Creating Competitive Advantage through Cash Management

by Turkay Tatar, Finance Director, Arçelik

Owing to the international nature of the Arçelik business, we have over 30 subsidiaries involved in both production and distribution across a wide variety of locations. Each subsidiary is responsible for its own payments and collections, while treasury activities and strategic decision-making is undertaken in treasury. From a cash management perspective, we were concerned that treasury lacked visibility over transactions undertaken locally, and it was difficult to manage the company’s overall cash position. This problem was exacerbated by the large number of currencies and bank accounts that we had to manage.

We made the decision to implement a single banking relationship to replace our existing bank relationships in order to monitor and control our cash flow globally.

In 2007, we reviewed our cash management activities and decided to put in place a new banking and cash management structure to support our evolving needs. At that time, we had 14 operating subsidiaries with over 25 banking relationships globally. This resulted in a lack of visibility and control over cash flow and severely restricted the mobility of cash. We made the decision to implement a single banking relationship to replace our existing bank relationships in order to monitor and control our cash flow globally. This would provide us with a common banking platform across the business on which we could standardise our cash management transactions and achieve visibility across all subsidiary companies.

Business rationale

There were a number of reasons for seeking to replace our disparate banking relationships with a single banking partner. In particular, a single bank would enable us to:

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