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Nomentia Acquires TIPCO: A union of exceptional products and teams
08-09-2021 | treasuryXL | Nomentia |
Nomentia announced yesterday that the company has acquired TIPCO Treasury & Technology. Shortly after the news was released, we had the chance to sit down with Jukka Sallinen, CEO of Nomentia, and talk about the announcement, what does the acquisition promise for finance and treasury professionals globally, and what does the future hold for Nomentia.
The acquisition of TIPCO is the latest milestone in Nomentia’s history. What’s the reason behind the transaction?
There are a couple of reasons. First and foremost, we’ve felt that both companies share a very similar mission. We want to provide unparalleled solutions for and with our customers. TIPCO’s Treasury Information Platform (TIP) is an exceptional treasury management solution that is widely known in the DACH region, and TIPCO has been also famous for its acumen in treasury. Our combined solutions and domain expertise make us one of the strongest players in the cloud treasury and cash management space. I have no doubt that our current and future customers will benefit from our combined product portfolio. Another good reason for joining forces with TIPCO is that we’ve strongly felt that both companies have had surprisingly similar cultures – both have a very healthy obsession for providing the best solutions for our clients and we take pride in what we do.
Tell us more about the merged product portfolio and how treasury teams will benefit from it?
Before the acquisition, Nomentia cash management was consisting of Bank connections, Payments, Cash Forecasting, In-house banking, Bank Account Management, and Reconciliation solutions. Adding TIP to the solution mix, we can now provide robust and sophisticated cash flow forecast and cash visibility solutions, as well as solutions for trade finance, FX risk, treasury reporting and treasury workflows, and more. TIP has been always loved by the users and now all Nomentia customers will have access to TIP.
Today, it’s not feasible for treasury teams and finance teams to choose one provider for all their needs or trust that their ERP system would provide a working solution alone. Treasurers should be able to choose the solutions that can best resolve their challenges and meet their needs. To get the best outcome, finance and treasury teams often need to work with multiple vendors – taking the best solution from each. Of course, that’s not always ideal from IT’s point of view, but that’s where our team comes in to take care of the implementation plan together with the client and integrate with their existing systems and banks. We trust that a lot of our current customers will find new solutions from our updated offering that can help them to overcome their current challenges.
New customers will find that Nomentia can offer the widest cash and treasury management solution portfolio on the market to help them build better treasury processes.
How does the acquisition affect Nomentia’s future?
During the past year, Nomentia has taken big steps toward becoming the global powerhouse for treasury and cash management. After last year’s merger of OpusCapita and Analyste, we’ve successfully got our footprint in many new markets, and we’ve been especially growing in the DACH and Benelux regions besides continuing to be the number one choice of treasurers in the Nordics. Acquiring TIPCO and merging the two product portfolios will help us to strengthen our position in Europe even more.
Our team has been also growing significantly – it’s always great to work with people that are experts in their field and can truly help our customers to develop their operations. Together, we will exceed our customers’ expectations with our strong product portfolio and even stronger team. Personally, I am thrilled about the news and can’t wait to roll up our sleeves and get to work together with our new colleagues!
Read the press release to learn more
Spreadsheet risk: the silent killer of FX performance
07-09-2021 | treasuryXL | Kantox
Imagine a perfectly designed currency hedging program for a company that seeks to protect its annual budget. Given the specific features of that company —especially its pricing dynamics— such a program would allow the finance team to systematically achieve a hedge rate that would be equal or better than the FX budget rate, avoiding overhedging all the while. The hedging strategy would also consider the firm’s degree of forecast accuracy, as well as the forward discount or premium of the currencies in which it trades.
Now imagine that this optimal FX hedging program was implemented on perfectly designed spreadsheets. Armed with super-efficient spreadsheets, the finance team would project forecasted revenues and expenditures, calculate the firm’s exposure to currency risk and set a time frame for the execution of hedges.
A treasurer’s dream come true? Not so fast.
Any reasonably well-designed currency hedging program goes through a process in three phases: the pre-trade phase, the trade phase and the post-trade phase. Each of these phases, in turn, comprises several intricate steps. And here’s where a wholly unexpected risk would sneak in, with potentially devastating consequences: spreadsheet risk, the silent killer of performance.
Spreadsheet risk is omnipresent
Spreadsheet risk comprises a series of errors stemming mostly from the requirement of data to be manually inputted into each cell. Manual management not only takes up much of the financial team’s resources and time — it makes human error inevitable. The most commonly observed errors and risks comprise:
Despite all the efforts in spreadsheet risk management, the problem is not going away. In fact, more risk is being created as economies grow and businesses become more complex. The truth is that spreadsheets were originally designed for small pockets of data. They were never designed to handle large amounts of data in an interconnected environment.
Experts know well that the world’s most famous business spreadsheet saw the light of day before the World Wide Web and the internet browser — that is, before the explosion of interconnectedness. And interconnectedness lies at the heart of modern FX hedging programs.
Spreadsheets traveling back and forth
The most prosaic element of a FX program is the seemingly innocuous process of sourcing currency rates for multi-currency pricing purposes. Quite apart from the fact that many firms undertake it with irrelevant time-based criteria, the reality is that, once currency rates are sourced —for example, from the European Central Bank’s website— the commercial team receives the information on a spreadsheet.
Next, the FX exposure needs to be collected and processed. Budgeting, as we know, is a process that involves commercial and production teams, purchasing managers, economists, human resources departments and treasury teams. In other words: the cornerstone of the hedging program is the result of dozens, or more likely, hundreds of spreadsheets traveling back and forth across the enterprise. At this point, spreadsheets risk is only in its initial stages.
Depending on the forward discount/premium of the currencies involved, conditional FX orders are set. The information must be provided by the relevant commercial teams/purchasing managers — on a spreadsheet. Then the trade phase kicks in. If manually executed, several processes take place: approval request, first review, second review, final approval. Yet more spreadsheets are transferred in the process.
And what about the FX payments and collections process? And the FX accounting and performance analytics stages? You guessed it: critically important information is subject, once more, to data input errors, copy & paste errors, formula errors and formatting errors. These are the ingredients of a potentially nightmarish scenario. Even for the best-designed currency hedging programs. And even for programs implemented on brilliantly designed spreadsheets.
FX Automation: taming spreadsheet risk
In an increasingly interconnected world with more complex business models, spreadsheet risk can be a silent killer of performance. Business managers face enough risks in the day-to-day management of their operations, and treasurers in particular have enough on their plates to worry about the spreadsheet risk in their FX hedging programs.
It’s high time they work to better manage this risk. Here, Currency Management Automation is your company’s best antidote. These software solutions use Application Programming Interfaces to ensure that data can flow seamlessly between different systems (ERP, TMS) and software without any need for spreadsheets.
The time to act is now.
Strategic Treasurer’s Analyst Report Series: Treasury and Risk Management Systems
06-09-2021 | treasuryXL | Kyriba |
This document contains a comprehensive illustration of the current state of treasury technology and the exciting future direction using new tools that are already with us. This FinTech analyst report from Strategic Treasurer takes a look at the current health of the TMS space and what benefits can come from implementing a treasury management system in your operations. Additionally, this report covers emerging technologies within treasury, such as the use of robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and more.
Understand the current TMS space and its benefits
The Treasury and Risk Management Systems Analyst Report offers a thorough evaluation of the TMS space by covering the emerging uses of AI/ML (artificial intelligence and machine learning), RPA (robotic process automation), and API (application programming interface) technologies in treasury.
It also discusses:
Download it now!