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Under the Hood of the Global Payments System: Complexity

By July 14, 2020No Comments

How TIS helped The Adecco Group harmonize payment, reporting and bank account management processes.

So, you need to make payments? Sounds simple, but once you look under the hood of the global payments apparatus—which has developed differently in different places for different currencies—you will discover separate layers of complexity. That’s according to Joerg Wiemer, co-founder and CEO of Treasury Intelligence Solutions, or TIS.

Put simply, there are three different sources of complexity.

  1. The connection and integration of the ERP and the bank system is incomplete, resulting in the use of multiple e-banking tools and a cumbersome cash visibility process.
  2. Payment formats, despite efforts to harmonize them, are not fully standardized, resulting in more time-consuming setup processes and/or costly payment fixes.
  3. Communication options like APIs are more like green bananas than the ripe fruit they are currently made out to be. Add to these the increased frequency of fraud attempts targeting the payments function. 

High jump. The combination of these factors makes it hard for a treasury management system (TMS) to truly meet payment needs. And that’s before you consider that you will always need to make payments. A TMS, TIS suggests, can be a great “all-arounder” but is still like an Olympic decathlete in terms of required functionalities compared to the superior, focused expertise of a sprinter, long-distance runner, high jumper or javelin thrower.

A simplification case. At a recent meeting of the Tech20 High Growth Edition, NeuGroup for treasurers of high-growth tech companies, TIS co-presented a payments simplification case with a client, The Adecco Group. 

  • Adecco is a Fortune Global 500 recruitment and staffing agency based in Zurich, Switzerland, which operates 5,100 branches in eight regions and 60 countries. Over 60% of its EUR 23.4 billion FY2019 revenues came from Western Europe, and 19% from North America.
  • While the business is relatively stable and has some offsetting/countercyclical elements, 75% of revenues come from temporary staffing solutions with “retail-like” margins, i.e., not that generous. With processes involving up to 700,000 individuals at any given time, the emphasis is naturally on operating efficiency.
  • This entails digitization and automation in timesheets, recruitment (e.g., candidate portals), documentation, administration and, of course, payments. 

The handover. The payments function, often managed by treasury, is a handover point from many stakeholders, including treasury itself, accounting, shared services, IT or value-added process owners, and a variety of legal entities. It is similar at Adecco. The objectives of Adecco’s transformation journey are focused on:

  • Global cash visibility in the TMS, Kyriba.
  • Connection to all banks globally using TIS as the service bureau, ensuring communication efficiency (SWIFT, host-to-host, EBICS, BACS) depending on volume and complexity of local business needs.
  • Improved and harmonized payment, reporting and bank account management processes via a single, bank-independent e-banking system, provided by TIS (over 10,000 banks are connected via TIS’s cloud platform)—while also achieving compliance, bank-signature governance, risk reduction and cash centralization via pooling arrangements.  

A complicating factor is payroll payments: Salary and wage payments come from human resource systems where local rules and regulations for employee protections and taxes drive local differences, making this type of payment hard to harmonize.

The business case? Depending on your starting point, a “very high” ROI can be achieved primarily by:

  • Building in the ability to choose the most efficient communication option (bullet 2 above) for each payment. Over 90% of the traffic can go directly via non-SWIFT channels, meaning it’s cheaper: SWIFT has transaction-based pricing and TIS has “value-based” pricing where higher complexity means higher pricing (the number of bank accounts or ERPs is a proxy for complexity). But part of the TIS value proposition is reducing complexity with their project implementation.
  • Overcoming format-error driven payment delays (and costly fixes) with the use of TIS’s continuously updated and maintained payments “format library.” 

Success factors. Like many project stories, success lies in the effective coordination and collaboration of people.

  • Senior management sets the tone by driving change and expectations; also required is committed involvement from internal controls, compliance and IT/security, and strong governance from business, finance and treasury leadership.  

Test, test and test some more. For an end-to-end (E2E) process approach to be successful, test, test and retest all the formats and pathways thoroughly. And include deliberate errors to make testing as robust as possible.

Next up: From batch to instant payments. TIS does not consider APIs quite ready for prime time yet, and cites country-by-country differences (apps, clearing systems, amount thresholds and the varying API libraries banks have) as the primary reasons. They are nevertheless a big development and will bring many benefits in time.

  • People use Adecco’s app to find jobs; when their work is done and approved, nothing really stands in the way of settling the payment for that work.
  • “So we envision moving from batch to instant payments,” André van der Toorn, senior vp of treasury at the Adecco Group, said. Adecco’s associates (employees for whom Adecco is the employer of record) may be keen to accept that, even if it means they will get paid slightly less. Instant payments may come very soon, based on the success of a live test with a digital client in a remote part of the world.

Antony Michels

Author Antony Michels

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