Leveraging Technology to Climb Treasury Mountains

Gaining global insight into and control over treasury operations is a pipe dream for many treasurers. But two of Kyriba’s clients – Royal FrieslandCampina and Ingersoll Rand – have leveraged the vendor’s cloud offering to transform their workflows to overcome visibility hurdles, eradicate inefficiencies and become even better strategic partners to the business. Each won a 2019 TMI Corporate Recognition Award for their hard work.

Five years ago, the corporate treasury team at Royal FrieslandCampina initiated a journey from corporate policymaker to strategic corporate treasury department – with a centralised operations team as part of the new set-up. The aim was to gain global insight into, and control over, the company’s cash, as well as supporting the basic treasury functions in the shared service centres.

The first step was the implementation of a centralised payment hub that supported the standardisation of the global payments processes. A dedicated treasury operations team was also created to include a treasury project manager and treasury systems manager. In addition, a dedicated treasury-owned IT strategy was introduced, setting clear guidelines for the selection of new systems. Choosing cloud solutions was particularly important in future-proofing the treasury operations, in order to reduce overall dependence on internal IT, and always have an up-to-date version in order to improve speed of decision-making.

This set-up kick-started acceleration towards an optimal global payments and collections process that would become more time and cost efficient and less error-prone using an efficient and lean IT infrastructure. Project Everest, as it was named, was born in 2017 to realise these objectives. After careful consultation by the main stakeholders, the project plan was mapped out with four camps to reach the summit:

Jeroen Brieffies, Group Treasurer and Project Manager of Everest, says: “We are so proud of the digital transformation journey initiated by treasury. We now have the tools to further optimise our cash flows and processes, quickly and efficiently. We can also provide better internal insight and authority to our stakeholders.”

These impressive achievements led to the Project winning TMI’s 2019 Corporate Recognition Award for ‘Best in Class Payments’. Simon Shorthose, Managing Director, Northern Europe – Kyriba, adds: “We are delighted that Royal FrieslandCampina has been recognised for its payments process optimisation. Kyriba is proud to have been instrumental in this digital transformation journey that has seen the treasury team adding significant cost savings, visibility, control and strategic value to the business.”

Meanwhile, Ingersoll Rand has been busy harnessing the power of Kyriba’s cloud capabilities to gain real-time visibility of group FX exposure. To address gaps in the company’s hedging capabilities and to translate exposure management into meaningful analysis that could add value to the business, Ingersoll Rand turned to Kyriba’s FX solution (formerly FiREapps).

The objectives were to achieve visibility and quantification of:

All of the above has now been achieved through the use of Kyriba’s solution, leading to significant quantitative and qualitative benefits – and earning Ingersoll Rand the 2019 TMI Corporate Recognition Award for ‘Best FX Solution’. Assistant Group Treasurer, Chris Donohoe, comments: “Treasury has evolved into a true strategic partner to the business rather than just a corporate function. We now have the ability to work with our entities on specific projects and to implement business solutions rather than simply providing trade solutions.”

Shorthose notes: “Innovative companies are monitoring real-time FX exposures to help understand the impact of trade decisions and how they affect the overall risk profile. There is no better example of this than Ingersoll Rand, which has reduced its exposure by over half in just one year, and increased visibility of its group-wide exposure to 97%. This Award is thoroughly well deserved and testament to what can be achieved with the help of technology.”