an improvement on the previous 22% dividend tax, which was often not creditable against tax in the receiving country.
Netting of intercompany invoices is not allowed. However, one participant is using an Indian entity to centralise all invoices within the country using a POBO/ROBO process, and limiting the transactions to a single, large, gross in/gross out settlement. They are also looking at a non resident INR account.
Participants mostly use deposits for investing their excess cash. One is using the TIDE deposit: the bank automatically sweeps fixed amounts of cash above a defined threshold into deposits. These receive a higher rate if they remain for more than two weeks, but can be released if needed, with a lower interest rate being paid.
Most participants use international banks, mainly Citi and BNPP. Most complained that Citi are reluctant to use automated FX platforms, and are behind on the electronic transmission of import documentation – but one participant had a more positive experience. JPMorgan again received positive comments for their approach.
The participants who use local banks generally had positive comments about them, and found they were a big help with pricing, especially on loans and letters of credit.
Tax remains complex and challenging.
Bottom line: the – excellent – report below reflects the significant complexity of doing business and managing treasury in India. But it is an important market, and one which is improving. So it is definitely worth the effort!
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