Treasury Strategy & Transformation
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Transforming Treasury Technology at Bombardier

 
Bombardier Transportation Group has a proactive strategy of investing in leading mobility solutions, capturing global growth opportunities and flawless execution. Vital to achieving this strategy is attracting and retaining key talent globally, demonstrating strong financial discipline, pursuing an active risk management strategy and committing to corporate social responsibility. As the group’s treasury team, we play a critical role in fulfilling these ambitions, but we need the right skills, technology, policies and processes to do so effectively. A flagship treasury project to facilitate our corporate and treasury strategy has been the implementation of a new treasury management system (TMS), FIS’s Quantum 6, which went live in 2016.

Key points

  • Bombardier Transportation decided in 2013 to replace its TMS system, by that time nearly 20 years old, with a new system capable of supporting its current treasury requirements, including the demands of IFRS 9
  • After a rigorous selection process FIS’s web-based Quantum 6, capable of hosting the solution in a secure, private, cloud-based environment, was chosen
  • User training for Bombardier’s 375 users across different locations was a priority
  • Implementation was successfully completed in summer 2016, after a steep learning curve for the project team, who are continuing to explore the advanced capabilities of the system and to create new report templates

Treasury organisation

Our Transportation Group treasury function is based in Zurich, Switzerland, and comprises a team of 13 treasury professionals with a wide range of responsibilities. These include:

  • FX (including risk management, hedging and accounting)
  • Cash management (including bank account management, minimising trapped cash, and centralised payments that operates on a payments-on-behalf-of (POBO) basis)
  • In-house banking (including intercompany loans, cash funding and cash pooling)
  • Trade (including guarantees, factoring and reverse factoring). 

We work with more than 30 currencies in over 400 accounts spread across 35 different banks, each with high transaction volumes that include more than 500 FX transactions monthly.

Project background

We had used our previous TMS – FIS’s Globe$ solution, for almost two decades.  In that time, our business requirements evolved beyond what Globe$ could accommodate.  We had created a patchwork of workarounds and add-ons to meet our treasury needs, and as a result, we reached a point where our treasury technology architecture was far too complex, fragmented, and expensive for IT to support. We were also conscious that we were reliant on a very few key people, which presented a significant risk to our business. Given the scale of our group ambitions, and our treasury commitment to remaining best-in-class, we needed a system that would support secure, automated processes on one hand, and facilitate high-quality decision-making on the other.