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Alexander Hamilton Awards

Automating Cash Visibility in Emerging Markets

Why Microsoft won the 2019 Silver Alexander Hamilton Award for its best practices in restricted/emerging markets.

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Treasury innovation is a point of pride at Microsoft. The centralized treasury group serves more than 450 subsidiaries in 118 countries around the world, managing over 1,300 bank accounts distributed among 85 different banks. Not surprisingly, cash visibility is a perpetual challenge. In the past decade, Microsoft treasury has pushed to achieve greater visibility into bank accounts and subsidiaries’ investments.

“We have a very good idea of what and where our balances are,” explains senior treasury manager Dave Piechowski, “but unlike a lot of large treasuries, we don’t maintain a single companywide treasury management system. We’ve built our own Cash Forecasting & Analytics Reporting [CFAR] solution. And one of the things we’ve been working on, companywide, is maximizing the amount of information that feeds directly from our banks into our ERP [enterprise resource planning] and CFAR systems.”

To that end, Microsoft obtained its own SWIFT Bank Identifier Code (BIC). This enabled many banks to automatically feed statements into CFAR. “We pushed our banking partners to provide daily statements in MT940, if not XML, format so that our system could pull in rich account data,” Piechowski says. The goal was to be able to analyze trends in cash flow and collections. “You can get a lot more granular when you have the full swath of data,” he adds.

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Meg Waters

Meg Waters

Meg Waters is the editor in chief of Treasury & Risk. She is the former editor in chief of BPM Magazine and the former managing editor of Business Finance.

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