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BCR has long been a beacon of innovation and excellence in the realm of receivables finance, playing an instrumental role in shaping the industry’s international landscape. Through its comprehensive conferences, insightful publications, and thought leadership, BCR has facilitated crucial dialogues and connections among industry professionals, driving forward the development of receivables finance globally.
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When Dealing with Foreign Exchange, Don’t Forget About Compliance
12-11-2020 | treasuryXL | XE |
What’s the most common problem in foreign exchange? It may not be glamorous, but one of the most common problems is regulatory delay—and it can have a major impact on your supply chain, cash flow, and relationships with suppliers and customers.
In the previous installments of our blog series on foreign exchange risk management, we’ve discussed several of the most common (and costly) mistakes that businesses make when making international payments and dealing with foreign currencies. Today, we want to take a closer look at regulatory compliance: what it is, what you need to do to be compliant, and what can happen to your business if you don’t take the necessary steps.
What do you need to know?
Financial institutions and other FX providers must comply with strict regulations while conducting foreign exchange transactions on behalf of their customers. Under know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) rules, they are required to verify the identities of all the parties they deal with, including the foreign parties with which your business may have contact. Additionally, there are overseas banking details to consider. While bank identifiers in the UK, for example, are standardised around account numbers and sort codes, the equivalents vary from country to country internationally. Depending on where you’re doing business, you may need to deal with data such as international bank account numbers (IBANs) and bank identifier codes (BICs).
The bottom line: your foreign exchange providers will legally require certain information so that they can transact on your behalf, and your business will need robust processes in place to generate said information and ensure that there aren’t any delays in business.
What happens if you don’t have the right policies in place?
Regulatory delay is one of the most common (and expensive) FX problems for businesses. If your business doesn’t know what it needs to do to be compliant and have policies and procedures in place to ensure that all business is up to regulatory standards, then you could see consequences. What’s the most likely outcome? Your payments won’t go through on time. Consider how that could impact your business, your cash flow, your supply chain, and your relationships.
What can an FX provider do?
If you’re not well-versed in everything you have to do to remain compliant while conducting business as usual, a specialist FX provider is the way to go. An FX provider can help you handle the various regulatory requirements and remain compliant in every country that you do business with.
For example, do you have online systems in place to automate data entry and quickly identify mistakes or missing information that may get in the way of your payments being made on time? Does your provider offer simple, easy-to-understand advice on the information you require from foreign counterparties and where to find it? Can you store payment details so you don’t have to keep re-entering them each time a transaction is due (and potentially leave room for human error)?
You don’t need to be an expert on regulatory compliance. However, if your business engages in any degree of foreign exchange, then you will need to pay special attention to regulatory compliance. If you don’t currently have the knowledge or resources to take care of compliance on your own, an FX provider is the way to go to ensure that your business won’t be disrupted by regulatory delay.
Get in touch with XE.com
About XE.com
XE can help safeguard your profit margins and improve cashflow through quantifying the FX risk you face and implementing unique strategies to mitigate it. XE Business Solutions provides a comprehensive range of currency services and products to help businesses access competitive rates with greater control.
Deciding when to make an international payment and at what rate can be critical. XE Business Solutions work with businesses to protect bottom-line from exchange rate fluctuations, while the currency experts and risk management specialists act as eyes and ears in the market to protect your profits from the world’s volatile currency markets.
Your company money is safe with XE, their NASDAQ listed parent company, Euronet Worldwide Inc., has a multi billion-dollar market capitalization, and an investment grade credit rating. With offices in the UK, Canada, Europe, APAC and North America they have a truly global coverage.
Are you curious to know more about XE?
Maurits Houthoff, senior business development manager at XE.com, is always in for a cup of coffee, mail or call to provide you detailed information.
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Miltenyi Biotec standardizes corporate payments and bank management with new payments platform
| 10-11-2020 | TIS |
Globally operating biotech company consolidates its banking landscape and creates more transparency and security in finance and international payments with TIS (Treasury Intelligence Solutions).
Walldorf, November 10, 2020. Miltenyi Biotec, headquartered in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, has selected the TIS payments platform to manage all its bank accounts, bank statements, payments and conduct detailed financial analyses. The decision for TIS was made after thorough market observation. Its usability, high security standards, and effective SAP integration clearly stood out.
Miltenyi Biotec has grown steadily in recent years, especially in international markets. The company was founded in 1989 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, and specializes in products and processes for cellular research and cell therapy applications. Today, it has more than 3,000 employees worldwide, with 700 employees in research and clinical development. Miltenyi Biotec distributes its products through direct sales in 28 countries. The company’s ongoing growth, increasing number of affiliates, banking partners and accounts led to a need to standardize the company’s finance processes and to make them more efficient.
Besides accounts and payments consolidation, the company also wanted to make its payment processes more professional. In Germany, payment processes were structured with the Treasury Management System. Internationally, however, subsidiaries and affiliates used SAP and other ERP systems for payments and connected to banks via different online banking tools.
Daniel Pier, Group Leader Treasury at Miltenyi Biotec: “For our renewed banking landscape we looked for a centralized payments platform to make international payments more transparent and secure. With TIS, we can automate and standardize payments and monitor the processes from group treasury whenever necessary. For us, the core value of this solution is to enable us to follow closely the company-wide liquidity status at the push of a button.”
Jörg Wiemer, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at TIS: “For fast growing companies, it is especially important to manage resources efficiently and meanwhile also ensure security and transparency in corporate payments and liquidity management. With its effective SAP integration and extensive bank connectivity, TIS offers powerful benefits to its customers. We are happy to welcome Miltenyi Biotec, a leading innovator in biomedical research and cellular therapy, to the TIS community.”
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 and 2020. Offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the TIS solution is a comprehensive, highly-scalable, cloud platform for company-wide payments and cash management. 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.
Your world of Payments. ONE Login.
https://www.tis.biz
Press contact
Treasury Intelligence Solutions GmbH
Liang Fang
Altrottstrasse 31
69190 Walldorf
Germany
If you want to know more about TIS, visit www.tis.biz
Read the complete press release also here
Partner Interview Nomentia | Best-of-breed cash & treasury management solutions
10-11-2020 | treasuryXL | Nomentia |
It has been a crazy year for OpusCapita with a lot of positive changes. OpusCapita recently joined forces with Analyste and merged into Nomentia.
Nomentia is a Nordic powerhouse for global cash management. By believing in a world in which businesses can make the right decisions no matter how unpredictable the times are, their SaaS-based platform offers solutions for cash forecasting & visibility, global payments with bank connectivity, reconciliation, in-house banking, guarantees, and FX dealing. Nomentia currently serves 2,300+ clients in over 100 countries processing more than 200 billion euros annually.
AN INTRODUCTION TO…
Meet Jukka Sallinen , Deputy CEO at Nomentia.
Jukka is a cash management domain expert with a strong hands-on background from international and complex payment factory and SWIFT projects. Previously Jukka had been working in various R&D roles, focusing on bank and ERP integrations and security topics.
” We are the bridge between finance and treasury ”
We asked him 9 questions. Let’s go!
INTERVIEW
1. Nomentia, what is the core business and what is its mission??
Our vision is to create solutions that make the life of modern CFO’s and Treasurers easier. We provide best-of-breed cash and treasury solutions that are the bridge between Finance and Treasury. Best-of-breed means that we focus on challenges that matter for modern CFO’s and treasurers to stay ahead of the curve and help their business to prosper.
We solve the challenges that professionals face in their daily work:
End-to-end & total visibility of cash flows is ever important. By visibility we of course mean visibility to cash flows, bank accounts, payments and future cash flows. But today, visibility is also more and more a risk & compliance related challenge. To whom I am going to pay? How do I mitigate the risk of fraud? Another visibility challenge is the whole topic of working capital where cash & liquidity forecasting & analytics solutions will play a role.
While visibility could be classified as internal challenge an example of external challenge Treasurers are facing is financial crime which is globally a trillion-dollar industry. Payment fraud and cybercrime faced by corporates remains significant and growing problem. To fight back corporates are mitigating these risks by harmonizing bank connectivity & payments into a centralized payment hub.
Finally, finance organizations seeking for return of investments from their Treasury or Finance solutions typically look increasing automation and efficiency in financial processes. Automating & harmonizing bank statement processing and accounts receivable reconciliation (automatic matching) holds typically largest savings potential.
By focusing on these challenges that matter to modern CFO and Treasurers, Nomentia is different. Monolithic finance and treasury systems are not quick and flexible enough to face the challenges of today and thus remain largely un-used.
2. OpusCapita recently formed a new company together with Analyste. What was the main reason for this?
There is a growing need for choosing best-of-breed cloud solutions to solve particular business challenges today’s organizations are facing, which cannot be addressed by traditional monolithic tools. And treasury and finance organizations are no different. We are in a journey to create a leading cloud native cash management company as one.
3. What constitutes this Nordic powerhouse?
We took the best practices of both companies and combined them into one integrated solution for Finance and Treasury professionals. Nowadays, companies need multiple tools and systems. Is anyone convinced that the trend would go backwards? I mean look at your mobile phone. More apps keep coming and we as consumers add more. As business consumers we don’t want to be different, right?
A modern company needs a sales and customer relationship management, marketing automation tools, billing systems, project management tools, HR systems and various business solutions – and Finance & Treasury are no different. Often at some point we fall into the trap of looking for one platform to solve all challenges. But there never will be one, because we cannot possibly know everything a platform needs to solve to adapt in changing business environment. You end up using only small fraction of such monolithic platform with a very high price tag or building very customized solutions.
4.You talk about best-of-breed, what does it mean and what is the customer benefit?
Now, what does this mean for treasury and cash? A one-for-all solution would be a single solution to solve all your finance & treasury & cash management issues. That at least used to be sort of IT’s dream come true. One can clearly see benefits such as having less systems to integrate or less business partners to deal with. Also, commonly heard argument is to claim you would have “all the data at your hand in one place” which often shrinks into a mere sales argument.
While choosing best-of-breed companies can build network of integrated products and solutions. Benefits are often ones like paying and implementing only what you really need, much quicker implementation time and thus quick payback time, more standard features and no customization and vendor locking. Even the integration – a classical tarpit in IT projects – is often surprisingly simple because best of breed providers works very well together
Treasury or Finance is not an island. It is not the treasury that really is changing but the world around it. How companies are purchasing goods, sales are becoming digital, buying journey shifting to marketplaces and technology and software connecting everyone and concerning almost any business will sure keep changing the work that needs to be done by Treasury and Finance teams. Our claim is that networks and best-of-breed is more adapted to change.
5. How does the customer journey look like from start till end? And how long does a project take?
This really depends on the customers and their needs and how their internal processes look as well. We adjust to our customers’ needs.
6. Can you give us an outlook on the product developments that are scheduled?
The most important achievement is that we’ve now released our first versions from next generation Nomentia products that are based on a modern cloud architecture. We have been working on for the last four to five years to come up with the next generation – which is by the way already fifth generation if we look how our products have evolved from 80’s. Our customers should expect a whole new user experience from all our applications as many modules have not only got a completely new front end in HTML5 but a backend and business logic as well.
One of the new developments our customers should be looking carefully is that we are bringing better productized analytics capabilities to our next generation product as we speak. With analytics capabilities we mean payment behavior analytics and statistics, performance analysis and working capital related key performance indicators.
7. What has been your best experience in your career at OpusCapita, now Nomentia?
Next spring shall mark me already fifteen years in the company. Both OpusCapita and Analyste had gone such an exciting journey first as an independent company and then as part of larger enterprises, and finally again independent but together. It’s hard for me to rank all the memories I’ve collected with such a fantastic team and individuals that have participated into this journey. However, I still do remember with warmth some of the early development projects that helped us to become more international, such as joining to SWIFT Lite 2 program as global early adopters in 2013. And of course, winning the hearts of first global customers for the new service back then.
I’ve always got inspiration from challenging projects, working with new technology, and working to productize something that no one has done before. I feel that our employees at Nomentia are in a privileged position, since we work with such an exciting customer base and deliver software for so critical processes.
8. What has been the biggest success story of OpusCapita, now Nomentia, so far?
Although both Analyste and OpusCapita have their roots in early 80’s we’re truly living the moments of biggest success right now. The company has never been filled with such a talented people, have such great solutions, and finally a market position to grow and create a European (or rather global) Fintech success story.
9. The year is 2025, what have been the OpusCapita/Nomentia successes over the last years?
The world of CFO and Treasurer is changing probably faster than never. Our five-year plan is obviously to grow significantly, which means double-digit revenue growth year-on-year. Much of our growth comes from international markets where I would expect us to cement our positions in several new markets as a viable and market leading choice of a modern CFO.
We will be significantly larger and stronger European Fintech company than we are today. When it comes to successes, I believe it is all about the journey rather than single events. We must work hard every day to win our customers hearts, and to have an atmosphere where employees find it exciting to wake up every Monday and be a part of our success story. Work hard, learn something new every day, and do it with a smile, and the journey will reward you.