Kyriba has had a meteoric rise over the last decade, investing heavily (raising over over $100M) and now has over 2000 clients and 65,000 users in 100 countries. It recently announced it is on track to surpass $100MM in sales bookings by the end of 2018.

Yesterday Kyriba announced it had reached an agreement to acquire FiREapps, a leader in enterprise currency management, in a deal which, they claim, “creates the most advanced and effective solution for seamlessly managing the entire lifecycle of global foreign exchange risk.”

The agreement combines two suppliers of cloud-based treasury and risk management.

Managing FX risk

“FX volatility is a major strategic challenge for treasury organizations,” said Kevin Permenter, senior research analyst for enterprise applications at IDC, a leading technology analyst firm. “Financial leaders doing business in multiple countries should be looking to adopt a more holistic approach to their global risk management strategies.”  

The acquisition, Kyriba claim, “will create a highly advanced solution for managing global FX risk, including data gathering and consolidation, reporting, analytics, decision support, payments, hedge accounting and more. The combined result is a faster, more efficient way to manage FX exposures than using old school processes involving spreadsheets and manual data gathering across multiple systems.”

The FX market is one of the largest financial markets in the world and has become increasingly volatile thanks to geopolitical events such as Brexit, trade wars and continued pressure from hyper-inflationary economics. According to FiREapps data, global corporations lost at least $39 billion during the first half of 2018, up from $14 billion during the same period the year before. The analysis, from FiREapps’ “Q2 2018 Currency Impact Report,” sampled data from 1,200 publicly held multinational companies worldwide. 

Kyriba and FIREapps 

In a published case study, treasury executives from a multibillion-dollar US consumer goods company shared the results of using Kyriba and FiREapps to better manage their cash, liquidity, payments and currency exposure across 38 ERP systems, 25 different business units and dozens of global banks. The initial result was a dramatic reduction in foreign currency net losses, from $90M (cumulative) in 2013-2015 down to $2M in 2016, and a near doubling of cash visibility to 95%.

Comments from CEOs:

• “The market has been asking for a single-vendor solution to manage the entire breadth of FX currency exposure,” said Wolfgang Koester, founder and CEO of FiREapps. “By joining with Kyriba, we fill that gap with a highly differentiated solution, while also aligning with world-class capabilities for cash and risk management, payments, working capital optimization and more.”
• “The acquisition of FiREapps deepens our commitment to helping senior financial executives be more agile and efficient in managing all types of risk, including FX exposures,” said Jean-Luc Robert, chairman and CEO of Kyriba. 

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CTMfile take: Over the last three years TMS suppliers have been widening their focus to include all types of risk with their in-house solution, e.g. Kyriba’s acquisition of FiREapps, GTreasury’s acquisition of Visual Risk (April 2018) and ION Group’s acquisition of Reval (November 2016) to be, as Robert says, “More agile and efficient in managing all types of risk, including FX exposures.” But increased coverage does not mean a better solution, the issue will always be: how well and seamlessly does the so-called integrated solution really work?