Our Senior Product Manager Cash visibility, Forecasting - Jan Willem - explains

Posts
February 20, 2022

TreasurUp introduces a groundbreaking feature that seems so logical to have in a bank’s FX platform, but is missing in most hedging platforms that banks are offering their corporate client base.

The so-called ‘use case’ is seemingly small but occurs so often that banks using TreasurUp’s white label FX module will greatly benefit from this feature as it simply occurs all the time within both small, medium and large companies.

Companies require the ability to change their FX hedges

Internationally active companies in particular have a lot of uncertain cash flows. Based on user feedback it turns out many companies are looking for simple solutions to amend value dates on existing FX hedges. With the ‘change date’ solution TreasurUp provides a simple approach for closing the gap between FX risk and liquidity management and for matching the timing of a hedge and the related liquidity management.

Suppose a European company expects to receive a USD 500,000 payment from a customer based in the US before 30 June 2021. To hedge its USD risk, the company buys an FX Forward contract from its bank, where it commits to sell USD 500,000 on 30 June 2021 and to receive EUR 420,000 in return on the same date.

Three weeks later the client informs the company that the payment will be delayed with 3 months. The company now needs to take action, because it still needs to sell USD 500,000 to the bank on 30 June 2021.

What action can the company take in order to change the settlement date of his trade position from 30 June 2021 to 30 September 2021?

How it’s done now with most banks

The company enters into an FX Swap (either at market rate or at historical rate; depending on the region and bank), where it offsets the original position settling on 30 June 2021 – buying USD 500,000 on the near leg and selling USD 500,000 on the far leg settling 30 September 2021.

The downsides of this method are:

  • It is difficult, sometimes even counter-intuitive: one of the swap legs needs to offset the amount settled on the original settlement date;
  • Insufficient information: the new FX Swap does not automatically link to the original FX Forward contract in the administration. As a consequence, users may not have sufficient information on when certain positions will settle;
  • Economical uncertainty: the EUR amount they receive for USD 500,000 is not fixed. The spot rate will be a fixed rate, but the forward component can fluctuate.

How TreasurUp makes it easy

The mission was simple: create an intuitive user journey that allows users to easily change the date of their outstanding FX hedge settlements whilst maintaining full clarity on different settlement dates in time and amounts settling.

TreasurUp has managed to build a feature that meets all of these requirements and proven it through extensive validations with users. 

The result: a front-end where users only have to select the hedge they want to change, enter the amount they want to move and the date to which they want to move it forward or backward. TreasurUp takes care of the rest (like offsetting the swaps) and strips all unnecessary complexity for the user. 

An impression:

treasurup-change-settlement

Available for all bank clients of TreasurUp to offer to their corporate users

TreasurUp will launch the Change Date feature at the end of February 2021. The new module is built in such a way that it can cope with regional differences but still offers a consistent user-friendly interface.

For existing clients TreasurUp has set up deep dive sessions to learn about local and regional requirements and what is needed from its price platform to make it work.

If you’re interested in more information, we are more than happy to demo this feature.