Banking Tech Awards 2023 Finalist: TreasurUp

TreasurUp, has been selected as a finalist in the Best Digital Solution Provider – Banking Tech category for their pioneering project,Foreign Exchange (FX) Front Ends for Commercial Banks in the Banking Tech Awards 2023.

What? A white-labeled FX front end for banks.

TreasurUp provides banks with a unique FX module with a wow factor for SMB clients of commercial banks. Where most FX platforms focus solely on trading TreasurUp has added intelligence to simplify treasury processes like exposure identification and adjusting/rolling hedges whilst re-designing trading capabilities to match the way small and medium-sized companies do their treasury business. The platform uses the bank's FX pricing and also the client relation remains with the bank.

Why? To improve the competitiveness of banks.

When performing FX hedging and executions clients of banks typically spent most of their time on pre and post-trade activities vs trading. The investments banks make in FX platforms are not reflecting this as the prime focus is trading and related bells and whistles. We firmly believe in adding a workflow that relieves the bank's clients of manual exercises and makes it easy to perform FX operations like swaps by only entering the required data. Simplification thought through by the treasury users provides a deep value-add layer to banks as well as their clients.

How? By creating a wow effect for users.

The capabilities of the TreasurUp FX platform can be split into basic trading and advanced hedging capabilities. Both the basic trading and advanced journeys are unique as they are offered by banks only and designed with the feedback of hundreds of corporate treasurers and finance managers. In comparison to a Treasury Management System, the TreasurUp platform offers the stuff most needed but without the cumbersome setup and hefty price tag. In the design principles, there is always a smart way to gather relevant information (ERP connection, smart Excel uploads or effortless manual input), dynamic processing, links and cross journeys to relevant bank products (FX spot, FX Forwards and swaps) and understandable trade post information.

Basic FX Trading Journeys

Easy FX spot and market rates with alerts for web and Mobile in order to have your client choose your bank as the best market rate information source.

We have learned that in order to drive mobile use for FX journeys it needs to be a fit with the way companies work. Some companies might prefer to use mobile as an approval-only tool whereas others are also looking for market information or on-the-go trading. TreasurUp caters for the most common user journeys through relevant channels.

Change settlement is another feature that removes the complexity of swaps for SMB users. Typically SMBs are looking to change a delivery date. The change settlement feature breaks this down to one action where the amount and new value date or selected and the swaps are executed by the bank. This removes the need to call the bank and provide the new and far date of a swap and also keeps a link in place between the initial hedge and rate and new for easy record keeping.

The trade planner is a feature that allows the user to manage outstanding FX orders showing the PL on an order or invoice.

Allowing for ‘corporate roles’ is a configuration that follows the TreasurUp logic of making sure the platform workflow follows the way the bank's clients work. Roles can be set up like trade executor and manager with the applicable segregation and what a person can view or execute.

Advanced FX Hedging

When looking at how companies do FX hedging not all companies do the same. For instance, a low-margin trading company would like to hedge each order or invoice individually and a project-based company would be more inclined to hedge over a longer period of time based on Forecast.

The TreasurUp FX platform has two advanced hedging methodologies

• Order/invoice-based hedging (e.g. mainly trading companies)
• Forecast-based hedging (e.g. project-oriented companies)

In order to hedge orders/invoices companies can use either smart Excel uploads where only the header of the file needs to be configured once or ERP connections to upload all orders or invoices. Companies can also set a hedge policy to designate what invoices/orders should be hedged based on all common parameters and also apply layering. The whole process is automated and is reduced from hours to minutes for the user as well as bringing plannable flows.

For Forecast based hedging the (cash flow) Forecast screen is adjustable to the company's preference as companies usually are not looking to change their categorization.

Both of these hedging methodologies are completely dynamic meaning that if the data changes all all hedges are adjusted as well to always match the policy setting without any manual work and also netting is applied to reduce the amount of hedges to the necessary.

The whole process is automated to provide a cash flow overview of all the hedging activity from exposures and hedges.

All together a few hours of hedging work is brought to a few seconds maintaining transparency in all steps of the process.

User cases with benefits for Treasurers

A company with multiple entities in different countries was hedging on an invoice level. On a daily basis, invoices were uploaded to Excel where the applicable hedge ratios were applied (a manual and error-prone copy-paste exercise). These raw exposures across the main entity were hedged and then the process was repeated or adjusted in case of exposure changes with manual swaps, also tracked in Excel.

TreasurUp order invoice hedging was easily implemented and after setting the policy all the manual tasks were automated, FX position (exposures and hedges) were clear across all entities and the policy could be applied over all entities in one go. As there was one process netting could also be applied, reducing the trading cost. For the bank, this was a win as well as all entities were now following the same process bringing the plannable business to the bank.

Banks benefit as well

TreasurUp only serves banks but takes into consideration the workflows that company clients of the banks follow. This goes from ERP integration and pre-trade through trade to post-trade activities. This creates a single bank FX platform that really stands out from the competition bringing TMS-like functionalities to the bank's clients.
The connection with the bank is usually configured with the Front-end and logic connected to your bank’s price engine. The bank's product and pricing are shown and the configuration of the screen like Price breakdown and Price countdown or request for streaming quotes are based on the bank's preferences.

Technology and Integration in Commercial Banking Portal

TreasurUp uses the latest technology and is able to integrate into a bank at various levels ranging from a managed front end to APIs. When deep linking TreasurUp as a monolith in the banks portal banks SSO (Single Sign-On) can be used.

4 Levels of portal integration:

1. Deep linking TreasurUp as a monolith (tile/menu item in portal, SSO)
2. Deep linking per module or feature (tile/menu per key feature in the portal, per role)
3. Integration of front-end components (behavioral integration, widgets)
4. Integration via Rest APIs

The hosting and new releases are all done by TreasurUp relieving a bank's IT department.

A unique FX solution

TreasurUp’s FX solution is unique because it looks at the holistic treasurer's journey and places it in the right spot for banks to digitally deliver their products. As an example, a cash flow forecast module can be added giving companies a robust forecasting tool with the capabilities to use these forecasts seamlessly for FX hedging as well as alert the companies on excess liquidity. As the solution is modular and many components can be reused across banks can co-design what this should look like in a partnership manner more than TreasurUP being a system integrator.

Interested in learning more? Get in touch with us by filling out the form at https://treasurup.com/contact/.