Photo of Olivier Smekens, Breitling and Yannic Schwendener, Kantox.
Olivier Smekens
Global Head of Treasury
Switzerland
Breitling is a Swiss luxury watchmaker founded in 1884 in Saint-Imier, Switzerland, by Léon Breitling. Breitling’s HQ is based in Grenchen and their production is based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
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The challenge
Breitling’s most significant treasury challenge was managing its FX exposure amid unprecedented global expansion resulting from a business model transformation. Following a private equity acquisition in 2017, the company doubled its turnover as it pivoted from wholesale-only distribution to a multichannel strategy encompassing own‑branded boutiques, franchisee partnerships and traditional wholesale operations.
From 2021, more than 140 boutiques were launched across all major continents in just three years. Breitling now counts close to 300 boutiques globally. Strong growth amplified the level of FX complexity, introducing new currencies, diverse market dynamics and higher transaction volumes.
Led by Olivier Smekens, the lean treasury team faced limited capacity to manage the surge in FX exposures.
Manual processes consumed critical resources and introduced execution risk. The catalyst for change was the continued appreciation of CHF amid global tensions and when management designated FX as a top five risk to the business.
The solution
To mitigate FX risk while transforming operational efficiency, Breitling automated and enhanced its layered hedging programme powered by Kantox Dynamic Hedging.
This solution ‘builds’ hedge rates progressively through automated, successive layer execution – systematically reducing FX rate volatility while enabling cash flow visibility.
Addressing the Swiss Franc premium challenge, working in partnership with Breitling’s treasury team, Kantox calibrated the programme to tackle a critical pain point: the cost burden Swiss corporations face due to most currencies trading at a forward discount to CHF.
A granular hedging schedule minimised exposure to costly long-dated forward contracts.
Crucially, the solution is bank-agnostic, allowing treasury to retain control and trade with whichever bank offers the best rate, ensuring flexibility and visibility. Kantox Dynamic Hedging captures spreadsheet-based forecasts from Breitling’s treasury and routes the corresponding FX trades. This ease of execution allows the treasury team to remain focused on driving value, not managing technology.
The solution’s differentiating capability lies in continuous, real-time market monitoring. This dynamic intelligence layer injects market-responsive elements into the programme, transforming static hedging into an opportunity‑aware process.
Best practice and innovation
The judges commended Breitling as a complex and impactful hedging strategy that enhanced predictability and reduced cash flow variability, optimised costs and boosted operational excellence.
Modern treasury teams navigate shifting landscapes of FX volatility, forecast accuracy and interest rate environments. Static hedging cannot keep pace. At Breitling, FX hedging operations were limited to standard office hours, reducing Olivier Smekens’ ability to act on favourable rate movements. This created missed opportunities and added timing risk to the FX management strategy.
The Kantox solution reimagines corporate FX risk management, delivering best practices such as:
Continuous market tracking.
Intelligent cost optimisation.
Opportunistic value capture.
Unbounded scalability.
Enterprise-wide visibility.
Complete process automation.
By removing resource-intensive processes, these innovations create critical bandwidth for high-impact, treasury-led initiatives: developing forward-looking FX policy frameworks, supporting pricing intelligence for commercial teams and delivering actionable risk insights to C-suite leadership.
Key benefits
Cost savings.
Process efficiencies.
Exceptional implementation (budget/time).
Improved key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics.
Improved visibility.
Increased automation.
Manual intervention reduced.
Reduction in errors.
From day one, Breitling’s FX risk management transformation delivered quantifiable value creation across three critical dimensions:
Enhanced predictability.
Optimisation.
Operational excellence.
With only a small treasury team responsible for managing cash, risk and liquidity across multiple jurisdictions, time and resource constraints were a critical concern. That’s where the automated FX risk management project with Kantox comes into play. The project involved not only a shift in tools, but also in mindset and governance.
Treasury secured buy-in from senior leadership and mobilised collaboration across accounting and local entities. Understanding the exposures to currency risk at a granular level and revenue in foreign currencies required a serious input from every local subsidiary. Accounting was closely involved from the start, especially in ensuring that hedge accounting treatment was aligned with business operations.
Another key learning was that simplicity doesn’t mean compromise. The implementation was remarkably straightforward, requiring no IT overhaul or major internal infrastructure changes.
The lesson here was to clearly communicate the long‑term value and remove emotion from the process by trusting in automation. By shifting the burden of FX management from individuals to systems, the finance team achieved not only better outcomes but also lasting confidence from stakeholders.
Mathieu Lacour
CEO, Kantox
Kantox warmly congratulates Breitling on being named a Highly Commended Winner in the Best Foreign Exchange Solution category at the 2026 Adam Smith Awards. This is a testament to the foresight and vision of Breitling’s treasury team, who recognised early on that automation was the key to managing FX risk at scale. By choosing Kantox’s scalable and market-responsive solutions, Breitling’s team navigated an ambitious global expansion while staying true to its broader efficiency-driven strategy. We’re proud to be part of this success story.
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The Adam Smith Awards are the industry benchmark for best practice and innovation in corporate treasury. The 2026 awards attracted 635 nominations. To find out more please visit treasurytoday.com/adam-smith-awards
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