Companies don't have a good grasp of what's going on in their foreign exchange (FX) processes, and most don't have plans to change that fact in the near future. Those are the key results of a series of polls conducted during a recent Treasury & Risk webcast.

Among the 121 survey respondents, more than 40 percent said their FX risk management processes have "blind spots"—areas in which they don't have visibility into FX exposures—and more than 20 percent said they don't know whether they have blind spots. (See Figure 1, below.) This is a somewhat alarming statistic, and companies should be paying heed, according to Andy Gage, vice president of strategic market development for FiREapps.

"The fact that 64 percent of the polled corporates are either unsure or said 'yes' to having blind spots is not overly surprising, but it is dangerous," Gage says. "Corporates with a blind spot do not have a full grasp on what could present itself as a surprise—positive or negative—and thus do not have all of the information they need to effectively manage currency risk inside their business."