Can big data and the cloud buffer country risk and other bugs?
Members of the EuroTPG convened for their 2017 H1 meeting in May at Standard Chartered in London. A big topic on the agenda was the impact of global politics on their business environment. An improving global economy but with increasing emerging-markets country risk requires a robust risk management process. Members also debated how the evolution of big data, fintech and other technological advances will change treasury, and how they’ll work with their banks. Member presentations covered a treasury organization redesign, and the migration of treasury technology and bank connectivity to the cloud. Here are a few of the takeaways from the event:
1) Risk Management Adjustments for High-Risk Countries. In volatile and uncertain times, country risk is a crucial metric for a holistic risk management approach, especially for emerging markets.
2) Bank Connectivity via Cloud Solutions (a member case study). A member described a shift from an on-premise system setup to a cloud-based TMS and connectivity solution for SAP.
3) Leveraging Technology to Transform Treasury. How should Treasury leverage transformational megatrends and innovations to make improvements and help the broader business?
Risk Management Adjustments for High-Risk Countries
Dan Barnao, Managing Director of Corporate Sales for Europe at Standard Chartered Bank, highlighted a few structural economic changes and gave a high-level overview of regulatory, liquidity and FX changes in emerging markets; risk management strategies to manage trapped cash; and interest rate, liquidity, FX and commodity risk across challenging markets.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1) Country risk is the key determinant of emerging-markets risk. Mr. Barnao highlighted a key focus of the risk management advisory team at Standard Chartered, which was the importance of country-risk monitoring in a holistic risk management approach. This was particularly important when dealing with emerging market risk. “Being agnostic to country risk or passively approaching this issue may be a bigger risk to long-term corporate valuation than the actual investment,” he cautioned in his presentation. In setting a hurdle rate for an investment in any given country, he argued for adjusting the required hurdle rate (derived from the marginal cost of equity + marginal cost of debt) for country risk.
2) Monitor carefully, manage proactively. Evaluate the downside risk and the need for proactive hedging before potentially negative events, and set up an early-warning system using relevant metrics like key economic indicators to monitor the main geographical exposures, such as:
- Government policy: any proposed changes in local regs and monetary policy;
- Political changes: the timing and expected outcome; and
- Fundamentals: productivity, unemployment, FX rate changes (mostly against the USD in EMs), commodity prices, etc.
3) Communicate what is and isn’t possible to mitigate. The primary mitigation steps are cash-flow hedging and offsetting local assets with local debt. Those mitigation actions are complicated by local regulatory factors such as FX controls, thin-capitalization rules, withholding taxes and other local peculiarities, which may make your preferred risk mitigation action either impossible or very expensive.
Treasury Operations and Organizational Design
With an influx of new members and some in the progress of reconsidering their organizational design, this session focused on a member’s ideas on a treasury redesign for the EMEA region.
Currently, the member’s treasury has 21 people at the central treasury Center of Excellence (HQ) and six in the global service center for EMEA, while approximately 55 FTEs support treasury from the local level (over 100 individuals spending part time). At HQ, responsibilities cover capital markets and financial risk management. The EMEA in-house bank offers services to 135 customers (business units), including cash pooling; loans; third-party netting, payments and POBO; cash positioning; and short-term investments. The EMEA area treasurer serves as the link between country-level and global treasury, provides treasury counsel to the countries, and oversees bank relationship management, controls and compliance and other regional and intermediary services tocentral and country treasury.
Some highlights from the discussion:
- Let a global ERP implementation drive organizational change. If M&A doesn’t prompt an organizational redesign, a global ERP implementation can. In the discussion leader’s organization, SAP-driven changes permeate treasury’s operations. A risk-averse organization, they want to leverage the implementation, including SAP Treasury, to do more with less without any loss of excellence by moving activities into global service centers (GSCs). For example, the GSC for EMEA—providing cash coding, reconciliation, in-house cash clearing, cash pool reconciliation and bank payment monitoring—was a result of the SAP deployment.
- Dedicated IT for treasury? Only a minority of NeuGroup members have dedicated treasury IT resources. Those who do enjoy greater possibilities to customize or create solutions in-house, but a key resource who departs is a risk. We now see more efforts to standardize treasury processes to those pre-existing in systems (more and more SaaS-based), which unburdens treasury from fault if something goes wrong in the system itself. We also see best-in-class systems approaches yielding to an integrated ERP and treasury module (SAP + SAP Treasury) implementation. One member remarked that her company—while still keeping a dedicated treasury IT team—is shifting from in-house developed solutions to outsourced, standardized systems that the IT team manages.
- Define what is core treasury and what is not. A risk with a systems-driven re-organization is that treasury and what would normally be defined as shared-service center type tasks get commingled for process reasons related to the new systems. It’s important to be clear on how core and noncore treasury tasks are defined and what the appropriate reporting lines are, or treasury may end up with added responsibilities without the corresponding budget or resources. This is a particular risk for regional treasury centers.
- Forecast only what you really need to. Perfect cash (and exposure) forecasting is the holy grail of treasury but, often, treasury needs to rely on people in business units whose primary responsibility is not treasury. The discussion leader’s company is removing responsibility for cash forecasting from business-unit finance staff and limiting the forecast to on- vs. offshore cash, buybacks and other higher-level/corporate-level items. Other members said granular forecasting kicks into a higher gear for cash-mobilizing exercises like preparing for an acquisition or large dividend but that it’s otherwise a low-level effort.
OUTLOOK
If the outlook is uncertain for the US and other Western economies under new governments in the US, UK, and France, the second-order effects on emerging markets may prove even more unpredictable. The importance of adjusting investment hurdle rates for increased risk in emerging markets has thus never been more pronounced. It is crucial to monitor key indicators carefully and take prudent steps proactively to mitigate the negative effects of rapid changes in those markets.
Bank Connectivity via Cloud Solutions: A Member Case Study
Dovetailing with the tech theme, a member shared how implementing a complete bank connectivity and TMS solution was progressing. He highlighted the background and considerations for system and configuration choices, implementation scope and challenges, and the “end state.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1) Global footprint drives treasury complexity. The privately held company sells in more than 100 countries, has factories in 20 countries and over 25,000 employees worldwide. Sales are widespread: Western Europe (39%); North America (24%); Asia-Pacific (21%); Eastern Europe (8%); Latin America (5%); and Africa (3%). The treasury remit is global and some complex regions account for a small share of total sales but are time consuming.
2) But why change what’s working well? The company’s in-house bank fully or partially covers most of its large markets in Europe, North America and Asia-Pac, including China. Regional pooling is done in North America and Europe, while it’s domestic-only in China and India. The old on-premise setup, using SAP BCM (bank connectivity manager), a service bureau and SWIFT, was working well. Moreover, the in-house bank and POBO had brought process improvements, but too few banks were connected to it. The goal was to optimize payment processes further with “payments in name of” (PINO), automate bank-statement downloads plus reconciliations, migrate all 20 legacy ERP systems onto one single ERP, and migrate the SAP BCM/SWIFT setup and add more banks and countries.
3) To the cloud, everyone! Treasury then had to ask the question of how to connect the rest of its banks quickly and efficiently. With scarce IT resources, the company settled on TIS (Treasury Intelligence Solutions), a SAP spin-off and a dedicated SaaS-based SAP plug-in that connects to the cloud using SAP standards, eliminating formatting challenges. TIS also brought other cloud benefits, including: complexity reduction, efficiency (cost and time), flexibility, and scalability. TIS also allowed them to outsource time-consuming tasks and benefit from security developments and upgrades in real time, as well as the ease of adding business units and banks.
4) Leverage organizational support for SaaS in other critical functions. The member said support for a cloud-based solution stemmed from other critical functions in the company already using SaaS solutions.
OUTLOOK
It’s uncommon for a company to undertake a major systems upgrade if the existing one is working reasonably well, as was the case with the company presenting to the group. The lesson shared, however, is that it pays to be proactive in the longer run, especially when technology is at an inflection point, as it seems to be now with firms (and treasury) embracing the cloud. The expectation is that the changes now will make subsequent stages of the connectivity project easier as it gets rolled out to more noncore banks for both reconciliation and payments, plus business units that are not currently connected to SAP.
Leveraging Technology to Transform Treasury
There is a tidal wave of new technology and fintech entering the finance and treasury market, including treasury in the cloud, big data, blockchain, mobile money, payment digitization and behavioral risk analytics. What does this mean for your treasury? Is virtual treasury possible? Should you work directly with fintechs or via your bank? What can be practically leveraged and what is just hype? Standard Chartered’s Victor Penna, Managing Director and Head of Transaction Banking Network Sales and Treasury, and Vanessa Manning, Managing Director and Europe Americas Product Head, led a lively, interactive debate and attempt to define a practical path forward.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1) What trends and innovations will drive change? Several megatrends could significantly affect banking and treasury, including payments evolution, digitization of transactions, the cloud, fintech, robotics and automation. Innovations like APIs, fast, traceable payments, mobile money, distributed ledger (Blockchain), machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc., will change treasury substantially. The question is how to leverage this change in effectively, so treasury can use new technology to help the businesses it serves.
2) What’s changing, and what do treasurers need right now? Members thought the biggest impact would come in trade and supply-chain finance, where integration and a common platform can be transformational, and in payments and collections. Plus, treasury needs to become more attuned to actions required in response to events, link that to the business continuity plan (BCP) and develop the ability to execute within 48 hours. For that to be operational, longer-horizon dashboards and the ability to automate scenario analysis are needed.
3) Virtual accounts to find their fix. Virtual accounts can drive down cost and reduce actual bank accounts needed; however they can tie corporates to a specific bank’s account numbers and system structure. What if instead account numbers could be assigned by the corporate (driven by the ERP account numbers), and accounts were transferable between banks; adoption would likely see a significant uptick. Then adoption would skyrocket as the use case for virtual accounts would become bank agnostic and reduce rather than increase switching costs. Stay tuned, as this is coming, members were told.
4) Ready for real-time? The migration from batch-processed to real-time payments is under way but corporate systems and, more importantly, processes are not ready for it. Forecasting and liquidity management issues persist, and there’s the loss of float. But even if real-time is not priority number one, other payments trends can bring significant efficiencies and visibility, richer payment information, faster reconciliations, standardized reporting and more. Forging partnerships with these new payment channels enables banks to offer cashless payments and collections for corporate use.
5) Is the “bank-agnostic” mindset obsolete? Mr. Penna remarked that he felt the old choice of bank-agnostic vs. bank-proprietary solutions has gone stale. With standardization of messaging and formats, middleware and the ease of connection to multiple platforms, fintechs, intermediaries, exchanges, etc., the choice is not one vs. many but a matter of a preference for certain banks and providers over others. Access to any or all of them will become much more integrated from the user’s perspective.
OUTLOOK
The future of treasury in a digitized and data-driven world will no question be different, as will the nature of treasuries’ relationships with their banks. If or when fintech innovations and regulated cost of capital disadvantages drive a wedge between fintech firms and banks will be up for further debate. But, as long as technology empowers connectivity between them, there is an opportunity to embrace solutions from other sources. Meanwhile, fintech solutions will be seen via bank channels as well. This gives treasury time to assess its bank needs for the future and forge strong relationships with banks that deliver viable fintech solutions alongside fintechs to ensure smooth delivery of the services and capital that matter.