GTreasury acquires intercompany netting firm Coprocess

GTreasury, a treasury and risk management platform provider, has announced the acquisition of Coprocess, a provider of intercompany netting solutions. Adding intercompany netting to the GTreasury platform and ecosystem gives corporate treasurers the ability to streamline their settlement processes, cut costs by reducing payments and foreign exchange (FX) volumes, and add new automated efficiencies into their treasury workflows.

“GTreasury continues to look for ways to empower corporate treasurers to do their jobs more effectively, more efficiently, and with less cost to their organisations,” said Renaat Ver Eecke, CEO of GTreasury. “The complexities of doing business across countries and across banks continues to grow, and the technologies that treasurers rely on must keep up with that pace. Acquiring Coprocess does exactly that for our clients.”

Treasurers using Coprocess regularly see payments and FX volumes lowered by as much as 70%, while also benefiting from more centralised banking relationships and reduced float and complexity. Real-time intercompany reconciliation capabilities deliver visibility into intercompany transactions, interest, loans and treasury transactions - eliminating mismatches and facilitating automatic reporting. Fully centralised vendor payments further simplify often-costly and time-intensive treasury operations. The Coprocess solution is also highly configurable to businesses’ unique netting processes and organisational structures, and easily incorporates into treasurers’ existing architectures.

Combining the netting system with GTreasury’s cash, payments, FX, and risk management capabilities is designed to provide treasurers with an extensive end-to-end solution for optimising their treasury processes and workflows. The acquisition also continues to build the momentum of the GTreasury platform. 

“We saw record transaction volume flow though our treasury management ecosystem in 2020,” said Ver Eecke. “To continue to meet our clients’ needs, we’ve been signing key partnerships with banks and complementary technology providers, expanded our platform through new innovations like SmartPredictions, our AI-fueled cash forecasting, and executed on strategic acquisitions such as with Visual Risk and now Coprocess.”

 

EBA publishes final revised guidelines on money laundering and terrorist financing risk factors

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has published its final revised guidelines on money laundering (ML) and terrorist financing (TF) risk factors. The revisions take into account changes to the EU Anti Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Financing (AML/CFT) legal framework and address new ML/TF risks, including those identified by the EBA’s implementation reviews. In addition to strengthening financial institutions’ risk-based approaches to AML/CFT, the revision aims to support the development of more effective and consistent supervisory approaches where evidence suggested that divergent approaches continue to exist. 

The guidelines are addressed to both financial institutions and supervisory authorities. They set out factors that firms should consider when assessing the ML/TF risk associated with a business relationship or occasional transaction. In addition, they provide guidance on how financial institutions can adjust their customer due diligence measures to mitigate the ML/TF risk they have identified so as to make them more appropriate and proportionate. Finally, they support competent authorities’ AML/CFT supervision efforts when assessing the adequacy of firms’ risk assessments and AML/CFT policies and procedures.

In this revised version, the EBA strengthens the requirements on individual and business-wide risk assessments and customer due diligence (CDD) measures, adding new guidance on the identification of beneficial owners, the use of innovative solutions to identify and verify customers’ identities, and how financial institutions should comply with legal provisions on enhanced customer due diligence related to high-risk third countries. In addition, the EBA included new sectoral guidelines for crowdfunding platforms, corporate finance, account information service providers (AISPs) and payment initiation services providers (PISPs), and firms providing activities of currency exchanges offices. The revised guidelines also provide more details on terrorist financing risk factors. Together, the EBA says these changes will be conducive to the implementation by financial institutions of a more effective, risk-based approach to AML/CFT.

The EBA reiterates that there is no requirement for financial institutions to discontinue services to entire categories of customers that they associate with higher ML/TF risk (so-called ‘de-risking’): Instead, financial institutions should balance the need for financial inclusion with the need to mitigate and manage ML/TF risk. The guidelines aim to help financial institutions to achieve this balance. The EBA also stresses the need for supervisory authorities and financial institutions to enhance their understanding of tax crimes, as set out last year in the EBA’s Report on competent authorities’ approaches to tackling market integrity risks associated with dividend arbitrage schemes (EBA/REP/2020/15).

 

HSBC increases client control of liquidity investments 

HSBC has updated its Liquidity Investment Solutions (LIS) execution platform with the integration of Active Placement, enabling clients to take direct control of their surplus cash investments.

LIS provides HSBC’s corporate and institutional clients the ability to invest and redeem their excess cash across a number of investment options. Investments were initially made using a pre-defined investment policy, but the addition of Active Placement gives clients the flexibility to initiate control investments directly, or to invest passively using an automated cash sweep with their pre-defined rules.

With dual authorisation and email notifications, Active Placement provides clients with the necessary corporate governance controls to execute investments with a number of money market funds. An auto-settlement feature provides full integration and operational efficiency in the management and movement of surplus cash.

LIS is available via HSBCnet’s Liquidity Management Portal, a suite of visual analytics and self-service tools, including cash flow forecasting that provide clients with visibility and transparency in optimising their liquidity. LIS Active Placement is initially available to clients in the UK, Hong Kong and China. It will launch in the US and India in late March 2021.