A Streamlined Migration to SWIFTNet with UniCredit

by Carola Schmitz-Becker, Vice President and Volker Mademann, Senior Treasury Manager, Corporate Treasury Banking and Cash Management, Deutsche Post DHL

The Deutsche Post DHL Group offers a unique portfolio of logistics and communications services through the Deutsche Post and DHL corporate brands. The Group provides its customers with both easy to use standardised products and innovative and tailored solutions ranging from dialogue marketing to industrial supply chains. About 470,000 employees in more than 200 countries and territories form a global network focused on service, quality and sustainability. With programmes in the areas of climate protection, disaster relief and education, the Group is committed to social responsibility.

Deutsche Post DHL’s treasury function

Deutsche Post DHL (’DPDHL’) has a highly centralised treasury department based in the global headquarters in Bonn, Germany. In addition, we have three regional treasury centres located in Singapore for Asia Pacific, Florida USA, for the Americas, and Bonn for EMEA. These regional treasuries maintain direct contact with business units and ensure compliance with global policies that are designed by group treasury. Treasury takes responsibility for managing the financial risk of the group, including liquidity, FX, counterparty, country and interest rate risk which we achieve by centralising exposures as much as possible and managing them on a group level.

Legacy connectivity

Before implementing SWIFTNet, we already had a bank-independent electronic banking system in place, but we were conscious that the solution had a number of limitations. It was expensive to maintain, as we still needed to set up direct interfaces with each bank, and there were some challenges in terms of security and usability. As the experience of implementing SWIFTNet developed amongst the corporate community, we recognised that it was the right solution for us as it satisfied our multi-bank integration needs, security and efficiency objectives. We therefore made the decision to migrate to SWIFTNet in mid-2010 and selected Broadridge as a service bureau based on their credibility and experience with similar implementations.

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