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Achieving Treasury Potential through Treasury System Hosting

Bo Jorgensenby Bo Jørgensen, General Manager, Head of Group Treasury, FLSmidth & Co. A/S 

Leading supplier of equipment and services to the global cement and minerals industries FLSmidth has been a long-standing user of its treasury management system, SunGard’s AvantGard Quantum. The company was faced with the ongoing difficulty of securing resources from the company’s internal IT company, which was preventing treasury from taking advantage of essential new functionality. In this article, Bo Jørgensen, Head of Group Treasury describes how he and his team opted to outsource management of the solution to take advantage of a more responsive service and specific expertise. In addition, FLSmidth has been able to leverage its treasury infrastructure to streamline bank communication for both cash and trade.

Key points

Treasury organisation

We have a centralised treasury team of five people based in Copenhagen. Treasury acts as an in-house bank for around 50 subsidiaries globally, providing a full range of cash, FX funding and investment services. To support our treasury operations, we have used AvantGard Treasury (Quantum) solution for more than a decade.

IT challenges

We recognised that in order to manage the changing demands of a dynamic organisation effectively, it was essential to ensure that our treasury solution, AvantGard Quantum was well-maintained. This included upgrading the system regularly to take advantage of new functional, technical and usability benefits. The challenge, however, was that our internal IT department, based in our shared service centre in Chennai, India, lacked knowledge and expertise in the system so upgrades were difficult and time-consuming. Furthermore, as our treasury is a small department, it was not easy to secure the necessary resourcing ahead of system projects with a larger number of users, despite the business-critical nature of our activities.