Published: April 24, 2023
A collaboration between a major Belgian bank, a pioneering fintech, and their respective clients, is offering a customisable financial dashboard that blends powerful forecasting metrics with effortless data sharing capabilities. Frédéric Fontaine, Head of Transaction Banking, BNP Paribas Fortis, and Didier Vankeerberghen, Co-Founder, EMAsphere, reveal their treasury data revolution.
Making decisions without the right financial data is, to all intents and purposes, a guess. Treasurers are not in the business of gambling their organisations’ money. But acquiring the right data, at the right time, and in a way that makes sense for all who need it, can be a serious challenge to prudent decision-making.
This is why BNP Paribas Fortis decided to collaborate with the financial reporting solution EMAsphere, using client input on both sides to guide the development and wider roll-out of EMAsphere’s digital platform that seamlessly blends a customisable financial dashboard with powerful forecasting and data-sharing capabilities.
The aim of the platform is to remove the threat to decisioning accuracy and timeliness posed by the all-too-common use by finance departments of multiple spreadsheets. Indeed, in the current highly volatile trading environment, the financial risks posed by rapidly changing and deteriorating scenarios simply cannot be overestimated, says Vankeerberghen.
“Recent events are reinforcing the need for platforms such as EMAsphere. Financial professionals, including treasurers, will suffer at the hands of outdated information. The confidence in knowing they can reliably and quickly access their data, carry out the right analysis and what-if scenarios for their business, and know exactly where they are with their key financial indicators, has extraordinary value at any time, but its value is now amplified many times over.”
Accessing relevant data and forming well-structured information that can be easily shared between key stakeholders is indeed a powerful tool in current times. “In discussion with clients, one of their main priorities today is short-term forecasting,” explains Fontaine. He adds that this is true regardless of company size, although for now the EMAsphere target market is SMEs and corporates with a turnover of between €2m and €250m.
To deliver short-term forecasting effectively, online connectivity with up-to-date data is vital. “The EMAsphere platform connects directly with the client’s accounting package to provide the data, and the required analysis and insight for those essential shorter-term forecasts, while still giving the longer-term more strategic views,” notes Fontaine. It might be added that, as interest rates rise, a proactive liquidity management approach is also critical to the understanding of how a company’s cash will be impacted by its actions (including investments) in this “new paradigm”.
The collaboration between BNP Paribas Fortis and EMAsphere really is a timely response to current market conditions. A key part of its success so far as a platform is the series of proprietary connectors that EMAsphere has built. These enable automation of data collection from all the main accounting platforms, including local Belgian and French vendor systems, and ‘international’ offerings such as Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, QuickBooks and Xero. This means around 95% of the current market is covered.
The connectors facilitate the harvesting of in-depth financial data from these systems. This in turn enables the platform to deliver a high-level view of the user’s business, but also provide a granular perspective on any element, as required. Giving both micro and macro viewpoints is valuable because a user can inspect figures at a glance but then, for example, use the system to query an anomaly in as much depth as is necessary without having to wait for IT or another data owner to respond.
EMAsphere is an innovative fintech led by acknowledged entrepreneurs. While it has more than 10,000 SME clients already on board, Vankeerberghen says the platform’s development has benefitted hugely from the additional expert input of BNP Paribas Fortis and its customer base of corporates.
By canvassing the views of both sets of clients, and compiling a list of their most pressing needs, a dedicated adoption template has been created. The template improves system reach as it can be overlayed on any accounting tool for which connectors have already been built. More are being added, and the team has also produced a number of generic connectors to enable clients to integrate with certain domestic systems, such as France’s FEC (Fichier des Ecritures Comptables).
“Covering most systems and facilitating rapid connection and process automation, with limited investment, has great appeal for our clients,” comments Vankeerberghen. On the BNP Paribas Fortis side, the aim is to leverage a client base that represents some 25% of the Belgian market – by far the largest in the country. “EMAsphere and BNP Paribas Fortis have co-designed a dedicated standardised solution, with the aim of supporting rapid implementation and promoting platform uptake among its corporate clients,” says Fontaine.
And now that both bank and fintech client bases have offered input on their specific requirements, not only is traditional balance sheet and cashflow statement data accessible through the platform, but so too is information on working capital positions, cash flow forecasting, and inventory finance support. This complementary data is incorporated into the main dashboard and, as with all other data presentations in EMAsphere, can be explored by clients at a granular level.
BNP Paribas Fortis needs no introduction, but EMAsphere is a tech startup that traces its roots back to the FinTech Belgium Hackathon of 2018, sponsored by BNP Paribas Fortis. This is an annual competition in which developers come together to design and build new software programs in a highly compressed timeframe (often just 24 hours). It does so as part of its drive to encourage exploration, collaboration and discussion around innovation among a broad spectrum of financial system stakeholders.
The EMAsphere team won this particular event, catching the eye of the sponsoring bank. Initial discussions were fruitful for both parties. Indeed, those talks developed into a committed partnership that saw the unique EMAsphere product enter into a period of live testing in the Belgian market.
With its capabilities proven, the platform reach has now extended into France, where BNP Paribas has an especially strong market position. And as interest mounts, so additional surrounding geographies will be added. There are plans afoot to broaden the target market too, says Fontaine. “We’ve just extended the partnership until the end of 2025 and that has fuelled our ambition to extend EMAsphere access to our corporate clients in Belgium, through our Easy Banking Business digital platform. By the end of 2023, we also expect EMAsphere’s own clients to benefit from single sign-on access to Easy Banking Business.”
While closer integration between the two platforms enables easier data sharing, Fontaine is quick to point out that EMAsphere and Easy Banking Business (and its equivalent in France, Ma Banque Entreprise) remain fully segregated sources, stating that all data exchanges are strictly controlled by this prudent approach.
However, in terms of the continuing corporate journey of BNP Paribas Fortis’ clients, he reports that EMAsphere has been elevated to a key component of the bank’s ‘Beyond Banking’ strategic initiative, which is aimed squarely at leveraging innovation and collaboration.
This partnership undoubtedly represents a win for all stakeholders. As more businesses adopt the platform, so EMAsphere is able to continue enriching it with the direct input of its users. Indeed, although the solution is offered as a standard package, clients are now able to add an increasing range of functionality, as the need arises.
For BNP Paribas Fortis, being able to leverage EMAsphere to offer up-to-date financial data to its clients is a clear differentiator in a competitive market. It also positions the bank to directly offer financial solutions to platform users who, following data analysis via the platform, may decide a banking product such as working capital or inventory finance is required, and in so doing, deepen the relationship with the bank. Finding this data quest is often a challenge, Vankeerberghen states: “Now it’s all at the client’s fingertips.”
The EMAsphere platform connects directly with the client’s accounting package to provide the data, and the required analysis and insight for those essential shorter-term forecasts, while still giving the longer-term more strategic views.
