Treasury Technology
Published  4 MIN READ

Leveraging Technology to Climb Treasury Mountains

Gaining global insight into and control over treasury operations is a pipe dream for many treasurers. But two of Kyriba’s clients – Royal FrieslandCampina and Ingersoll Rand – have leveraged the vendor’s cloud offering to transform their workflows to overcome visibility hurdles, eradicate inefficiencies and become even better strategic partners to the business. Each won a 2019 TMI Corporate Recognition Award for their hard work.

Five years ago, the corporate treasury team at Royal FrieslandCampina initiated a journey from corporate policymaker to strategic corporate treasury department – with a centralised operations team as part of the new set-up. The aim was to gain global insight into, and control over, the company’s cash, as well as supporting the basic treasury functions in the shared service centres.

The first step was the implementation of a centralised payment hub that supported the standardisation of the global payments processes. A dedicated treasury operations team was also created to include a treasury project manager and treasury systems manager. In addition, a dedicated treasury-owned IT strategy was introduced, setting clear guidelines for the selection of new systems. Choosing cloud solutions was particularly important in future-proofing the treasury operations, in order to reduce overall dependence on internal IT, and always have an up-to-date version in order to improve speed of decision-making.

This set-up kick-started acceleration towards an optimal global payments and collections process that would become more time and cost efficient and less error-prone using an efficient and lean IT infrastructure. Project Everest, as it was named, was born in 2017 to realise these objectives. After careful consultation by the main stakeholders, the project plan was mapped out with four camps to reach the summit: