Free Up Millions in Working Capital
How Multinational Finance Functions Can Better Strategise with Accurate Global Cash Visibility
Whether you’re a CFO, Group Finance Manager, or hold any other senior finance or treasury role, it’s expected that you’re the cash expert.
Quite simply, you need to know how much your organisation has at any given time – as well as both your payables and receivables. Often, however, one of the core elements of the job – strategising and using your cash wisely – is either overlooked or simply becomes a near-impossibility.
Because of the way many businesses function when it comes to banking operations, establishing a concrete global cash position simply falls by the wayside. Your colleagues spend half their working hours logging in to a series of clumsy, archaic banking portals that, thanks to disparate subsidiaries, don’t guarantee an accurate global cash position. In fact, the reality of it is that you may well have millions of pounds hidden, so to speak, down the side of the sofa. Securing global cash visibility can help you locate and utilise this cash.
Today, we’re going to talk you through the problems that arise from a lack of global cash visibility, how achieving greater transparency can help you better strategise, and, importantly, what the solution to these issues is. We’ll break things down into the three fundamentals of increased cash visibility: See, Control, and Optimise, allowing you to free up millions in working capital. Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
See Your Cash: What’s the Importance of Knowing My Global Cash Position?
Control Your Cash: Dealing With Risk and Fraudulent Activity
Optimise Your Cash: How Centralising Bank Visibility Supports Daily Cash Forecasting
Optimise Your Cash: How Best to Utilise Your Working Capital
Who Can Help me See, Control and Optimise My Cash?
Do I Need an ERP System? Couldn’t We Use That Instead?
How ITV’s Bank Reconciliation Became 95% Faster
How NSG Improved Their Scalability and Security with Increased Cash Visibility
See Your Cash: What’s the Importance of Knowing My Global Cash Position?
When you’re leading multi-national banking operations of any scale, knowing your global cash position is vital. Picture trying to organise a personal budget for rent, food, and bills – simple enough. Now imagine that either your bank balance is one-to-two months out of date, or that you don’t know your salary full stop.
Strategising becomes an impossibility: how many food shops can I afford this month? When are my bills due to leave my account? Do I have any leftover cash to spend on my family? As CFO or Group FD, this is equivalent to the reality that many businesses face on a day-to-day basis. The consequences and implications, however, are much greater. You’re not just responsible for yourself – you may preside over 50 different subsidiaries that span several countries and continents.
Your current set-up may well be serving you well enough, or so you think. You’re conducting global banking operations, but behind the scenes it’s sticky tape and plasters.
“Sure, cash slips through the cracks here and there, and we depend on multiple banking portals, but isn’t that the case for every organisation of our size?” Simply put, no.
Increasing amounts of businesses are opening their eyes to the litany of mind-numbing manual processes grinding their banking operations to a near-halt. The first half of your day, for example, is likely spent awaiting data from colleagues who are desperately compiling cash data from a variety of independent banking portals.
Members of a Group Finance Function – who don’t have direct access to their banks or data – often only see their global cash position at month-end, meaning that entire banking operations are run on a 30-60 day time deficit. All of this serves to undermine your number one concern: how much cash you have.
Without the correct automated procedures in place, the glacial pace of your manual workflow combined with the inability to correctly strategise (what is expected in terms of payables and receivables? What can I do with the remaining cash?) means that your global banking operations are off to a hugely inefficient start.
Check out our eBook about the fundamentals of automated cash management.
Control Your Cash: Dealing With Risk and Fraudulent Activity
With increased cash visibility, controlling your working capital becomes a considerably easier feat. Fraud – and wider security issues – remain one of the most prevalent pitfalls plaguing global banking operations, preventing total cash control.
Over the past two years, for example, cybercriminals have relished the increased opportunities to prey upon vulnerable businesses, exacerbated by the risks of working from home. In fact, 73% of UK businesses suffered phishing-related data breaches in 2021.
Contrary to what you may believe, though, internal risk and fraudulent activity is likely the bigger concern for the corporate treasurer. After all, the rest is up to your security teams – but internal issues can create a sizeable splinter in your global banking operations. Let’s start with human error. Of course, you trust your team – but neither they nor you are immune to slip-ups that can achieve quite the opposite of simplifying your banking operations.
Say a payment gets sent to a client twice. Not impossible, given that we’ve already established your global cash position is likely muddied and unclear. With no clear means of managing payments or your forecast, a duplicate payment seems like an inevitability.
No biggie, right? You’ll get the money back eventually. While this is true, the temporary shortfall that may result from human error is enough to impede on both your personal workflow and your banking operations. You may enter an overdraft, incurring more unnecessary fines through accrued interest.
Finance Transformation Unlocked
Episode 2: Integrating Global Banking Operations To Mitigate Risk with Muzulu.
Watch NowDeviant payments are a reality you have to face, too. If a member of your organisation puts aside £100 every month, again, it may sound like an unremarkable problem, despite its illegality and the more obvious matter of the trust-breach.
Imagine instead, though, that this £100 is drawn across tens of subsidiaries in, say, 20 different countries. Suddenly, no matter how large-scale your global banking operations are, there is a serious amount of money that, due to a lack of cash visibility, is being pulled away from profits, investments and more. In order to fix these risks, you need the right solution in place. As Jim Bray notes in his article for treasury-management.com, “having the right balance between fraud detection technology and human-driven workflow processes” is the key to success here.
Thankfully, risk and fraudulent activity can be a thing of the past for your global banking operations. Read on to find out how…
Optimise Your Cash: How Centralising Bank Visibility Supports Daily Cash Forecasting
As we’ve mentioned before, having total cash visibility is one thing, but knowing what to do with it is another. You can’t utilise what you can’t see. Who needs paying today? Who owes you money? What happens when all seems said-and-done until a final accounts payable ping comes your way, sending you unexpectedly into your overdraft? It’s not just about your current global cash position – it’s about forecasting.
With a solution that provides total cash visibility over expected payables and receivables each day, you can reap the rewards of simplified daily forecasting – if you were ever able to forecast to begin with – and enjoy the increased predictability of your cash position.
By midday, after all, you need to know what the cash forecast is. If you’re in a surplus (lucky you), there exists a cut-off point at which you can choose to strategically invest. Should you be in shortfall, a cut-off still exists that determines when you can opt to source extra cash.
This cut-off point means that while you’re waiting to receive an approximate cash position post-banking portal faff, the window to maximise the benefits of your cash visibility is slimming. There may only be one short hour for you to decide whether or not it’s best to sweep cash into investment funds overnight, further invest, or explore the variety of other options available with your working cash.
Effective daily forecasting also means that actualisation can be tracked significantly more easily, meaning that expected payables or receivables that no-show can be investigated and resolved much faster. With both visibility and control over your global cash position, you can turn hope into certainty. And banking operations without the need to rely on overdrafts… wouldn’t that be nice?
Cash forecasting is crucial to running efficient banking operations, and we’re here to tell you why – as well as the reasons a cloud-based service is the best solution.
Read BlogA TRUE STORY of how one organisation saved £250K in bank charges after improving cash visibility across their bank accounts.
Read BlogOur multi-bank cash visibility and analytics tool provides treasurers with a single access point to the company’s complete portfolio of banking relationships.
Read BlogOptimise Your Cash: How Best to Utilise Your Working Capital
Being in a senior finance or treasury position isn’t just about totalling up your cash, then – it’s about knowing when and where to use it. And for that, you need data.
With colleagues unburdened by needless manual processes and the right software (we’ll come to this next…) that provides you with full cash visibility and insights across all of your subsidiaries, you and your team will have more time to dwell upon your newly found data.
This data can then be analysed and reviewed, bringing countless potential benefits – and unearthing existing money you may not have known about. For example, subsidiaries often incrementally put cash to the side for a rainy day, as your existing lack of global cash visibility means that they’re unsure when they might need it for a surprise expense.
The reality is, though, that this money typically sits unused for months or even years, allowing you to uncover valuable assets that were right under your nose.
The global nature of your banking operations also likely implies the usage of multiple currencies across your subsidiaries, highlighting the importance of understanding your balances across multiple nations’ accounts. By understanding how much cash is in your global accounts, you reduce the risk of purchasing too much when transferring funds back into your base currency.
Purchasing too-great an amount will also incur unnecessary fees, meaning that increased cash visibility would once more allow you to account for situations in which strategy reigns king. To learn more about making the best use of your cash in 2022 and beyond, check out our recent eBook, Corporate Banking Operations Trends for 2022: What You Need to Know.
Who Can Help Me See, Control and Optimise My Cash?
As becomes apparent, there’s a lot that goes into simplifying global banking operations. Between the vitality of increasing your cash visibility, the necessity for a reduction in manual processes, and the associated importance of high-level strategising and forecasting, it can seem like a lot to handle – especially if your business lacks a dedicated treasury team.
You’ll be glad to know that we’re not here to present problems without a solution.
Put simply, using banking portals and localised processes is no longer a justifiable workflow for a business conducting large-scale banking operations.
AccessPay recognise this, and instead provide instant cash visibility – no matter the number of accounts or subsidiaries – through our cloud-based system. In other words, we can help you See, Control and Optimise your cash.
With AccessPay’s bespoke Cash Management solution, you can access your entire cash portfolio at the click of a button – allowing you to stay one step ahead of expenditure, debt repayment, and investment opportunities.
Intra-day updates provide real-time analysis, oversight, and control for rapid changes in FX, credit, interest rates and liquidity forecasting.
Without the need to spend hours waiting for your global cash position, high-level senior finance and treasury activities become readily accessible: researching investment potential, managing debt, conducting audits, enjoying greater control over your banking relationships, and more.
And, while non-preventative, managing and auditing fraud becomes substantially easier with the new tools you’ll find at your disposal. Internal fraud and deviant payments become a near-impossibility thanks to the transparency granted by AccessPay’s solution; in itself acting as a deterrent.
In other words, AccessPay represents the future of corporate banking – and we’d love to have you along for the ride. Explore more with our on-demand Platform Showcase Stream.
Do I need an ERP system? Couldn’t we use that instead?
There are thousands of businesses, just like yours, that will find their banking operations laden down with the problems described above. Unsure of your global cash position, unable to effectively strategise, and vulnerable to fraud and risk, you may consider turning to an ERP system for help.
While you’d be correct in thinking that it’d solve some of your problems, it would be an incredibly inefficient solution. For a start, many of the subsidiaries in your existing banking ecosystem are likely already utilising an ERP system or an equivalent – to solve your problems on a macro scale, it would require a centralised ERP system that accounts for each and every one of them.
The complexities involved in this are clear; it would likely require several years and millions of pounds for full implementation. With AccessPay, however, you can sit back and relax, knowing that your existing ecosystem will be connected for you – at a fraction of the cost.
This provides ultimate visibility at group level, without the need for either a business-wide overhaul or huge changes to each subsidiary’s existing workflows and processes. Whether you have one bank account or one hundred, an ERP system or not, AccessPay can tailor the solution to your banking operation needs.
How ITV’s Bank Reconciliation Became 95% Faster
As a global entity the finance team at ITV oversee thousands of payroll, supplier and talent transactions each month. Operating with speed and accuracy, the team at ITV required a corporate banking solution to support their business growth, to better handle payments and cash management operations.
By working with AccessPay ITV has been able to manage both international transaction processing, as well as cash visibility across several hundred subsidiaries, without scaling headcount. The platform enabled the finance team to manage cash and payments across 300 entities in 20 different counties, by connecting to more than 10 banks via the SWIFT network.
The benefits are three-fold, enabling ITV to seamlessly manage straight-through processing of payments, whilst providing bank connectivity that improves cash visibility and bank reconciliation capabilities. ITV saved 25 hours week and became 95% faster at their bank reconciliation.
View video transcription
I’m Karen Fagan, I’m the head of Treasury operations at ITV. We were coming to the end of our contract with our previous payment supplier, so it just seemed like an ideal opportunity for us to just see what else was out there, see what were the solutions we could find. At that time, we got invited to a payment summit with Swift, where AccessPay were showing their their new offering. And it was that, that really excited us to speak to you more. What we found most attractive about the AccessPay solution was the vision that they had for the software. Their enthusiasm for cash management. It wasn’t just a payment system. It was a system that could do a whole lot more. So, when you come in in the morning, you literally log in and you know exactly how much cash you have around the group. We were able to not just see payments have been sent to the bank, we could get confirmations back from the bank. We could also then manage our cash – it’s much more joined up. Process at the moment is the main tool that we use for payments across the group. So all of our payroll, our suppliers, our artists, talent, everything gets paid across across the access pay solution. It’s not just doing BACS, it’s doing international payments, faster payments, super payments. There wasn’t much change we needed to make in the backend. So the payment files we were sending to our old provider, we could send those same files. It just seemed like a really straightforward change for us. It’s really easy to use, quick, no messing solution, and it just really made a difference for us. So AccessPay helped us to tackle a number of requirements that ITV’s cybersecurity team had, in particular, keeping our files safe.
What we needed to do was make sure that all of the files payment files coming from our backend systems were encrypted and with AccessPay’s help, we’ve been able to do that. All of our payment files are now PGP encrypted, which of course, means that those files can’t be tampered with en-route. So that was that was a pretty important for us and to the data security team at ITV. It has definitely made a difference. The processes are much slicker and the team has been able to take on more value added tasks and extra tasks from different parts of Treasury. We’re definitely a more efficient team because of it. One of the benefits of being an active paid customer is the fact that you get invited to some really good events. You get to meet your peers, you get to hear about new technologies and your initiatives. One that we’re going to soon is the Swift GPI session, which is about cross-border payments being able to track those payments. So this is all really good stuff for helping manage and optimise working capital. There’s been a few of those events that we’ve been to that have been really key to knowing the future of cash management and how we can get the best out of those systems and solutions. We would recommend AccessPay to our peers and we already have done. It’s just really intuitive, great system to use. We’ve definitely have a really good working relationship with the team AccessPay. It’s definitely going to be a core software provider for us for for a long time, hopefully, and we can see lots more benefits coming.
How NSG Improved Their Scalability and Security with Increased Cash Visibility
Around five years ago NSG had a cash visibility problem that needed to be solved. The world-leading glass and glazing manufacturer needed to streamline their payment operations.
With a creaking ‘de-centralised structure’ it was time for change and a project was launched. Their aims were to increase cash visibility, become bank agnostic and allow for more agile banking.
After extensive market research, the team decided that they needed a cloud-based solution and chose SWIFT, a leading provider of secure financial messaging services. Rather than a slow and costly DIY approach they decided to go through a SWIFT vendor. Their wise investment led them to global fintech provider AccessPay.
“The ability to scale connectivity to multiple banks and jurisdictions using multiple payment methods all through a single standard connectivity process was a real benefit to us.”
Christopher Davies, Treasury Risk and Reporting Manager at NSG Group
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