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This is why corporate treasury is great – The laymen introduction to corporate treasury
| 09-01-2018 | Pieter de Kiewit |
All organisations, even the small ones, can benefit from good treasury. Only the bigger ones hired permanent experts. The main three areas, perhaps oversimplified, they focus on are:
This does not sound sexy, does it? But do understand that during the crisis treasurers found solutions for companies how to survive. They found funding to pay salaries, helped sales finding creative funding solutions to make complex transactions achievable, helped prevent companies going belly-up due to currency exposures, forced banks to offer better solutions at a more acceptable price.
Treasurers manage huge amounts of money and operate very close to the CFO. They are involved in mergers & acquisitions, reorganisations and international expansion. They act in small numbers but have huge impact if they would stop doing their work. And the job type evolves continuously. Creating new treasury bridges to traditional job types like accounting, tax, sales helps all doing a better job. The academic world is showing increasing interest. In the Netherlands the post graduate education at the Vrije Universiteit is becoming more prominent in the treasury community. Corporate treasury is very dynamic!
What I love doing is helping CFO’s, HR, internal recruitment and senior treasury managers with their staffing questions. What qualifications and personality type matches best with your current and future business situation. If you only hire one treasurer per year, what do you need to know to choose the best candidate? I hope now you can understand my passion for creating bridges in treasury and recruitment.
I look forward to your thoughts to the above and further contact,
Pieter de Kiewit
[email protected] / +31 6 1111 9783
Pieter de Kiewit
Owner Treasurer Search
Bitcoin – hype or reality?
| 08-01-2018 | Lionel Pavey |
Here is a technology that has recently been created – started in 2009 – that has caused a huge debate and led to passionate arguments on its merits or demerits. Those in the know understand its concept – the rest are baffled by its very existence. At essence it is a digital currency – there are no coins or notes in existence. It is decentralized – there are no governments controlling it. If you own it, your identity is anonymous to others – transactions take place via encryption keys. The supply is limited – protocol dictates that a maximum of 21 million Bitcoins can be produced. At the end of 2017 there were 16,774,500 coins in circulation – roughly 80% of the maximum allowed. So, the supply is clearly limited, but they have no real intrinsic value – they do not represent a claim on an asset.
My main area of interest has been on the price – the rise in 2017 of more than 1,400% is astounding. I decided to collate some information and have a chart showing Bitcoins price of the last 2 years.
Well……. here is another chart
There appears to be a “strategy” of buying Bitcoin to hoard them. There does not appear to be a sizeable free float of Bitcoin. If there is more demand than supply, then obviously the price will increase dramatically. Bitcoin is touted as an alternative currency, yet the advocates do not seem to want to spread it around with everybody else. It is a currency that is not used to settle transactions – this makes it difficult to consider Bitcoin becoming a recognized mechanism for payments. One of the criteria of money is that it is a “medium of exchange” – yet again Bitcoin, which appears to be hoarded, does not meet the criteria.
How can a cryptocurrency replace a conventional fiat currency if it is not freely tradeable? Furthermore, if you hold Bitcoin and want to take your profit, then this will be realized in a fiat currency. As Bitcoin is generally quoted and traded in $, this means receiving your profit in an antiquated currency that your cryptocurrency wishes to replace – ironic?
The underlying technology – Blockchain – is here to stay. As to whether Bitcoin is here to stay – if people hoard Bitcoin, it will exist. What the value of Bitcoin should be – whatever someone is prepared to pay for it. Will it replace fiat currency – maybe one day, but not in its present Bitcoin form.
Lionel Pavey
Cash Management and Treasury Specialist
Forward Rate Agreement (FRA)
| 05-01-2018| Arnoud Doornbos |
At the press conference on 14 December 2017, the ECB announced that expectations for economic growth and inflation have been adjusted upwards. But despite optimistic growth, the ECB is not yet fully convinced of a continued upward trend in domestic price pressures. And thus Draghi: “An ample degree of monetary stimulus … is necessary for underlying inflation pressures to continue to build up.”
For this reason, the ECB will maintain the buying program at least until September 2018. And only then will an increase in policy rates come into the picture. Since the beginning of 2017, investors have seen the chance that the ECB will implement an increase in policy interest rates. This has not yet had an effect on the three-month Euribor rate. This has been stable at around -0.3% for the whole of 2017, and we expect that this will be the case in the vast majority of 2018 as well.
But markets will go up again for sure during time and borrowers need to prepare themselves for that moment. A good interest rate risk management can help to extent the pleasure of using favorable low interest rates for your company. Hedging your short term interest rate exposure with FRA’s could be a good idea. Good timing is essential.
Definition
A Forward Rate Agreement’s (FRA’s) effective description is a cash for difference derivative contract, between two parties, benchmarked against an interest rate index. That index is commonly an interbank offered rate (-IBOR) of specific tenor in different currencies, for example LIBOR in USD, GBP, EURIBOR in EUR or STIBOR in SEK. A FRA between two counterparties requires a fixed rate, notional amount, chosen interest rate index tenor and date to be completely specified.
FRAs are not loans, and do not constitute agreements to loan any amount of money on an unsecured basis to another party at any pre-agreed rate. Their nature as a IRD product creates only the effect of leverage and the ability to speculate, or hedge, interest rate risk exposure.
How it works
Many banks and large corporations will use FRAs to hedge future interest or exchange rate exposure. The buyer hedges against the risk of rising interest rates, while the seller hedges against the risk of falling interest rates. Other parties that use Forward Rate Agreements are speculators purely looking to make bets on future directional changes in interest rates.
In other words, a forward rate agreement (FRA) is a tailor-made, over-the-counter financial futures contract on short-term deposits. A FRA transaction is a contract between two parties to exchange payments on a deposit, called the Notional amount, to be determined on the basis of a short-term interest rate, referred to as the Reference rate, over a predetermined time period at a future date.
At maturity, no funds exchange hands; rather, the difference between the contracted interest rate and the market rate is exchanged. The buyer of the contract is paid if the published reference rate is above the fixed, contracted rate, and the buyer pays to the seller if the published reference rate is below the fixed, contracted rate. A company that seeks to hedge against a possible increase in interest rates would purchase FRAs, whereas a company that seeks an interest hedge against a possible decline of the rates would sell FRAs.
Valuation and Pricing
The cash for difference value on a FRA, exchanged between the two parties, calculated from the perspective of having sold a FRA (which imitates receiving the fixed rate) is calculated as:
For USD and EUR this follows an ACT/360 convention and GBP follows an ACT/365 convention. The cash amount is paid on the value start date applicable to the interest rate index (depending in which currency the FRA is traded, this is either immediately after or within two business days of the published -IBOR fixing rate).
For mark-to-market (MTM) purposes the net present value (PV) of an FRA can be determined by discounting the expected cash difference, for a forecast value r:
Quotation and Market-Making
FRA Descriptive Notation and Interpretation
How to interpret a quote for FRA?
[EUR 3×6 -0.321 / -0.301%p.a ] – means deposit interest starting 3 months from now for 3 month is -0.321% and borrowing interest rate starting 3 months from now for 3 month is -0.301%. Entering a “payer FRA” means paying the fixed rate (-0.321% p.a.) and receiving a floating 3-month rate, while entering a “receiver FRA” means paying the same floating rate and receiving a fixed rate (-0.321% p.a.).
Due to the current negative Money Market rates means receiving actually paying and the other way around.
Arnoud Doornbos
Interim Treasury & Finance