DIAMOND! Digitalisation of Guarantees and Treasury workflows - finally!
We had fantastic first ever Helsinki Cash & Treasury Management Summit earlier this week powered by Nomentia and sponsored by SEB, Nordea, OP, TMI & TreasuryXL.
The theme was clear: managing your cash and treasury effectively is crucial to the success of any organisation. There is nothing new, but today the message is even more concrete as there is lot of innovation and new tech to leverage and enhance treasury related operations.
Summit was full of great presentations, but the most memorable presentations were the business case from Kaefer: digitalisation guarantees/ guarantee management in practice AND optimisation of Treasury workflows. Of course, it was great to listen the API discussion by SEB, Nordea and OP and would be nice to know other Nordic banks thoughts regarding the future of open banking APIs as well; other than PSD2 related as this is not just a PSD2 thing at all.
Some highlights: Guarantees digitalisation and management
As Mr Falke, Keafer nicely summed up, the starting point when the optimisation project starts, is usually very manual. Reporting is time- consuming, error risks and excels the most used reporting tool. It is quite amazing as especially nowadays; guarantees are an important instrument for the business for large corporations but heavily also for SME sector. SAP is the bottleneck: inconvenient double or even triple manual administration in ERP plus other systems.
Requests for new guarantees are sent via email or excel from your organisation and naturally from subsidiaries. The whole process is manual, and you do not get grip of the external or internal fees. This means for Group Treasury e.g., that the charging of guarantees fees internally is manual. And paper and prints all over.
So, Treasury functions need to change this with the following actions minimum in connection to guarantees:
- reporting must be efficient and flexible.
- secure and transparent guarantees workflow, secure guarantee documentation
- interfaces to ERP and other systems automatically
- global overview of all guarantees and facility utilisation
- efficient communication internally to management, Finance department and subsidiaries. Externally efficient communication to banks and insurances.
It was great to see in this project that the specification is made thoroughly as it is key to success. During the project it was crystallized that one document and one format to work with all issuers was essential.
Some highlights: optimisation of Treasury workflows
Mr Fleischmann run nice ChatGPT show with the theme Imagine: A corporate Treasurer, late at night, overwhelmed by reams of paper, incoming spreadsheets and emails and phone calls, depicted in a hyper realistic way.
It was great examples how to optimise treasury workflows, e.g., bank account management. With optimisation work is smarter, faster, safer and happier, because outcome of having things “under control”, frees up lot of resources for analytical tasks.
The only things which were not covered during the fantastic presentation, were 1) RFP process towards banks and how to achieve no paper, no emails, no back and forth between banks, group Treasury and local entities and 2) the feedback and collaboration tool between banks and bank’s corporate customers to enhance relationships and create new valuable data for all
But don’t worry, there is a great fintech solutions for both treasury challenges and both currently very manual processes for the Treasury functions and subsidiaries can be fixed today.
Looking forward to these kind of fantastic events in live, Great networking also. Super thanks to Jukka Sallinen and the crew and all dear corporates and bankers!
