By Joseph Neu During NeuGroup’s second meeting of the fall season, Global Cash and Banking Group members discussed a variety of cash and payment topics in sessions sponsored by TIS. Below are a few takeaways I wanted to share. Cash forecasting: one size doesn’t fit all. One member shared the conclusion reached after six months of benchmarking to find an appropriate third-party vendor to improve cash forecasting, that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The approach has to be tailored to each…
September 17, 2020
Weighing Reward vs. Risk, Cash Investors Make Moves or Hunker Down
Some take advantage of opportunities to pick up yield; others play it safer and stick to government money funds.The Covid crisis has illuminated where corporate cash investors sit on the risk tolerance spectrum—a point underscored in a Virtual Interactive Session sponsored by ICD this week that gave some NeuGroup members a clearer picture of where they stand relative to their peers.Career risk vs. opportunity for yield. Hearing what some peers have done “reinforces how conservative we really are,” said one…
September 17, 2020
Talking Shop: The Philosophy of Fees on Revolving Credit Facilities
Question: “Do you pay the same arrangement fee for a 364-day revolver renewal as for a 5-year renewal?” “We executed our first 364-day revolving credit facility last year (in addition to a five-year) and it is time to renew the 364-day facility. We only have 50% of the banks participating in the 364-day renewal. We were thinking to pay a proportionate amount of arrangement fees to the lead banks. I don’t think they have to do very much since we…
A majority of companies in a recent Deloitte poll say that they are already in stabilization or growth mode. Working capital is an issue never far from a treasurer’s thoughts, and the uncertainty the pandemic has brought to corporate cash flows has made it only more relevant. A recent survey by Deloitte of 1,500 C-Suite and other executives revealed what Anthony Jackson, a Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory principal, called unexpected results. A majority of respondents said their companies are…
A member’s quest to improve cash visibility begins to bear fruit just as the crisis hits. “When there is a crisis, treasury becomes very important,” a member of the European Treasury Peer Group said at a recent meeting where he and a colleague shared their progress on a project to improve cash forecasting, in part by viewing cash as inventory to be optimized. Cash forecasting, a critical concern for treasury teams at all times, is especially important amid the extreme…
August 20, 2020
Balancing Act: The Realities of Working Capital Management
NeuGroup members and C2FO discuss the Fed, credit risk and negative cash conversion cycles. Working capital management has taken on increased significance during the pandemic, and two members of NeuGroup’s Tech20 Treasurers’ Peer Group discussed the subject with an executive from C2FO at a NeuGroup Virtual Interactive Session this week. Here are some takeaways from the session by NeuGroup founder and CEO Joseph Neu. The growing importance of data. C2FO’s platform is a great way to use working capital efficiently…
The pandemic is taking a toll on working capital, leading to more rationing of cash, an FEI survey says. Far fewer finance teams planned on cutting headcount in the second quarter of 2020 than in the first, according to a survey released this week by Financial Executives International in collaboration with Deloitte. Meanwhile, the percentage of companies reporting a drop in working capital balances in Q2 rose by a third as the pandemic took hold. The survey of 170 of FEI’s…
The benefits of using one TMS for treasury payments and retiring a homebuilt infrastructure. One member of NeuGroup’s Global Cash and Banking Group recently shared the benefits of using Kyriba as a payment factory that handles about 85% of his company’s treasury payments. The advantages boil down to saving time while improving controls, oversight, visibility and efficiency, he said.Ultimate goal. The treasury director said his company used Kyriba as a tool to achieve the primary goal of centralizing treasury operations…
A cash awareness culture results in better forecasting of future flows to support growth.Young tech companies thriving in the latter stages of a multi-year economic expansion when many investors had lots of cash to deploy can be forgiven for not always demonstrating disciplined cash preservation. “We are cash rich and our culture is not sensitive to cash,” as one member put it during a discussion of cash positioning and forecasting at a recent meeting of the Tech20 High Growth Edition.But…
August 11, 2020
Exploring Cashforce’s Forecasting Solution, Among Others
Bottoms-up, top-down, ERP or bank statements? During a recent discussion about cash forecasting at NeuGroup’s Global Cash and Banking Group, one member asked if any of her peers had done demos of solutions from Cashforce. Another member said his company had reached the point where Cashforce is “going to demo something” once an NDA is in place. “We have found them to be very open-minded,” the member said.That’s important because his company has decided it does not want a forecasting…