London – EuroFinance announced today that Spotify, the Swedish music streaming company, has won its annual award for international treasury excellence.
EuroFinance cites a number of achievements by the Spotify treasury in recent years: its bank rationalisation programme to four global institutions; implementation of Swift, XML and a cloud-based TMS along with a data warehouse with full slice and dice capability of all financial data. Together with its bank partner Nordea, it built a cloud-based FX solution. It has created a new hedging programme that uses advanced data insights to accurately forecast exposures and has also reengineered many processes using the twinned themes of best of breed technology and a recognition of the importance of financial data.
“This year Spotify embodies many of the points of excellence we were looking for in a modern treasury geared to grow with its company,” said Leslie Holstrom, editor, EuroFinance. “They have built an agile and collaborative treasury that makes the best of its internal teams, as well as its external partners whether those are bank relationships or newer Fintech companies that can offer different levels of innovation.”
EuroFinance also points to the expanded role that treasury has taken within the business. Johan Bergqvist, Spotify’s treasurer, already handles a broad portfolio beyond the normal treasury reach to include corporate finance and insurance. But he also heads the corporate development team that looks at strategic build/buy/partner options for the company as it pursues an aggressive growth strategy.
Although Spotify has had the luxury of developing treasury from scratch, it has done so in an environment of hyper growth (80% top line growth last year), and therefore it has chosen its tech and banking partners wisely, investing in future proof treasury solutions. Spotfy’s Bergqvist has not shied from researching, watching closely and indeed partnering with Fintech companies if they can offer more timely, more efficient solutions elsewhere on the market. But behind all this hi-tech is an old fashioned drive for efficiency. Spotify has100 million users in its system, creating close to 360 million transactions a year. Every fractional gain will have significant payoffs for the company.
