Since our foundation in 2013 we have been gifted with many interesting and exciting assignments and projects for a wealth of large and small corporates with an international outlook. We have helped a diversified group of customers – first of all in our home market, the Nordics, but also in e.g. Australia, Kazakhstan, UK, Iceland, Netherlands and Switzerland.
Successful TMS selection process
Danske Commodities (DC) is an independent, international energy commodities trading house with focus on electrical power, gas and climate certificates via Exchanges, OTC and bilaterally covering physical as well as financial products.
As DC foresaw a continuing increase in their commercial trading volume as well as higher complexity, they decided they needed a scalable treasury management system (TMS) to replace their in-house built solution. To find the right solution, DC engaged infiniance to run a TMS selection process. The task was to envision an optimal future state treasury solution for Danske Commodities covering both technology, as well as processes and organizational aspects.
infiniance carried out an analysis defining DC high-level requirements and based on these and infiniance’s wide experience in the TMS market held them up against the capabilities of the various TMS solutions. A shortlist of providers was the foundation for an invitation to a more detailed RFP. With the RFP feedback in place, a business case and vendor presentations (Proof of Concept) were the basis for a final proposal to DC to decide.
The advantages for DC using infiniance in the selection process; infiniance knew the TMS market and the system providers, their strengths and their weaknesses in relation to the specific requirements, infiniance knew the interaction between processes and systems, infiniance has done the selection process many times and refined it to a template which gives speed, efficiency and less time consuming for DC. And as infiniance is an independent advisor, DC could trust that the final recommendation would be completely unbiased.
Successful ongoing treasury improvement initiatives
Vestas is the energy industry’s global partner on sustainable energy solutions. Vestas designs, manufactures, installs, and services wind turbines across the globe, and with more than 108 GW of wind turbines in 80 countries, they have installed more wind power than anyone else.
Vestas and infiniance consultants have had a long relationship all the way back to 2010 when SAP Treasury & Risk Management was originally implemented.
Since then infiniance have among other things delivered an full-scale in-house bank (SAP In-house Cash), and more recently, infiniance has been an integral part of Vestas’ ongoing treasury improvement initiatives, focusing on increasing operational efficiency and straight-through-processing in the treasury department.
The tasks included a fully automated integration of FX and deposit trades from Bloomberg’s trading platform FXGO, support of a CLS project, and latest, the implementation of non-deliverable forwards (NDF), automating the otherwise manual fixing and settlement of monthly transactions. This has led to huge operational benefits in the treasury, as well as reducing the risk of errors.
Working in smaller, dedicated teams with key Vestas resources on well-defined tasks, has proved successful with agile execution and faster timer-to-market of new initiatives as the result.
Succesful implementation of new cash management and payment factory
AAK has more than 140 years’ experience of innovating and customizing solutions based on vegetable oils and fats. In close collaboration with their customers, they create products for the food, confectionery, and cosmetics industries.
AAK has 20 different production facilities, sales offices in more than 25 countries with sales in more than 100 countries, and more than 3,900 employees. For more information about AAK: www.aak.com
AAK and infiniance have a long-standing relationship in supporting Treasury and Bank related processes.
In 2019 AAK changed their Bank and Cash Management structure, and in relation to this it was decided to implement one common global process for all payments and bank accounting, focusing on operational efficiency, increased security, automation and straight-through-processing (STP).
The objective of the project was to have one global process across all markets in AAK for payments and bank accounting by providing business new tools and standardization of processes with a high degree of automation and fulfilling standards of security with certification of payment files between back-end systems and the banks.
The first step of the project was to establish standard bank connectivity using SWIFT Alliance Lite2 (AL2) for communication of payment files, bank statements and payment status reports (PSR) with external banks.
For payments, STP with payment approval workflows and end-to-end payment monitoring was established, with a high degree of security and compliance on transmission of payments to external banks. All payment files were done following ISO20022 CGI standards. Processes were aligned with a single STP of payments to comply with today’s standards for efficient and effective processes and ensuring security mechanism of payment files, where users can monitor status of payments closely from initiation of payment, through approval, to acceptance of payments from the bank.
For bank statement processes one global process was implemented for bank and sub-ledger reconciliation, with standardization and automation of cash applications including online monitoring of bank statements.
The implementation was done using standard SAP functionality and Bank Communication Management (BCM) with SWIFT AL2 connectivity to external banks.
The project was done in a close relationship between expert consultants from infiniance and the AAK Project Team, which proved to be successful and was able to achieve its objectives.
Langelinie Allé 27B, DK-2100 Copenhagen
Tel.: +45 3086 0082 | infiniance@infiniance.com | CVR/VAT no.: 3537 5783