Building Capacity across the Treasury Grid

by Andreas Lützelschwab, Head of Corporate Finance, Treasury & Tax, Swissgrid AG

National grid company Swissgrid was faced with the challenge familiar to many treasury departments: multiple bank connections and standards, and lack of process automation. To overcome these issues, Swissgrid appointed Treasury Intelligence Solutions GmbH (TIS) to support its automation, integration and security objectives, as the company’s Head of Corporate Finance, Treasury & Tax outlines in this article.

Treasury organisation and priorities

We have a small treasury function at Swissgrid comprising three people in front and middle office, and two people with back office responsibility. We work with five house banks, and maintain around 70 bank accounts. We use SAP as our ERP across the business, which includes the TR (Transaction Manager) and CFM (Corporate Finance Management) modules.

As a small treasury team with diverse responsibilities, it is very important that we are able to automate cash and treasury management processes wherever possible. One of the problems we had in the past was the need to maintain separate electronic banking systems for all of our banks, each of which supports different formats and security protocols. In addition, we used FIDES for our Swiss-based accounts for both account statements and payments.

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