Perfection in Practice

FIS Helping Clients Build Optimal Treasury Environments in Good Times and Bad

As outright winner in the Best Cash & Treasury Management Solution category two years in a row, FIS is at the top of its game. But the vendor had more to offer TMI’s judges, with its clients winning the Editor’s Special Pick, and Highly Commended Awards in the Best New Treasury Function and Best TMS Implementation categorises. FIS is truly a builder of treasuries.

Winning TMI’s Award for Best Cash & Treasury Management Solution is never easy, but FIS’ global coverage and support network has the scale, expertise and data-driven insights to keep delivering innovative ways to solve business-critical challenges for its customers. This puts it ahead of the curve from the outset.

As proof of success, the long-established FIS Integrity SaaS solution has recently been completely reinvented, rebuilt, and re-released, as the Integrity SaaS (software-as-a-service) v10 solution. In 2020, FIS’s aggressive investment and innovation in Integrity SaaS continued with significant improvements.

As well as investing heavily in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) across the full spectrum of the Integrity SaaS functionality, by implementing the system in a virtual environment, clients will be much more flexible going forward.

Many recent improvements have been made rapidly. These are helping corporates navigate Covid-19, for example, by enabling working capital management (WCM) optimisation. Here the Integrity SaaS integration with FIS’ receivables management solution, GETPAID, is now facilitating the acceptance of detailed invoice items from accounts receivable for reporting, factoring, and a more holistic view of cash flow forecasting.

Additionally, as part of the FIS Code Connect application programming interface (API) development strategy, stronger integrations with key leading banking partners and technology providers is, among many other enhancements, improving bank data collection for liquidity management purposes and outputting data through a unique and valuable working capital dashboard.

Having acquired Worldpay in 2019, FIS managed in 2020 to integrate Integrity SaaS with the Worldpay Bankout global payments technology service. This is now helping corporates centralise and visualise global liquidity, and streamline and reduce global payment costs. Additionally, Worldpay’s virtual accounts solution is supporting corporate payments, especially where they have neither a physical presence nor local banking relationship.

Furthermore, Integrity SaaS is assisting treasurers meet interbank lending rate (IBOR) reform demands, introducing new formulas, interest rate calculators and accrual methodologies to handle in-arrears average rate calculations as new risk-free rates (RFRs) come onstream.

For its sterling effort and results in a challenging environment, TMI salutes FIS Integrity SaaS.

It’s a win very much deserved by FIS, as is the Corporate Recognition Editor’s Special Pick for Best Practice Treasury & Innovation for its work with Integrity SaaS system user, ST Telemedia (STT). With a substantial amount of time and effort consumed by manual day-to-day cash and liquidity operations, the onset of the pandemic and remote working could have caused a severe impact on STT’s day-to-day treasury operations without rapid and disruption-free implementation of its front- and back-office business continuity plans (BCPs).

STT’s treasury team BCP included arranging with its active cash management banks to ensure prompt settlements for payments and fixed deposits placements with accepted email confirmations from their authorisers to the banks. In anticipation of possible market volatility and a liquidity squeeze, liquidity and credit review exercises were also initiated, requiring enterprise-wide updates of liquidity positions, including cash and credit facilities, immediate action items, and all potential flashpoints.

The timely roll-out of the FIS cloud-based Integrity SaaS TMS just before the outbreak enabled STT to digitise most of its back-office internal treasury activities as well as processes such as recording trades, generating confirmation letters and updated reports. The digital transformation coupled with strong collaboration across the business units and partners, enables STT to achieve its objective of ‘keeping the lights on’ with no downtime and slippage costs. It’s a feat that TMI is happy to celebrate.

From the well-established to the brand new, FIS is helping treasuries go from strength to strength. TMI judges awarded Siemens Energy the Best New Treasury Function, Highly Commended accolade for getting a new treasury up and running in double-quick time.

Siemens Energy is one of the world’s leading energy technology companies. Its spin-off from Siemens AG became effective in September 2020. In preparation, Siemens Energy had to build its treasury landscape from scratch, including a time-critical ad hoc implementation of a brand-new, group-wide TMS.  Complex in functional requirements, IT landscape, the number of stakeholders, and a parallel build-up of the treasury team, the project was nonetheless a precondition for the takeover of large FX- and commodity-hedging portfolios.

Siemens Energy and the FIS project team achieved the goal of setting up a brand-new, highly automated treasury risk management system – FIS Quantum – to support the worldwide Siemens Energy business, in less than 11 months. All this, just days prior to the spin-off and financial year-end closing, while dealing with the lock-down environment. Impressive!

FIS was also acknowledged for its work in the Middle East with logistics firm Bahri, which won Highly Commended in the Best TMS Implementation category of TMI’s Corporate Recognition Awards. By implementing FIS’ Integrity SaaS TMS, at a stroke Bahri resolved suboptimal and risk-laden manual cash management, debt, payment, FX, reconciliation and bank connectivity processes across six business entities.

Bahri’s treasury collaborated with FIS to implement the real-time solution. With a steep learning curve in standardising new processes and understanding how technology could optimise its processes, FIS was instrumental in providing best practice and guidance towards success.

Even with the onset of Covid-19, the project took a 100% manual treasury operation to 90% automation. This has improved operational efficiency by up to 50%, increased control, streamlined multiple processes, facilitated visibility across cash and risk, and improved reporting. With Bahri treasury personnel now free to focus on more strategic initiatives, this award is justly deserved, as indeed are all of FIS’ achievements here.

“We’re delighted to be recognised in this year’s awards along with our clients,” says Andrew Bateman, EVP of Capital Markets Buy Side at FIS “Demand for sophisticated treasury technology has soared during the pandemic, and we remain committed to providing our clients with best-in-class solutions that help them manage treasury and risk in a cost-effective way.”