What’s new at TIPCO?

Top companies such as Lufthansa have for years been relying on the treasury information platform TIP to manage their cash flow forecasting. Corporates of this size generally already use a ‘classic TMS’, but this is rarely able to meet the local requirements of their subsidiaries. Yet, this is exactly what a good forecasting tool should do: it needs to be easy-to-use even at the local level in order to gather and compile important monthly forecasting data from all regions without the need to resort to Excel.

TIP allows both major global players and mid-sized enterprises to easily prepare forecasts which provide them with a revealing data landscape. This article explains how you can also optimise your forecasting with TIP.

 

Forecasts are only as good as the data on which they are based.

Many of the data needed for cash flow forecasting already exist in the various systems you use. ERP systems are a particularly efficient data source. For example, this is where you’ll find all of your receivables and payables, including the associated due dates and terms of payment. You can also source the total amount of regular salary payments from your ERP system. With this information at hand, you can already cover a major share of the overall volume of payments. This is exactly the key strength of TIP: As a result of direct links to all other systems, you can import and include these data in your forecasts at the press of a button.

Predicting the future by analysing the past.

Another helpful tool is predictive analytics. This procedure allows you to derive an amazingly accurate forecast from your historical data. A good case in point is a company subject to major seasonal volatility in terms of revenues and expenses. Assuming there is a revenue target for the coming year, the treasurer can use the statistical methods to rapidly and precisely predict how annual revenues will be spread across the individual months ahead. Other companies even analyse their social media data with predictive analytics in order to identify trends which have an impact on their cash flows.

Forecasting liquidity requires flexibility.

The treasury information platform TIP allows you to freely define the structure of your forecasting – and to do so in just a few minutes. Regardless of whether you need standard forecasts of operational and non-operational payments and financial cash flows or whether your company mainly engages in project-related business, you should be able to freely define your forecasting structure down to the last detail. Alternatively, you can use the on-board templates as a starting point and modify these whenever necessary.

 

TIP also allows you to define any forecasting horizon you want. Banks often require companies facing a critical cash flow situation to provide them with short-term, day-by-day, cash flow forecasts. TIP makes this possible in addition to long-term forecasts spanning several years on a month-by-month basis. It is also possible to combine daily, weekly and monthly forecasting periods. For example, your forecast could include the next seven days on a daily basis, the following 12 weeks on a weekly basis and the remaining nine months of the year on a monthly basis. You can specify how the weekly and monthly values are automatically distributed by TIP. This means that you are free to define how previous figures with a low degree of granularity appear at the weekly or daily level after the next data rollover.

 

Flexibility is also required when it comes to displaying the data. TIP offers several features which enable you to investigate the causes of significant differences between the current and earlier forecasts. For example, switch between the various levels of granularity (in terms of the structure and the timeline) or compare forecasts at different points in time. A single click is also all it takes to compare forecast and actual figures. Thanks to these flexible display options, expensive analysis tools are no longer necessary; all you need to do is take a quick look at your cash flow forecasting module.

 

 

 

More than “just” safeguarding liquidity

The primary purpose of forecasting of course remains ensuring sufficient liquidity. Based on your current cash reserves the cash flows associated with the various future time periods are aggregated to provide you with the forecasted volume of cash available at the end of every period. This makes it possible to quickly spot cash bottlenecks.

TIP also offers you the option of managing your credit lines and taking these into account in your forecasts based on the defined due dates. This allows you to immediately recognise when credit lines need to be drawn down or increased. This is just one of the many aspects which make it clear how you can be supported by a well-designed system.

Currency-differentiated forecasting is yet another major advantage offered by TIP. It allows you to capture all cash flows in the original transaction currency. The advantage here is that as soon as you have prepared the forecast, you not only get an overview of the development of liquidity, but also of your FX risk exposures. And because you can also manage your FX hedges in TIP, all it takes is a few clicks to calculate your open FX exposures based on a comparison of your FX payments and existing hedges. If required, TIP can even generate hedge proposals for you based on the unhedged exposure; proposals which are then automatically forwarded to your trading system in a workflow-based process once these have been confirmed and approved.

Most of our clients have been reliably forecasting their cash flows with TIP for years. In stable economic times, all you need for this is long-term forecasting horizons; but in time such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there needs to be a rethink. In this context, increasing numbers of clients are supplementing their previous forecasting with a short-term cash flow forecast covering 14 days and/or 13 weeks.

 

Tomorrow, 9 March, we will be back on stage with the Treasury Dragons! Topic of this week is one of the most-discussed issues within the frame of digitization: electronic bank account management! 

What may sound logical has actually taken a long time to become standard practice: an automated reconciliation process that forms a bridge between treasury departments and banks. The challenge here is enabling corporate IT systems and those of banks to automatically communicate with each other in a standardised language.

Bank accounts are the crux of every treasury department; central to every key process. At the end of the day, every financial transaction is reflected on a bank account. Which is why large corporates generally have dozens if not hundreds of accounts which their head offices and subsidiaries have to manage and check. These accounts are distributed around the globe, denominated in various currencies and held at numerous banks. Retaining an overview is therefore no easy task. What about the number, status and purpose of accounts? Are the account signatory permissions still up-to-date?

The treasury team from SCHOTT, pilot client of our first EBAM project, highlights the biggest advantage: “The option of checking who has signatory rights to an account at the press of a button helps us in terms of compliance with our policies and saves a lot of valuable time.”

The enormous potential of eBAM, however, goes way further as it allows you to automate other processes related to opening, amending and closing bank accounts as well. In other words, completely paper-free bank account management which doesn’t rely on fax machines or letters and which also significantly simplifies and accelerates internal coordination work.

This means that it is now also possible to set up new and to extend or limit existing signatory authorisations. Smart workflows ensure that an end-to-end audit trail based on the multiple controls exists in the background.

Tune in tomorrow and learn how eBAM message flows will make your bank account related processes more automated, more transparent and audit-proof.

Use this link to sign up now for the Treasury Dragons session together with our colleagues from TIS, Cobase and Redbridge.

 

The medical and safety technology group Dräger has set up an automated FX risk management process. Senior Controller Frank Freitag reports in an interview with TreasuryLog on how the company streamlined calculating its exposure and cut costs by optimising its hedging portfolio.

 

TreasuryLog: Dräger recently received the AFP Pinnacle Award for Excellence in Treasury and Finance, beating the internet giant Alphabet (Google) and others in the process. How did you manage this and what makes treasury at Dräger so outstanding?

Frank Freitag: Even before the award, we were convinced that our project in the previous year had elevated FX risk management at Dräger to a new level. Being in finance, however, we didn’t communicate this actively. Our application for the award was originally the suggestion of TIPCO, the treasury software specialists with whom we jointly implemented the project. The fact that we were ultimately able to win this award in the USA shows that this issue and its implementation are obviously also extremely relevant for other companies.

 

TreasuryLog: Why is this excellence award so important to you?

Freitag: This excellence award is an extremely prestigious and important confirmation of the work we do. Particularly in area of finance, it doesn’t often happen that we receive awards for further developing our processes. This however demonstrates that even finance professionals can strive for process excellence and that we, at Dräger, are able to establish state-of-the-art processes.

 

TreasuryLog: Which processes did you design to become state of the art and deserve an award? What was the context in which you had to re-evaluate these processes?

Freitag: This project aimed to further develop our operational FX risk management process and transfer this to a stable system environment. The goal was to calculate and forecast the group’s FX exposures at the press of a button. Based on this, the intention was to quantify risk by means of the cash flow at risk method and, ultimately, we wanted to calculate an efficient and lowest-cost hedging portfolio for a defined target risk.

In the past, our entire FX risk management process relied entirely on Excel. The processing of huge volumes of data to calculate exposures however was soon more than Excel could handle. If we wanted to flexibly analyse this volume of data and based on this, generate a forecast and manage a hedging portfolio, a lack of stability and susceptibility to errors would mean incurring a serious process-related risk. What’s more, we aimed to calculate risk using an ‘at-risk’ method and perform a portfolio optimisation analysis based on this. All in all, a process with a very high degree of content-based and technical complexity for which Excel didn’t represent a solution with a rosy future.

 

TreasuryLog: How did you tackle this problem? Did you exchange Excel for another software solution?

Freitag: We didn’t immediately start with the aim of implementing a software solution; the first step was to develop a blueprint of our future FX risk model in Excel, with TIPCO acting as a consultant. We then used this blueprint to pre-test the practicality of our model and find out if the outputs were accepted by our top management. The second step involved us determining which software environment we could implement everything in. The key question here was initially whether to buy in or develop in house. Should we develop our own solution in the SAP Business Warehouse environment or rely on the expertise of an external partner with a specialised solution? Due to the project-related risk of in-house development, on the one hand, and our past experience with TIPCO in designing the blueprint, on the other, we decided to opt for the TIP RiskSuite and the computation module developed by SLG for risk calculation.

 

TreasuryLog: From an Excel dilemma to a database solution: How would you describe the current situation?

Freitag: We set up an automated FX risk management process. We increased the transparency of our existing FX exposures in the TIP software environment and now get the information we need for the group at the press of a button. And all this works by means of an automated data upload from SAP to TIP and we then rely on the existing reporting tools in TIP to get the reports we need immediately, whenever we need them.

 

 

TreasuryLog: How often does this happen?

Freitag: The reporting and the hedging of the net exposure take place monthly. That’s why this frequency in terms of the exposure transparency is enough at the moment. But the flexibility to implement shorter intervals is there if we ever need it.

 

TreasuryLog: What is your risk exposure and which positions does it consist of?

Freitag: Essentially, our FX risk management strategy aims to limit operational FX risk and, as a result, the volatility of the impacts on earnings. Based on netted accounts receivable and payables, we calculate and forecast our group-wide cash flow exposure in each foreign currency.

Although our SAP landscape only covers around 75% of external revenues, following an analysis of the remaining business operations of group subsidiaries we are able to capture over 90% of the group’s exposures. The data therefore provide a sufficient degree of accuracy in order to forecast exposures.

 

TreasuryLog: Aren’t future exposures also estimated, i.e. future cash flows even before these have been recorded as receivables or payables?

Freitag: Exactly. Our hedging process concentrates not only on hedging exposures on the balance sheet but also explicitly takes commercial exposures into account, in other words, future cash flows are forecast on the basis of historical cash flows and then form the basis upon which the hedging portfolio is determined. The aim is to minimise EBIT volatility vis-a-vis our forecasts on the grounds of FX rate impacts.

 

TreasuryLog: With regards the process, where does this start and how are the exposures forecast?

Freitag: The process is based on actual historical cash flow data. The starting point for the forecasting is always a complete calendar year in the past. The actual cash flows are analysed in the forecasting process and, when necessary, adjusted manually to eliminate any extraordinary items and events. Cash flows which shouldn’t be recognised in this period are automatically corrected; these include overdue payments and internal postponements of payments in a following year. The resulting ‘standardised’ cash flow exposure is then extrapolated using the country-level growth rates from the business plan so that we obtain a new annual exposure volume for the forecasting period. The forecast exposure is ultimately broken down to the level of individual months based on their historical distribution to deliver forecast cash flows on a monthly basis. All of this takes place largely automatically in TIP. Distributions, growth rates and other data relevant to the forecasting can be imported via interfaces to TIP.

 

 

TreasuryLog: What happens downstream in the process after you have these cash flows?

Freitag: The next step involves the risk calculation for the new forecast exposure and optimisation of the hedging portfolio. During this process step, TIP and the computation module from SLG can show off their performance and calculate a curve for the cost-optimal hedging portfolio for a defined risk spectrum by performing numerous simulations. In other words, TIP automatically calculates the relevant cost-minimised hedging portfolio for a defined number of target risks (cash flow at risk after hedging). Depending on the risk tolerance, this delivers us the hedging portfolio with the lowest hedging costs, supporting us in reaching a fact-based decision weighing up the associated risk and costs.

 

 

TreasuryLog: How do you define your risk tolerance?

Freitag: We try to limit the remaining risk in terms of the revenues to less than one percent. In this context, we aim to achieve the most efficient degree of hedging relative to the cost of carry. This can actually result in a global minimum, as in the prior year, but depends on the constellation of the exposures and the cost of carry. The optimisation runs this year delivered a nearly linear progression of the optimal hedging portfolio. The issue here was to reach a decision on risk preference. In other words, how much risk do we want to eliminate and how much money are we willing to spend in terms of the cost of carry for mitigating this risk?

 

TreasuryLog: How often do you consider optimising your hedging portfolio?

Freitag: We optimise our hedging portfolio in the course of an annual forecasting process and then recognise the hedge transactions in our IFRS hedge accounting. The hedging takes place applying a so-called rolling layered approach with a maximum hedging horizon of 18 months. The hedging ratio of 75% is stacked in quarters based on a rolling horizon between 12 and 18 months. This is one of the reasons why we don’t have a lower frequency for redefining the portfolio. This would mean too much work and may also mean we have to close out many hedge transactions and de-recognise the transactions again in our accounting. The closing out of hedge transactions relating to other periods would also lead to unforecast volatility in terms of our earnings.

In situations, like in 2020, when extraordinary, unforecast exposures arise more often, these are hedged individually by means of a special process. As such, the hedging portfolio remains the core of our FX risk management and we just make minor changes when these are necessary.

 

TreasuryLog: You have a defined target risk. What do you do when markets become more volatile months after you have hedged, when the correlations change, and when you exceed your target risk as a result?

Freitag: This can definitely happen. But we don’t have any benchmarks for this yet. We see the problem more in terms of the forecastability of the exposure volume rather than in the development of volatility in markets. COVID has taught us that our subsidiaries can be affected differently. Some have seen their exposures drop, while others have may significantly higher exposures. This is by far the more important factor for us.

 

TreasuryLog: Has the use of the software, as well as going through your risk management process in the Excel blueprint before this, led to a change in your decision-making process as a result?

Freitag: Yes. A significant change. The portfolio optimisation has added a new dimension to the quality of our decision making. In the past, we had statistical criteria for selecting currencies which might need hedging; for example, a maximum tolerated cost of carry per year. This meant that, when we had exceeded a defined value, these currencies weren’t hedged. The portfolio optimisation on the basis of cash flow at risk, as we do it now with TIP, means that we have currencies in the portfolio which we wouldn’t have hedged relying on the criteria we applied in the past. This past year in particular, one in which various emerging market currencies have taken a nosedive, has proven that our current hedging portfolio is very effective.

While the availability of vaccines has allowed the economy to make an optimistic start in the new year, it’s going to take time to overcome the challenges posed by 2020. What you need in treasury more than ever in times like these is the latest software which provides ideal support in areas from cash visibility to payments to trade finance. This is exactly what the treasury information platform TIP provides, and has been for more than 130 companies, from DAX-listed players to SMEs, for the past 20 years. Register now for our upcoming treasury webinars.

 

Our treasury webinars – every Thursday, from 16:00 to 16:30 CET

What can TIP do for you and which issues can you look forward to in our treasury webinars?

 

FX Risk Management

FX risk management and cash flow forecasting have become the most sought-after modules during the current crisis facing industry. Both issues are key to treasury and should be at the top of your agenda even in times when all is well, but are particularly important at the moment. That’s why we are especially proud of the AFP Pinnacle Award which our client Dräger received in 2020 for our joint risk management project. Find out in this treasury webinar how Dräger measures its risk exposure in just a few clicks and how it keeps its hedging costs to a minimum.

 

Cash Flow Forecasting & Predictive Analytics

KARL MAYER has also demonstrated how valuable our developments are to clients. Given its corporate structure, this textile machinery builder is not an obvious client for standard predictive analytics, but nonetheless commissioned us to automate its cash flow forecasting. We accepted the challenge and developed a procedure which can predict amazingly accurate forecasts, with a hit rate of 94.5%. In this webinar you will learn how to generate amazingly accurate forecast data and how to save no end of valuable time.

 

e-BAM

Working together with SCHOTT and Deutsche Bank, we have defined new milestones in the area of e-BAM. The focus here was again on integrating systems and data. This pioneering project with our client and Deutsche Bank means that it is now possible to query the status of an account completely automatically with a single mouse click. Yet another area where you can avoid emails and calls as well as setting new benchmarks in compliance. Register for our upcoming webinar and learn how to manage your bank accounts electronically – from opening accounts to updating signatory rights.

 

Digital Guarantee Management

Deutsche Telekom, Implenia, GEA and many other companies already benefit from digital guarantee management in TIP. Trade finance experts know better than almost anyone else about multi-layered consultancy processes which need to be precise and compliant. But there also needs to be a system for administration, monitoring and fee billing which is particularly transparent and able to respond to the demands of the relevant company. With its guarantee management module, TIP has made a name for itself in trade finance, one which almost no other provider can match. In this webinar you will learn how to move from tedious paperwork to electronic process management – from administration to monitoring to fee billing.

 

Workflows & Reporting

TIP is modular and relies in particular on the open exchange of data in its system landscape. We can integrate your upstream systems as seamlessly as your subsidiaries and create workflows which provide you with optimal support in your daily tasks. This avoids unnecessary emails, saves valuable time and also boosts compliance. What’s more, you can also use our flexible reporting tools to perform almost any analyses of your data using intuitive dashboards, combined with Power BI or Excel, to create an overview of all the information you need for management purposes.

 

Bank fee monitoring

Not only the status of an account is relevant but also the issue of fee statements is one which is increasingly in the focus of treasury departments. Together with the Common Global Implementation (CGI) initiative, we have campaigning for uniform standards for years in order to facilitate and optimise the options for digital fee monitoring. It is already possible to use TIP to capture your bank fees and to subsequently monitor these and even demand reimbursement. This process allows DAX-listed corporates to save millions of Euro a year and also provides completely new insights into the settlements undertaken by your subsidiaries.

 

Are any or several of these issues on your for agenda for 2021? Our client relationships are long-term and firmly based on trust, which is what inspires and motivates us to go the extra mile for them every day. From developing new products and implementing them to providing top-notch support. Come on board and discover how the treasury information platform TIP is the secret to transparent and flexible treasury.

 

Register for our next webinar or contact us directly. We’ll be happy to set up a 1-2-1 demo appointment whenever suits you. Interested in getting insights from a reference client? No problem. Just drop us a line and we’ll be in touch.

 

The Treasury Dragons entered the third round on 8 December. The issue: cash visibility. An issue so important that no fewer than six system providers appeared on the stage. We were also on board and looking forward to a lively discussion and plenty of audience participation. 

 

Cash visibility has always been one of our favourite issues. Not only because we are particularly good at it, but because cash visibility marked the birth of our Treasury Information Platform TIP. Around 20 years ago, consultants were constantly running into the same problems at clients when it came to identifying available financial resources. In response, they sought out programmers and explained the weak points of existing solutions and where they saw potential for improvements. The result was the Treasury Information Platform TIP; a solution which has been further developed over the years so that it is now used at many corporates even as a stand-alone TMS.

 

Tailor-made reporting at the press of a button is one of our strongest selling arguments. Demand in the meantime has shifted particularly to the TIP Cube, which enables ad-hoc reporting to be elevated to a new level. Corporates directly access their data in in Excel/Power BI and can compile these using drag&drop to analyse them however they want. This combines complete and up-to-date data with a graphic user interface which every treasurer is totally familiar with. A strong combination which is an immediate hit with our clients after implementation and guarantees satisfaction. It is finally possible to do everything that was in the past nearly impossible because of circular references and monster spreadsheets: Perform analyses in all directions and with any degree of granularity.

 

The dashboards in the Cube mean that we have now taken a giant leap into the future. Current data, drag&drop and perfect presentation. Understandable, logical and fast. That is exactly what you need for your management team, and all available in just a few minutes. 

 

Interested in finding out more? Watch the recording of the third round of Treasury Dragons.

And, if we may be a little immodest: the most exciting part starts in Minute 49.

Omikron and TIPCO establish a partnership for payments services

For around 20 years, the treasury information platform TIP has been supporting corporates with top-notch solutions to make their treasury activities particularly efficient and transparent. This year we decided to add payment services, allowing us to fully meet our clients’ requirements. For this, we opted to work with strong, experienced partners who know exactly what’s what in the payments business.

The name Omikron is inextricably linked to the brand MultiCash^®. This multi-bank electronic banking system is among the most successful solutions on the European market. We are delighted to have brought Omikron on board as an established provider of payment services; a partner with decades of experience working with both corporates and banks.

Alexander Fleischmann, responsible for partner management at TIPCO: “Over the last years, we have consistently developed and extended TIP into a fully-fledged treasury management system. Until now, payment services had been an exception. Our partnership with Omikron closes this gap and is in keeping with our philosophy of offering our clients the best solution in every area of treasury. Thanks to the fully automated interaction between TIP and MultiCash Transfer^®, we have now created a seamless, integrated solution which enables corporates to efficiently, securely and cost-effectively organise their group-wide payments based on all well-established communication standards.”

Corporates now benefit from the combined strengths of two leading providers in their respective fields – ranging from “one-stop shop” implementation of all services to an integrated and highly user-friendly solution for day-to-day business.

Gregor Opgen-Rhein, Senior Sales Consultant and responsible for the partnership at Omikron, expects the combined solution to interest a wide range of corporates, from mid-sized companies up to multinationals: “Real-time processing and digitalisation are shaping the future of payment services. Holistic business processes require integrated systems. For mid-sized corporates, this is often about taking their first steps towards digitalisation, but large corporates with international operations also have a pressing demand for improving efficiency and transparency still further. The TIPCO and Omikron solutions complement each other in many areas, providing an ideal fit. Working together, we can take a holistic approach to our clients’ business processes.”

The major advantages of the cooperation for you as a client:

 

• Concentrated expertise: Together, Omikron and TIPCO offer more than 50 years of experience in designing and implementing treasury solutions for corporates of all sizes: from SMEs to major multinationals.

 

• Seamless integration: The solution delivers a seamless, secure and automated interaction for payments between your Internal systems, such as ERP and HR, TIP and MultiCash Transfer^®.

 

• One-stop shop: Benefit from the best-in-breed approach of an ideally integrated solution from two leading providers. At the same time, your contractual partner and main point of contact during and after the project is and remains TIPCO.

 

Want to find out more about the advantages this cooperation can deliver for you? Then don’t hesitate to get in touch.

 

About TIPCO

The Austrian software provider TIPCO has implemented the treasury information platform TIP at leading European players in all major industries. Over 130 clients – including Deutsche Telekom AG, Deutsche Post DHL Group, Fresenius, Merck, REWE Group and STIHL, to name but a few – place their trust in TIP and TIPCO’s expertise when it comes to offering pioneering treasury innovations. The treasury information platform TIP stands for highly flexible, digital solutions in the areas of cash visibility, cash flow forecasting, risk management, guarantee management, bank fee monitoring and reporting. Treasury departments can also rely on TIPCO’s smart workflows to digitalise their processes and avoid time-consuming reconciliation processes via email.

For more information, success stories and webinars, visit www.tipco.at

 

About Omikron

Omikron is the leading provider of e-banking and payment factory solutions for business clients, service providers and banks. Under the MultiCash® brand, Omikron offers national and international clients a centralised platform as a basis for using the new services of the Digital Age. The product line MultiCash Transfer^® is tailored to companies who need a uniform, centralised and bank-independent system for the automation of their payment services and cash management which can be seamlessly integrated with their internal accounting, HR and treasury systems. The solution is available both in the cloud and on-premise and is tailored precisely to client specifications. The standardisation, automation and monitoring of cash management processes as well as global cash flows with the aid of embargo checks and sanction screening ensure internal and external compliance requirements.

More information about the company, solutions and reference projects is available at https://www.omikron.de/en

 

Dräger has emerged as the winner of the 2020 AFP Pinnacle Award for excellence in treasury and finance, competing with submissions by Google and Peloton.

Dräger manufactures medical and safety technology products. In so doing, Dräger products protect, support, and save people’s lives around the world in hospitals, with fire departments, emergency services, authorities, and in mining as well as industry. The treasury department manages a portfolio of 41 currencies, this makes it essential for the associated FX exposures to be managed in a highly automated, cost-effective and practical manner.

When Dräger and TIPCO first sat down to discuss the issue of FX management, the company’s risk managers were still deriving their FX exposures in Excel based on SAP data exports and no end of manual work. The goal: Enable both – the exposure as well as the risk to be calculated fully automatically in TIP based on underlying data from SAP.

“This perspective allows everyone involved in the risk management process to discuss the most suitable blend of risk and costs on a factual basis. This enables us to avoid scenarios with a relatively low level of additional hedging at considerable extra costs,” is how project leader Mark Blatt explains.

The prize money of $10,000 goes to the charity of Dräger’s choice, Aktion Deutschland Hilft. The donation will be used for coronavirus emergency aid.

Watch our webinar to learn more about how the medical technology firm Dräger saves time and money in FX hedging thanks to its’ solution for automated FX exposure calculations and optimised hedging implemented in TIP.

“TIP encouraged us to set up a digitized and more efficient bank account management.”
Dieter Worf, Head of Treasury, SCHOTT AG.

 

From BAM to eBAM: Digital bank account management as a driver for Corporate Treasury efficiency

Every Treasurer managing dozens if not hundreds of bank accounts worldwide knows the challenge: The accounts are distributed around the globe, denominated in various currencies and held at numerous banks. Retaining an overview is therefore no easy task. What about the number, status and purpose of accounts? Are the account signatory permissions still up-to-date? The Treasury team at SCHOTT AG, a leading international manufacturer of specialty glass and glass ceramics located in Mainz, Germany faced similar questions. With over 60 group entities and more than 200 bank accounts the team was used to the fact that managing these accounts takes a lot of time.

In 2018 however, SCHOTT embarked on a journey to digitize bank account management using the Treasury Information Platform (TIP) and leveraging XML-based eBAM-messages for communication with one of the group’s core banks via the SWIFT-network.

The outcome: More automation and more transparency!

 

About SCHOTT AG

SCHOTT is a leading international technology group in the areas of speciality glass and glass-ceramics. The company has more than 130 years of outstanding development, materials and technology expertise and offers a broad portfolio of high-quality products and intelligent solutions. SCHOTT is an innovative enabler for many industries, including the home appliance, pharma, electronics, optics, life sciences, automotive and aviation industries. SCHOTT strives to play an important part in everyone’s lives and is committed to innovation and sustainable success. The parent company, SCHOTT AG, has its headquarters in Mainz (Germany) and is solely owned by the Carl Zeiss Foundation. This is one of the oldest private and one of the largest foundations supporting scientific research in Germany. As a foundation-based company, SCHOTT assumes special responsibility for its employees, society and the environment.

Its more than 15,500 employees worldwide, of whom 5,500 are based in Germany, most recently generated revenues of EUR 2.08bn, 86% of which was generated abroad.

 

About TIPCO

The TIP eBAM solution leverages digital workflows to support all activities relating to the management of group-wide bank accounts across their entire lifecycle. Besides internal request/approval steps, bi-directional communication with external banking partners is enabled using XML-based .acmt formats which can be exchanged via SWIFT. In addition, via automated connectors, bank account data can be kept in sync with TMS, ERPs and other systems.