From cash and FX management to the challenges of know your customer (KYC) compliance,
fintechs can address some key, perennial pain points. We asked three companies to explain how these platforms work.
Dylan Boudraa, chief revenue officer: Trovata helps firms enhance their cash management systems and processes. Our founder and CEO Brett Turner was inspired by the possibilities of open banking, founding the company just as the leading corporate banks were starting to release application program interface- (API-) powered access into their treasury and cash management services.
We were one of the first companies to connect to the APIs released by JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America.
Our mission is to give finance teams an easy button for a unified view of cash, so they can spend less time wrangling bank data. That’s delivered via an easy-to-use web app, plus a companion mobile app, through which users can categorise their bank transactions, report on and analyse them, and then use them to build cash forecasts.
DB: We’re aiming to help any treasury professional who’s at the stage where their Excel system is breaking but is not yet ready to do the heavy lift of implementing a traditional treasury management system (TMS).
Our clients are medium to large enterprises in a range of industry sectors, from technology and manufacturing to healthcare and higher education.
DB: Once you get past having three or four bank relationships – or even at that very stage – the whole process of logging into four bank portals, downloading all the transactions and wrangling that data to understand cash becomes rather onerous. We work with clients who have tens, hundreds or, in some cases, more than 1,000 accounts.
We put all that data in once place, accompanied by a Google-like search experience and the ability to tag or bucket data into various categories. Machine learning software oversees that categorisation, helping the tool understand how your business works and supporting the ability to build effective cash forecasts.
We’re helping treasurers spend less time on mundane, repetitive tasks, so they can instead use their understanding of the business to help executives make better decisions.
DB: Depending on factors such as the size of the client, the desired functionality and the bank mix, a 12-month subscription is between $30,000 and $100,000. We don’t operate on three-year upfront commitments or anything like that – we have a four- to eight-week implementation phase, after which we are confident clients will see the value of the platform and renew their subscription.
DB: We are focused on the large white space of treasury departments in the US, at firms with revenues between $200m and $5bn. We’re excited about international markets so, in 2022, we’ll be opening up in Europe and Asia.
Richard Eaddy, CEO and director: Hedgebook delivers an intuitive, easy-to-use TMS. The software enables finance professionals to manage risk and streamline compliance procedures, while helping them to build collaborative banking relationships. It has a particular facility for simplifying complex areas – from FX and interest rates to commodities – and does so in a cost-effective way.
RE: We have designed Hedgebook to answer the needs of three different audiences:
RE: It addresses and tackles a number of the key issues facing corporate treasurers and bankers/brokers. First and foremost, it opens up insightful visibility on an organisation’s exposures and hedges, empowering that firm to make better hedging decisions. That happens through a really simple, intuitive interface that we’ve priced to add value in the context of treasurers’ budgets. TMSs don’t need to be expensive to be effective.
RE: Hedgebook is one of the most affordable treasury solutions available, with corporates able to gain access to its TMS from as little as £200 per month.
RE: We are a global operation, with our main headquarters in London and a development team based in New Zealand. Our primary focus is mid-sized corporates and banks that are eager to enhance their engagement with clients.
Liam Chennells, CEO: Detected is a piece of software that can find any company on the planet with just two pieces of information: its name and the city where it’s registered. In my understanding, we’re the only tool in the world that can do this.
We formed during the pandemic, when I couldn’t find the information necessary to verify firms in certain countries where I was looking to do business. For example, you’d think that finding company data in Singapore would be relatively easy. However, you have to register an account with the local equivalent of Companies House, then spend quite a lot of money to obtain a report that requires seven or eight inputs to compile. We connect 12 leading data providers for global coverage in a way that requires only minimal inputs to verify firms.
LC: Anyone who is involved with the onboarding of new suppliers and/or clients – so, it has both know your business (KYB) and know your client (KYC) applications. We see the tool as a supportive utility for strategic KYB and KYC decision-making.
LC: In many cases, when firms seek this type of data from business registries on a one-by-one basis, the ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) information they receive is out of date. Under many compliance regimes, that’s just not good enough.
So, we’ve built a workflow whereby a company sends a link saying “Add your UBO information” to the business it’s onboarding. The software then cross-references that data with sanctions records and other relevant documentation to look for potential discrepancies or issues of concern.
LC: We work out our pricing in discussion with individual end users. As a hub that sits in the middle of a variety of different data providers, we have efficiencies of scale that put us in a strong negotiating position – but we pass on the underlying savings through our low-cost cloud infrastructure.
LC: We’re aiming to empower people in any sort of compliance or risk function with better data. And that has a genuinely global dimension – particularly for firms that are seeking to do business in emerging or unfamiliar markets. We have corporate clients who have asked us to search for small, limited companies in Morocco, Hungary and Ghana, and we’ve found them instantly.
Matt Packer is a freelance business, finance and leadership journalist This article was taken from the Issue 2, 2022 edition of The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, log in to view the full issue or sign up for eAffiliate membership
