TOMATO CATCH-UP: Newsletter Issue 174 - July 2014

Your monthly resource on working capital, process optimization and issues relating to the world of corporate treasurers, IT professionals and bankers!

Introduction:

One of the more prominent topics in corporate finance and IT involves the consolidation and harmonization of payments. In this newsletter, Martin answers questions we routinely get and we highlight findings about this trend. Another trendy topic involves innovation, lately especially in relation to banking services. Then again, most people in an organization, including bankers, treasury and IT staff, are constantly faced with non-technical issues such as how to make decisions, how to deal with underperformers, or how to strike a life-work balance. Today’s newsletter deals with all these topics.

Enjoy the variety!

Your Tomato
Regula Spottl and the Tomato Team

 

Topics

 

Is Swift Score a Good Payment Software for a Corporate?

Clients ask us these questions again and again: Is Swift Score a good payment software for a corporate? Or is there something similar and just as effective or even better?

Here’s Martin Schneider’s advice: Swift makes sense if you prefer to execute all company payments in all your legal entities via one channel to few banks. The basics are ONE ERP system such as SAP 6.0, Oracle, or Microsoft Dynamic etc. throughout the whole corporation. If that represents your accounting systems, evaluate and connect this single ERP with a single bank connection or with the few banks you work with! Internal audit and internal control system (ICS) will have better control over all the payments.

Another option is to work with good transaction bank systems such as Deutsche Bank, HSBC, BNP, ING and Citibank.

One more option is to evaluate and channel your payments via TIS or Cogon. These systems relay your payments to the banks concerned. This may also require a Swift license from your side.

For all variants of the above, the hassle with local e-banking and changing signatures of changing staff will also disappear.

For further information, visit our pdf “Return on Investment by Workflow Tuning with a Decentralized Payment Factory” or feel free to call Martin Schneider at 044 814 2001 for an opinion on your situation.

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Trend zur Zentralisierung des Zahlungsverkehrs

Nach der Einführung von SEPA und damit der Harmonisierung des Euro-Zahlungsverkehrs ist es einfach, den Zahungsverkehr zu zentralisieren und zu konsolidieren. Corporates versprechen sich mit diesen Massnahmen mehr Effizienz, Transparenz und Kosteneinsparungen.

Der Trearurer Bericht „Nach Sepa: Zahlungsverkehr auf Zentralisierungskurs“ in der Ausgabe vom 3.7.14. fasst die Diskussionen der 110 Teilnehmer, die am 2. Cash Management Campus teilnahmen.

Martin Schneider’s Kommentar:
Ein Trend zur Zentralierung beobachten wir vor allem bei grossen Corporates mit über 5 Mrd Umsatz. Bei unseren Projekten mit 200 Mio bis 3 Mrd. Umsatz ist die dezentrale Payment Factory das übliche Ziel. Die Zahlungen werden wie bisher lokal ausgelöst; aber mit moderner Technik sieht das Corporarte Headquarter die lokalen Zahlungsaktivitäten und ist entsprechend auf Inflows und Outflows vorbereitet.

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Ongoing Issues Treasurers Face: Part 5

Installment 5 in our monthly series “Treasurers’ 5 Items Plan” offers 5 Common Misunderstandings between the Treasurer and the CFO. Again, these suggestions are as valid as they were in 2005 when we composed them.

  • Unclear allocation of tasks and responsibilities.
  • Compensation of the treasury team based on randomly allocated, performance-based criteria specified the CFO.
  • Lack of loyalty by the treasurer to the CFO due to personal reasons.
  • CFO’s fear to lose his position to an aspiring treasurer.
  • Mismanaged information flow down the hierarchy.

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SumUP von UBS: Erste Eindrücke

Letzten Monat beschrieb Prof. Dr. Andreas Dietrich, Hochschule Luzern, die Digitalisierung im Private Banking, die UBS für Anfang 2015 plant. Diesen Monat hat er im Blog “Mobile Payment – UBS kooperiert mit SumUp” seine Erfahrung mit einer Demoversion von SumUp PIN+ beschrieben.

Prof. Dietrich erklärt, wie SumUp funkitioniert (inkl. Screen shots des Zahlungsvorgangs und des mobilen Kartenterminal der Firma SumUpzz), für wen das Angebot interessant ist und die Rolle von UBS.

Sein Fazit:

  • Die Idee von mobilen Kartenterminals findet er vor allem für kleine oder mobile Geschäfte interessant.
  • Die Herausforderung ist, Unternehmen darauf hinzuweisen und die Skepsis der Händler überzeugend zu widerlegen.
  • UBS geht mit der Lösung ein begrenztes Risiko ein. Sollte sich SumUp nicht durchsetzen, verliert UBS nicht viel.

Christian Ruf von der Universität St.Gallen, Institut fuer Wirtschaftsentwicklung,  hat SumUp auch getestet. Siehe Blog UBS SumUp PIN+ angetestet - Das mobile Kartenterminal in der Schweiz

If you’re more comfortable in English, read SumUp launches ‘first’ proprietary chip & PIN device in Europe

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IFZ Konferenz „Innovative Angebote im Retail Banking“: Übersicht

In seinem Blog, offeriert Prof. Dr. Andreas Dietrich, Hochschule Luzern-Wirtschaft eine Zusammenfassung der Vorträge von der Fachtagung des Instituts für Finanzdienstleistungen Zug (IFZ) der Hochschule Luzern vom 26.6.14.

Laut Prof. Dietrich ist die Innovationskraft vieler Banken tief. Management ist zu viel mit dem “Tagesgeschäft, den Regulatorien oder Kostensenkungsmassnahmen absorbiert.” Sie sind also eher reaktiv ohne sich auf die Zukunft vorzubereiten.

Zusammenfassungen der Vortragsthemen:

  • Hypothekenvermittler
  • Crowdfunding
  • Personal Finance Management: Hype oder ein Muss für die Banken?
  • Anlagegeschäft im Retail Banking: Zwei neue Geschäftsmodelle im Anlagebereich

Details im Blog Rückblick auf die Konferenz „Innovative Angebote im Retail Banking

Der NZZ Artikel Neue Konkurrenz für Banken hat über die Konferenz berichtet.

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Book Tip: Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

The book “Collective Genius”, to be published on July 10 by the Harvard Press, explains why some organizations innovate again and again while many just can’t. Innovation is not the result of exceptional creative talent or the right investments. It’s the result of a distinctive type of leadership that “unleashes and harnesses the ‘collective genius’ of the people in the organization”, the authors explain.

A 22 page excerpt gives you a taste of what the authors found after studying innovative groups across the globe: “Instead of trying to come up with a vision and make innovation happen themselves, a leader of innovation creates a place—a context, an environment—where people are willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires.”

The book offers concrete, practical guidance needed to build innovation into the fabric of a business.

Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation by leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback.

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Data-Driven Businesses Should Trust Intuition too

Data analytics technology is a key driver for effective decision making. Still, intuition plays an important role as well. That notion is supported by a study on decision making, which resulted in the report Decisive action: How businesses make decisions and how they could do it better (pdf)

Results of the study indicates that 59% of participants said that they rely on data to make decisions, 32% depend on collaboration as much as possible, and only 10 percent said they mainly rely on intuition.

"Despite the apparent popularity of data-driven decision-making, intuition is in fact valued highly," says Jane Bird, author of the EIU report. "Nearly 75% of respondents said they trust their own intuition when it comes to decision-making. Even among the data-driven decision-makers, 68% agreed with that statement."

The link between data-driven decisions and human intuition is described best by the question how people would respond if the available data contradicted their gut feeling. 57% said that if confronted with that situation, they would start by reanalyzing the data; 30% answered that they would collect more data and only 10 percent said they would take the course of action suggested by the data.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) questioned 174 senior managers and executives from around the world and from a range of industries for this research.

Full story in the CIO.com article Even Data-Driven Businesses Should Cultivate Intuition

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Helping Underperformers: Productive Intervention

To have an underperformer in the team is frustrating; time consuming and can demoralize the rest of the team. In the book The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, Joseph Weintraub, a professor of management and organizational behavior at Babson College and co-author of the book offers stages of productive intervention, dos and don’ts and case studies.

In the Harvard Business School Blog “How to Help an Underperformer, Amy Gallo summarizes Weintraub’s principles as

  • Take action as soon as possible — the sooner you intervene the better.
  • Consider how you might be contributing to the performance issues.
  • Make a concrete, measurable plan for improvement.
  • Don’t forget to follow up — monitor their progress regularly.
  • Don’t waste your time trying to coach someone who is unwilling to admit that there’s an issue.
  • Don’t talk about specific performance issues with others on the team.

Details in HBS Blog “How to Help an Underperformer”

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Achieving Work-Life Balance by Hiring the Right People

If you are a manager or plan to be one in the future, you work very hard at any time work demands it. Your work makes it hard to strike a work-life balance. Well, you shouldn’t sacrifice your private life and family for your job.

Tim Elkins, CIO at Primelending, suggests the key to striking work-life balance is to hire the right people, trust them to do what they are hired to do, and “give them not only responsibility and accountability but the leeway to do their job and do it well.”

You have to have the confidence that your people can handle problems as well or better than you can. If you have to look over their shoulder, you don’t have the right people. You also don’t want to ask them to do something that prevents them from doing what they know is right for the company and the department, says Elkins. Details in Enterpriseproject.com…

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It’s about Work/Life Blending, not Balance

In their effort to strike a work-life balance, many people have been protecting their hours, days and holidays. In a strict sense, work-life balance really can mean getting home on time to be with family or foster hobbies; don’t work on weekends and don’t work on vacations.

Well, that narrow view of work-life balance is over for a lot of people as a “People-Inspired Security study involving 4,500 European office workers” by Samsung found. The research findings include:

  • 75% reported they do personal tasks in work time, and 77% do work in personal time
  • 38% believe work-life blending enables them do more work in the same amount of time
  • 32% say it helps them manage their personal lives better and it makes them less stressed
  • 36% say that blending work and personal activities on one device makes them feel more productive

Similar suggestions are often found in articles on working with Millennials. These findings have important implications for business. Full story in Samsung at Work…

Work-life balance and work-life blending is not really a contradiction. Work-life balance implies that a person has a good balance between the two. It’s WHEN a person works or “lives” that has changed. It’s a good thing when people can do the work when they are in top form for doing it and “live” when that works best. Your thoughts?

Ziehen Sie deutsch vor?
Die Netzwoche berichtete über die Samsung Studie in Wie Arbeit und Freizeit stärker verschmelzen

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From the Desk of Regula Spottl, Greensboro, NC

In the blog on UBS SumUp PIN+ Christian Ruf, Universität St.Gallen, mentions Groupon, which connects the card terminal with an “interesting CRM and accounting system”. I don’t know how popular Groupon is in Switzerland and how long it has been in operation.

In the U.S., Groupon is very popular among consumers. For many companies it has been a negative experience though. Their reason for offering Groupon is to get the customers in the door, expecting that if they like the service or product, they will come back. Well, that’s not what’s happening. Many consumers look out for anything cheap, so when they plan to shop or go out for a meal etc. they look for the best Groupon deal. They do this each time they consume. So many companies simply lose money on Groupon.

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