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ARTICLES

Round Table “Payment Challenges in a Post-Covid World” | Toekomst Betalingsverkeer

18-8-2021 | François de Witte | treasuryXL |

On September 9, 2021, the event “Toekomst Betalingsverkeer” will take place in Amsterdam. This annual event on the Future of Payments has been the meeting place for 20 years.

With upcoming edition following topics will amongst others be covered:

The Fintech evolution of banking.
Platform strategies & developments big tech.
Customer experience strategies.
Open banking.
Instant payments.

Close to 30 experts will share their views on the various developments and challenges in the payment world.

Round Table Sessions

I will be hosting two round table sessions on “Payment Challenges in a Post-Covid World”.

The Covid19 crisis had a huge impact on the payment landscape. We have seen interesting developments such as:

A large growth of e-commerce transactions.
An increased use of contactless payments.
A Surge in marketplaces and the increased importance of the platform strategy.
The payment experience is more critical than ever.
The increased use of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and Central bank digital currencies (CBDC).
The increasing Demand for Mobile Point of Sale.
Online payments increasing in importance, replacing partially card-based payments;

TOPICS

During the round table, we will make a deep dive on the following 3 topics:

Instant Payments – the new “normal” ?
Request to Pay: the bridge between customer convenience and reconciliation?
Digital currencies for a digital future ?

I will not tell more about this, but hope to meet you there.

For more information and program overview, click here

François de Witte

How to Start Avoiding Payment Fraud from Happening

| 18-08-2021 | treasuryXL | Nomentia |

It’s 2021 and even with advancing technologies and AI detecting fraudulent behavior, payment fraud remains an ever-present Risk for any company.

The other day we met with someone who has recently been a target of Payment Fraud and is now implementing a payment factory in order to reduce the risk. We wanted to take a look at how we approach the subject with our solution. Having the right software in place is important, sure but it goes beyond technology.

Let’s start with the Software, Nomentia’s Cash Management solution has several mechanisms in place that protect you against fraud.

Here’s a Quick list

First of all, our software creates a single point of managing all payments. We talk a lot about centralizing, and this is just that. Our product brings all these payments into a single view. If we think of a typical case, a company might upload some payments to internet banks, some to a service bureau, use host-to-host connections for others and maybe even run some payments via SWIFT. That creates at least 5 times X channels where payments are executed. This means all payments can’t be seen from one view, which already makes it impossible to detect fraudulent or suspicious payments. But in addition, those 5 times X channels also mean 5 times X places where user rights need to be maintained and controlled.
This brings us also to the second point; our software comes with a comprehensive user and user rights management. Our software creates a clear structure and visibility as to who has rights to which companies and accounts and what kind of user roles they are having. We create visibility and an easy way to maintain those rights.
When payments are transferred from one source system such as ERP, payroll and the likes to our cloud, files cannot be altered. This creates additional security measures that protect companies from attacks.
Lastly, we have created capabilities to set up straight forward approval flows that ensure a segregation of duty into the way payments are done, within the users’ approval limit. Approval limits can be set for each user when working in different roles for multiple companies.

Those are the things that come built into our software. But it’s important to highlight one key fact, most fraud attempts have a human factor and that’s why it’s important to look beyond the software and take a critical look at the processes. As a matter of fact, despite all the noise about external risks, fraud and theft are more likely to be committed by an internal actor than an external actor (Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center).

In other words, if you focus on validating data for possible fraud, you probably should take steps to minimize the possibility of fraud in the first place. Otherwise, proverbially speaking, it’s winter (Northern Finland winter for that matter) and you are going out in shorts and with wet hair.

Apart from controlling user access rights, we would like to share some more tips and ideas that can help to mitigate the risk of fraud.

Payments that are made from ERP but rejected by the bank cannot be modified by all users. In practice this means when a payment is made from the ERP system but rejected by the bank, it bounces back where users need to review the failed payment, before sending it to the bank. Fixing the payment data on ERP master data instead of manual adjustments. This would highlight and prevent for example internal fraud attempts.
Consider working with your system admins to install payment templates that your end users can use. This decreases the risk for fraud and error by limiting the manual work of filling in information.
Make use of the full audit trail that we provide. You can see the whole lifecycle of a payment from its creation to its reconciliation, including by whom and which changes were made, who has approved and sent the payment.
Create clear rules on manual payment creation. We enforce a 4-eye approval flow before sending it. In manual payments, there might be a reason to have more than 2 persons approval. If you are having SSC’s in use or even multiple SSC globally. Use the standard 4-eye approval flow locally but have additional approval from another SSC to reduce the internal actor.

These are a few ideas from our side. We are always happy to hear more ideas and feedback on how we can together create safe payment processes.

DOWNLOAD PAYMENT FRAUD E-BOOK

The real value of Multi-Dealer FX trading platforms

16-08-2021 | treasuryXL | Kantox

(Spoiler: it’s not about trading costs)

A few years ago, PwC consultants proposed a clever analogy to illustrate the difference between single-dealer platforms (SDPs) and Multi-Dealer Platforms (MDPs). For banks looking to provide products and services to corporate clients on a platform, SDPs are like an airline’s website, where high-margin sales occur. Multi-Dealer Platforms, in turn, are the equivalent of online aggregators that let customers compare fares and schedules. While the former emphasizes customer relationship intimacy, the latter work as “transactional supermarkets” with a higher degree of automation.

When it comes to the corporate FX market, where spot and forward transactions take the lion’s share in terms of traded volumes, Multi-Dealer Platforms like 360T and SWAPs have been the venue of choice. The shared technology of Multi-Dealer Platforms has enabled them to better adapt to changing customers’ needs than the proprietary technology of most Single-Dealer Platforms. As a result, corporate treasurers have moved en masse to Multi-Dealer Platforms to improve FX trading processes and reduce spreads. As Kantox’s CEO Philippe Gelis argues, the success of Multi-Dealer Platforms has resulted in a spectacular “compression of FX spreads for vanilla products”.

Beyond trading costs: the value proposition of Multi-Dealer Platforms

Lower FX trading costs, the natural result of the Multi-dealer platform proposition, play an important role by facilitating the participation of firms who see a benefit in ‘embracing currencies’ to access new markets and grow their business. But the fixation with lower spreads is unwarranted. Going forward, treasurers will care less about paying 9 bps instead of 10 bps, if a 2% move in the exchange rate can be easily and efficiently handled by an automated hedging program.

To see where the real value of Multi-Dealer Platforms lies, let us start by briefly looking at the three phases of the FX hedging workflow: pre-trade, trade and post-trade.

The pre-trade phase involves sourcing exchange rates for the purpose of pricing as well as capturing and processing the relevant exposure. Once the FX trade is executed and confirmed, the post-trade phase kicks in with reporting and performance analytics as well as accounting and payments and collections.

In this increasingly automated series of steps, MDPs play a key role. Kantox’ partnership with 360T, for example, provides straight-through processing integration for corporates of all sizes to tailor their Multi-Dealer Platform setup to execution and routing rules of their own making. The range of functionalities includes:

Trading in spot, forwards, NDFs and swaps with hundreds of liquidity providers
Automated trade and data requests via API
Transparent pricing with greater efficiency in sourcing
Diversification in order to lower counterparty risk
Ability to select preferred liquidity providers
Complete trade history and audit trail
24/6 execution capabilities
‘Best price execution’ functionality that puts liquidity providers in competition with one another
Conditional orders setup with order management tools
Automated trade confirmation by API or email

What emerges from this picture is clear: the ‘trade phase’ of the FX corporate workflow is being automated at lightning speed. The reduction in spreads, while important, only tells part of the story. The real value proposition of a Multi-Dealer Platform lies elsewhere: they are an integral part of the seamless, end-to-end management of corporate currency workflows that Currency Management Automation solutions provide.

This process of automation comes with an added bonus: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) ensure that data can flow seamlessly between different systems (ERP, TMS) without any need for spreadsheets, reducing spreadsheet risk and freeing up valuable treasury resources.

When viewed in this broader dimension, as part of a larger process that includes all the phases of an automated FX hedging program, Multi-Dealer Platforms are part of an ecosystem that allows companies to benefit not only from automating, one by one, the different phases of a hedging program but to have all these processes integrated with one another, thus creating more value than the sum of the parts.

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