There have always been ‘free’ offers e.g. buy three get the fourth free. With the COVID-19 crisis we are seeing all sorts of corporate treasury suppliers offering, so-called, free packages/services:

• BELLIN is offering the modules that cover cash management, forecasting/liquidity planning and recording and managing financial instruments, which are pivotal topics during the current COVID-19 global pandemic. Users will be able to have full visibility and control of cash and liquidity, see
• TreasuryXpress are offering a Treasury Technology Relief Program which will offer free subscriptions during this crisis to a new self-service treasury management tool they have developed, see
• Cashforce – crisis package. (More details later.)

The driving forces behind these offers are to:

• provide real support in the short term
• generate new business and new clients in the longer term.

But corporate treasury departments need to ask:

• how flexible is the new offer?
• can I customise it to my company’s/group’s specific needs?
• are there any support charges?
• what happens at the end of the ‘free’ period?

How IBM and Honeywell are helping

Multi-national corporations such as IBM and Honeywell work on a different scale and in a different way from these three companies.

IBM’s responses to COVID-19 is very different. It has the resources to share —supercomputing power, virus tracking and an AI assistant to answer citizens’ questions. IBM’s initiatives include:

• The COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium which is bringing together the Federal government, industry, and academic leaders to provide access to the world’s most powerful high-performance computing resources in support of COVID-19 research.  It delivers over 402 petaflops, 105,334 nodes, 3,539,044 CPU cores, 41,286 GPUs, and counting.
• Trusted information and business intelligence
• Business solutions to help the development of COVID-19 solutions.

Honeywell’s main initiative is to make N95 face mask - a respirator that protects the individual who’s wearing it with 95 per cent efficiency. An N95 mask is specifically built with materials that filter out particles in the air.

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CTMfile take: The question with all ‘free’ offers is: What are the consequences of taking the offer?