A Brighter Future for Treasury Automation and Visibility

Published: September 29, 2014

A Brighter Future for Treasury Automation and Visibility

by Amanda Pilipovic, Assistant Corporate Treasurer, Brightstar Corporation

Brightstar’s treasury team is centrally based in Miami, Florida and has overall group treasury responsibility in addition to supporting regional treasury requirements for North America. Outside North America, treasury is largely decentralised, with treasury managers operating in most major markets. Until recently, the team in Miami was relatively small, comprising seven or eight treasury professionals. Over recent months, we have expanded the team to around 20 people to support Brightstar’s growth trajectory. That growth came in part from restructuring an existing finance group directly into Treasury, as well as creating new roles and functions that did not previously exist. As part of our new treasury organisation, we have a strategic focus on global debt and liquidity, operational excellence, and strategy and planning. Consequently, having expanded the team and developed our treasury strategy, we needed to ensure our technology infrastructure would meet our current and future needs.

Technology infrastructure and challenges

Having evolved from a largely decentralised organisation, we had a variety of treasury systems in place. Although we had a treasury management system (TMS) in use, it was not fully deployed, and was supported by a combination of ancillary systems, and manual processes. With more than 90 banking relationships worldwide, we also had a wide variety of different banking solutions in place that added further to the complexity of our infrastructure.

We recognised that the scale and complexity of our treasury operations was increasing, so we needed a treasury technology infrastructure that would support our changing needs and enable economies of scale. We were looking to overcome a variety of challenges. Firstly, we needed to ensure that we had the functionality in place to meet our evolving treasury management needs including core cash management, debt portfolio management, and treasury accounting. Secondly, with a number of different ERP and treasury systems in place, the overall solution needed to support the efficient flow of data between systems, particularly as our integration needs are likely to become more complex in the future. Finally, we were looking to achieve greater visibility over information to allow us to perform more sophisticated analytics and aid faster decision-making at leadership levels. A key treasury responsibility is stewardship of Brightstar’s financial assets and timely, accurate and complete visibility of data is essential to fulfil this responsibility.

As a business, our most important priority is to support the needs of our customers, so we first considered what needed to be done to achieve this. We were fortunate in the timing of our project in that we launched a global initiative in 2013 to roll out a single ERP across the business, as well as implement a shared services model to support customer needs more effectively. Consequently, we were able to leverage this project’s infrastructure and timeline and link in our treasury connectivity, integration and functionality requirements as part of the wider finance transformation.[[[PAGE]]]

Steps towards an efficient technology infrastructure

There were various aspects to our technology infrastructure project plan. Firstly, we reviewed our existing TMS. We had started using the system, which is provided by SunGard, only a few years ago. At that time, our requirements were relatively straightforward so we had not implemented the full range of functionality offered. We realised that we did not need to replace the system, but rather we needed to make fuller use of its functionality. Having done this, we were in a better position to see how to address our remaining requirements.

The second step was to consider the exchange of data between our in-house systems, and in particular, how the TMS would be integrated with the go-forward ERP system(s). It would have been unmanageable to achieve the degree of integration that we were seeking across the range of ERPs that we had in place initially, but with the project to move to a common ERP platform over time, our plan is to implement two-way integration between the TMS and ERP in due course.

The third project step was bank connectivity. We looked at our global banking footprint which comprises a large number of banks and more than 500 accounts. Historically, we have used host-to-host connectivity in some cases and web-based electronic banking channels in others. We were seeking to streamline our bank connectivity channels to achieve comparable levels of efficiency and security as host-to-host communication for dealing with large volumes of data, together with greater flexibility and scalability for the future.

We developed a template to compare different connectivity options against our criteria. These included scalability, resource requirement, security, cost and flexibility. Ultimately, based on the criteria we had determined, we decided to implement SWIFT. We recognised that SWIFT offered the combination of multi-bank connectivity, scalability, security and flexibility that we were seeking, and could be integrated closely with our internal systems. SWIFT would enable us to connect to all of our banks securely, with the ability to add or change banking partners in the future without the need to implement new systems or interfaces. The SWIFT solution is based on industry-standard formats that support our overall integration objectives. There were a variety of related considerations, such as whether to use AllianceLite2, SWIFT’s cloud-based connectivity option, which had the advantage that we would need little internal resource; however, we would lose some control and flexibility in the way that we managed our connectivity.

Implementation in progress

We have now finalised our infrastructure design template and embarked on our SWIFT implementation, which will have a phased approach to align with the ERP roll-out. We started with an initial workshop involving all of the key project participants and stakeholders. The first project phase includes connectivity with 10 global banks that represent the majority of cash balances globally, and the preferred disbursements banks in the US and Latin America. This will provide visibility to more than 90% of global cash and capture approximately 70% of our current transaction volume. As a second phase, we will then expand into other regions with additional strategic banks, which will increase visibility and transaction volumes through SWIFT to 99% and 90% respectively. We are connecting our SWIFT hub (which we are managing directly) to both our TMS and ERP to support our treasury and commercial accounts and flows, including both in- and outbound information using XML ISO 20022 standards.

We have tried to anticipate potential challenges. For example, it is important that we constantly co-ordinate the project with the ERP project. We have worked closely with the ERP project team and devised our project schedule to ensure project alignment and we will continue to maintain a regular dialogue. We have appointed dedicated resources to the treasury project which means that we can be responsive and adaptable to changes when necessary.[[[PAGE]]]

Delivery milestones

October 2014 marks the targeted launch of our ERP roll-out. Soon afterwards, by the end of 2014, we anticipate going live on the additional functionality in our TMS and leveraging our new connectivity framework. We are working closely with SunGard and SWIFT and the project would be impossible without their support and expertise. In a fast-paced industry in which treasury needs to be responsive and adaptable, the project plays an important role in equipping our treasury team with the tools they need to support our long-term business strategy and navigate change and complexity.

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Article Last Updated: May 07, 2024

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