Published: September 07, 2026
When Shuying Song took on the task of creating the first formal treasury operation for multinational Japanese healthcare and optics technology company Hoya, she reached out to Bank Mendes Gans (BMG) to help her build a flexible notional pooling structure. The results have been quite remarkable.
When Song joined Hoya in 2022 as its first professional treasurer, she knew she was taking on a major transformation task. The company is split into two main business segments: Lifecare delivers healthcare and medical products; Information Technology leverages the firm’s advanced optics and glass materials technologies for the tech and semiconductor sectors.
Each segment consists of product-based divisions, on a financial level, the divisions operate largely independently. Under these two umbrellas are more than 140 legal entities stretching across 40 countries, mostly covering Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America.
As a Japanese registered and listed company, many corporate headquarters functions, including disclosure and investor relations activities, are located in the Tokyo headquarters, but the group’s finance and treasury headquarters are located in the Netherlands and Singapore. However, until Song arrived, Treasury activities were managed through a decentralised finance organisation without a dedicated treasury team, with responsibilities shared among finance staff across various group companies.
Today, there is one small treasury office, located in Amsterdam, Singapore and Tokyo, and consisting of Song, her direct manager based in Singapore, and several support staff. But Hoya is a sizeable operation. In the fiscal year ended March 2025, it generated revenues of about $6bn, a profit of around $1.3bn. Given Hoya’s scale, the firm’s decentralised cash, diverse banking relationships and manual processes had become somewhat limiting and there was significant scope to improve liquidity management efficiency. As the Group expanded globally, treasury identified opportunities to further enhance liquidity visibility and efficiency.
Song’s arrival signalled a fresh start for the company’s treasury. She saw the challenges – and indeed the opportunities – with the way cash was being treated at Hoya, and offered two new game-changing ideas.
Taking daring treasury decisions comes only from a position of deep knowledge and understanding. Song started her career with a Chinese multinational corporation, first at its Chinese headquarters, then moving to help establish its International Treasury Center in Amsterdam more than a decade ago. When that transferred to another country, she preferred to remain in the Netherlands, signing up for a one-year MBA at the University of Amsterdam. Upon graduation she joined the Dutch treasury outpost of US-listed International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF).
IFF maintains a lean treasury organisation in Europe, with global treasury activities coordinated by the European team under the leadership of the Group Treasurer in New York.
This transition provided Song with comprehensive exposure to the full spectrum of treasury operations from day one. It beautifully complements her valuable tenure at the Chinese company, where she mastered high-volume, critical cash management and back-office functions. Ultimately, this new role offers a broader, end-to-end view of all the treasury business. With considerably more experience under her belt, Song decided after a few years to move on from IFF. In 2022, with an offer of the position as Manager Corporate Finance and Treasury, Hoya presented her just the challenge she was seeking. Again, she would take on the full gamut of treasury activities, and again it would be a small team. But this time it meant working from a standing start.
Building a treasury from scratch is “certainly a challenge”, admits Song now. “But I enjoy it because leading the development of the systems, the processes, the structures, the policies – is a rare opportunity to enrich my own experience and treasury abilities.”
Upon arrival, Song immediately saw the two-part solution to Hoya’s fragmented and overly manual set-up. The first was to implement a notional cash pool; the second was to deploy a TMS. The notional pool is now live with most of its entities already participating in the structure, and in the process of expanding its scope with key partner BMG, while the TMS project has just got underway with FIS Integrity.
The work with BMG naturally centred around Song’s core remit to manage Hoya’s liquidity and excess cash. Although liquidity levels across the group were strong, treasury identified an opportunity to enhance group-wide visibility, coordination and liquidity efficiency. Deriving value from it meant supporting efficient funding decisions, and improving overall cash management across the group. That, Song knew, was going to happen only with cash centralisation.
The magnitude of the responsibility to ensure that treasury runs smoothly and efficiently had essentially dictated that the days of Hoya’s manually and largely decentralised pre-Song era were over.
To improve the timeliness of cash visibility, subsidiaries were also required to maintain dedicated excess cash accounts and submit balance reports regularly to finance and treasury headquarters. While this provided additional information, the process remained highly manual, placing an operational burden on finance teams across the group and requiring significant effort from finance and treasury headquarters to consolidate and analyse the data. The fragmented banking – spread across far too many local banks and accounts – meant loss of scale for interest yield, less negotiation power over fees, and a challenging task in calculating accurate and timely cash positions.
It was an issue, too, that with so many banks involved across the group, each with different cut-off times, intercompany funding transactions required significant coordination and monitoring to ensure timely execution. While deadlines were generally met, the process was far from efficient and it was an unnecessary additional challenge for treasury to overcome.
Song was adamant that reducing the stress and lack of clarity in treasury demanded the simplest possible solution. There was no point in building a complex structure and swapping one issue for another. That new structure had to offer proper visibility across the board so that cash could be provided when and where it was needed, and work harder when it wasn’t. It also required careful consideration from legal, accounting, tax and other relevant perspectives.
The vision and objectives set out by Song upon her arrival centred on establishing cash visibility through centralisation. Localised excess cash and buffers needed to be optimised, and centralisation could then be the key to enhancing negotiating power with a smaller, more manageable panel of banks, and optimising interest revenue.
At the sharp end, quicker, preferably instant, funds transfer across group entities, including HQ, would follow internal approvals and efficient bank executions. Chain payments across multiple nodes would be removed, cut-off times become less of an issue, and intraday overdraft facilities become a reality. Ultimately, group cash needed to become a knowable and hardworking commodity, and treasury blood pressure had to be lowered.
Song’s two-phase idea was the obvious path to success. In the first instance, the option of a physical cash pool was set aside in favour of its notional counterpart. Song identified that a physical structure would place an unsustainable demand on a lean treasury team, particularly given the implementation resource requirements. Furthermore, Song believed that a physical pooling structure would involve considerably higher implementation and ongoing maintenance costs. Future upgrades to core platforms could necessitate rebuilding elements of the physical pooling framework, increasing both operational complexity and long-term costs. Recognising these operational realities, the Group management fully endorsed the notional approach, with the TMS plan approved as a follow-on project. Song’s push to adopt a notional pooling structure is based on its capacity to enable Hoya to consolidate and control multiple local subsidiary accounts virtually through one banking partner. There is no need to physically move or co-mingle funds. Song saw it as “a pragmatic and efficient solution that immediately offered us cash visibility and access to excess cash”. Compared with a physical pooling structure, which would have required a more complex operating framework, it also presented fewer implementation and ongoing management considerations.
Song was no stranger to the cash pool concept, nor indeed the work of BMG in this space. Song’s experience with BMG cash pooling dates back to her days in the international treasury centre of the Chinese company. This foundational experience with BMG structures carried over seamlessly into her next role at IFF, another BMG cash pool client, where she further deepened her expertise with the system. Accumulated positive experience naturally led her to BMG’s door once again as the cash pooling option emerged for Hoya. BMG duly won the mandate following a short RFP process.
“Having utilised the BMG system on a daily basis throughout my career, I knew precisely how it worked and how we could capture immediate efficiencies by introducing it at Hoya,” states Song. When it was realised that BMG could mostly match Hoya’s global footprint, it only strengthened the case to appoint this bank. However, certain jurisdictions presented regulatory limitations on offshore pooling structures. These required alternative approaches.
Nonetheless, the decision to implement the BMG notional pool gained broad support across Hoya. With its group management buying into the idea, it became easier to cascade the idea to the divisional CFOs and outwards to the subsidiaries. The project was sponsored by Group management and delivered through close collaboration between treasury, finance, legal, tax and local management teams. Of course, the treasury team spent “a lot of time” preparing and discussing the master agreement for all pool participants, but also in addressing potential concerns from stakeholders. Key considerations involved alignment with legal, accounting and tax requirements.
As a Tokyo-listed company, the project required close coordination with headquarters in Tokyo and consultation with relevant internal and external stakeholders throughout the implementation process.
Launched in 2023, the bulk of the notional pooling setup and onboarding was successfully completed in 2024. The structure was further expanded in 2025 with the integration of two additional entities. Throughout 2026, the plan is to extend this framework to include several smaller and more complex setups. Song comments that Hoya’s BMG notional pooling structure has proven to be “easy to manage”. It has also delivered some “significantly positive” outcomes for the business.
With the live system, a consolidated cash view is the first major uptick for Song. This facilitates “a more strategic approach” to deploying that cash. By revealing immediately how much excess cash is available across all accounts, it informs how excess liquidity could best be utilised across the Group.
By leveraging the combined net balance of the pooled accounts, Hoya secured more favourable interest rate conditions at the group level compared to the rates previously negotiated by individual subsidiaries with local banks. Through these economies of scale, BMG calculates a boosted yield on the notionally pooled cash without ever physically moving the funds. This allows the company to optimise its interest income while ensuring the money remains securely in its individual local accounts. Local autonomy over daily cash operations is carefully safeguarded; subsidiaries continue to utilise their local accounts to manage day-to-day operational cash. Since the majority of these entities consistently generate excess cash, the pooling framework focuses on mobilising that surplus rather than establishing overdrafts at the subsidiary level.
As Song notes, “We provided subsidiaries with a clear formula to calculate their excess cash, allowing them to independently review what to pool and what to keep as a local buffer at month-end.” This automated approach prevents a constant back-and-forth over cash retention. For substantial capital requirements like CapEx, entities can still seamlessly request internal funding.
With the holding companies, the subsidiaries, the branch, and the headquarters all now in the cash pool, cash positions are centrally monitored and coordinated by treasury in accordance with group policies – and payment cut-offs are finally limited in their impact.
“The plan is that after we have the TMS in place, we can easily review cash patterns, and then we can take a more proactive approach, either helping entities simplify their own cash management processes, or maybe look at cash sweeping,” comments Song. “But I don’t want to have a lot of resistance from the subsidiaries, every party needs to be comfortable with this structure.”
Of course, at an executive level, deeper insight into cash creates significant added-value for financial decision-making. More timely and consolidated cash information enables management to assess group liquidity more efficiently and supports strategic investment and funding decisions.
And with treasury managing to do so much more, the size of the team is less of an issue for Song. “We remain comfortably lean,” she reports. This encourages agility, and helps keep the impact of the communication process under control. The chain from Song to her manager, to the global management, is short so when an issue arises, discussions and solutions flow quickly in either direction.
Many Japanese multinationals have traditionally operated with decentralised organisational structures, granting significant autonomy to regional and local entities. This approach reflects the view that delegated authority can serve as a powerful driver of both motivation and accountability, according to Hiromi Nakayama, Director, Head of BMG Sales for Japan, ING Bank N.V., Tokyo Branch.
“BMG’s notional pooling is uniquely well-suited to both decentralised structures as well as more centralised set-ups. Under a notional pooling framework, funds and ownership remain with each entity, while headquarters benefits from full visibility and a consolidated liquidity position. This enables efficient support to subsidiaries without disrupting existing local banking relationships,” she says.
“At the same time, it is important to pay close attention to the legal structure of a notional pool — whether it is based on pledge or cross-guarantee (or joint and several liability) — as well as how interest is calculated and allocated among participants as these elements have important implications from legal, tax and accounting perspectives.”
BMG notional pooling is also often highlighted as a key component of a robust and resilient financial framework, reflecting its ability to maintain reliable support for subsidiaries of Japanese companies across more than 30 currencies, including same-day funding capabilities in over 20 currencies, notes Nakayama.
“Japan is known for long holidays, such as Golden Week [a cluster of national holidays running from late April to early May], when Japanese banks are closed, and Japan-based headquarters cannot support their subsidiaries. BMG notional pooling is operational and ready to support clients.”
As global operating environments become more volatile, treasury structures must provide both control and flexibility, believes Mark Appelman, CEO at BMG.
“Over the past two decades, treasurers have navigated a succession of disruptions, from the financial crisis and pandemic to geopolitical tensions and supply chain challenges. These events have shown that liquidity assumptions can change faster than many businesses can adapt.” He explains: “As events evolve in different ways at the same time, it generates options. With global liquidity management, we shouldn’t follow a fixed route as there is no one-size-fits-all solution.”
Appelman argues that organisations benefit from maintaining optionality in their liquidity structures. “The challenge is not simply achieving efficiency. It is ensuring that your treasury framework can adapt when conditions change. Solutions that provide visibility, access to liquidity and operational flexibility allow treasurers to respond without fundamentally redesigning their operating model.”
He sees Hoya’s notional pooling structure as an example of this balance in practice. “Hoya has improved visibility and liquidity efficiency while enabling entities to retain ownership of their funds and continue managing local operations. Such a balance between central oversight and local flexibility can be particularly valuable for multinational organisations, especially during periods of uncertainty.”
See Mark’s article Shaping a Treasury That is Fit For Any Future
The TMS implementation, once live, will ideally enable full visibility, not only of subsidiary excess cash, but also of their cash forecasts, hopes Song. Currently, this is a local spreadsheet exercise, with the results being uploaded to SharePoint for treasury analysis. When cash forecasts can be uploaded into the TMS, a full overview of every cash forecast across the group will be possible. This, she admits, may see treasury “optimise the use of excess cash at local entities”.
Meanwhile, Song is busy adding more subsidiaries to the BMG notional cash pool. Plans to extend its functionality are also afoot, with the overdraft facility likely to see more use. She is also exploring the possibility of centralising more cash from Hoya’s other global banking partners.
Meanwhile, Song continues to expand participation in the BMG notional cash pool and explore further opportunities to optimise liquidity management across the group. But she is taking a measured approach. “We can’t be too aggressive, first the cash pool, then the TMS, and down the road, probably the payment factory and POBO, we’re taking it one step at a time.”
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The corporate world has never before had access to so much rich data and fast connectivity. But will this exciting new terrain really change how treasury operates? A recent TMI podcast recorded at Treasury 360 in Gothenburg, Sweden, uncovers the reality of real-time. Lena Myklebust, Head of Cash Management Infrastructure, Equinor, and Christof Hofmann, Global Head of Cash Management, Deutsche Bank, are your guides.
