Treasury Strategy & Transformation
Published  8 MIN READ
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Against the Clock: Creating the Treasury Organisations of the Future


Since Alex Molinaroli became CEO of Johnson Controls International plc (JCI, formerly Johnson Controls Inc.) in 2013, the business has been through a radical transformation. Initially, this included divesting a number of business units and divisions, and some small acquisitions to refocus the business; however, in June 2015, JCI announced the spinoff of its automotive business, effectively half of the company, into a new corporation, Adient, with a target completion date of October 2016. Soon after, JCI announced its merger with Tyco, which then took place in September 2016, only a month before the conclusion of the Adient spinoff. The impact of these events across the former JCI and Tyco businesses, as well as the new Adient corporation, has inevitably been enormous, not least for treasury. In this article, Jean-Philippe De Waele and Mario Del Natale of JCI discuss some of the factors that contributed to the successful creation of the Adient treasury function, particularly focusing on the treasury technology implications.

 Key Points

  • Johnson Controls International decided in 2015 to spin-off its automotive business into a new corporation, Adient, and shortly after that JCI announced its merger with Tyco which would take place in 2016
  • These changes had enormous impact on treasury, with particular implications for technology; all the preparations for a fully functioning treasury department for Adient had to be completed in under a year
  • The corporation worked closely with FIS (formerly SunGard) which already provided its TMS system Quantum and payment factory system Trax. Existing Quantum and Trax applications were cloned, and the FIS-hosted infrastructure migrated to the UK
  • Quantum was updated and replicated for Adient, and Trax was connected to SWIFT in 35 countries
  • The authors describe the factors which contributed to the success of the complex project and note some of the obstacles which had to be overcome during implementation