By Ted Howard

The October issue of iTreasurer begins with a look at a plan brewing among corporates and banks to tackle the painful experience of complying with know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) rules. Also discussed is working with regulators (and determining which agency does what) in China, as well as payments, blockchain and risk velocity.

We start by taking a look at an initiative to conquer the difficulties in complying with KYC/AML laws that have made bank relationship management a tough job. Coca-Cola’s director of international treasury, Jim Aschmeyer, has been on a mission to transform the long-standing and increasingly painful approach to compliance. “AML/KYC is a process that clearly has no winners,” Mr. Aschmeyer said. “It’s as painful and inefficient for the banks as it is for the corporates—the classic death by a thousand paper cuts for all involved.”

The initiative is a collaborative one and includes Citibank, Bloomberg, Coke and four other large Citi customers—Merck, UPS, Cargill and Procter & Gamble.

In our “Anticipated Exposures” section, we look at how despite the abundance of payment innovations, implementing them fully will take time, in large part due to the significant changes corporates must make to their legacy technology infrastructures. There’s also a Gartner list of the “Top 10 Emerging Risks of Q2 2018” where two stood out for their “risk velocity” or the speed at which these issues could escalate and damage a company were they to occur. And finally, we consider the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s continued attempts to undo problems and complexity found in Dodd-Frank-era cross-border swap rules.

In “Playing It SAFE with Chinese Cross-Border Transactions,” we delve into the challenge of clearing a path for cross-border transactions in China via better communications with state regulators at the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE).

This month iTreasurer features two NeuGroup meeting summaries: the European Treasury Peer Group (EuroTPG) and the Assistant Treasurers’ Leadership Group (ATLG). At the EuroTPG, treasurers weighted the merits of virtual accounts, discussed how to navigate sanctioned countries and considered changes in cash management solutions. They also discussed the increasing importance of technology in treasury and the mitigation of cybersecurity threats.ATLG members learned about the first steps to replace Libor, and the new US tax law’s GILTI and BEAT implications and complications. Members discussed their companies’ timetables for repatriating cash in the wake of tax reform, and a KPMG expert apprised them of the need to model the new law’s often complicated provisions and how they will interact with each other—especially for overseas earnings—to arrive at the optimal tax outcome.

Finally, in “Blockchain Still Strong Despite Cryptocurrency Fall,” we look at a Deloitte report that suggests that despite cryptocurrencies’ collapse in value this year, the adoption of the blockchain technology behind them by mainstream companies in search of cost savings and efficiency is almost certain to continue, if less quickly than originally anticipated. The survey indicates US companies are taking a much more cautious approach to the new technology.