Photo of Ben O’Higgins, Treasury Analyst.

Revolutionising the bank guarantee process with technology

The challenge

Takeda was seeking a multi-bank trade finance solution that would enable the company to manage its bank guarantee process effectively using a centralised and integrated approach.

The legacy process involved many local finance teams requesting bank guarantees individually and following different methods with each bank. This resulted in time-consuming, inefficient, paper-based processes, as well as a lack of visibility over the company’s bank guarantees and no centralised reporting.

In addition, bank guarantees were issued locally across multiple regions with no way of viewing these guarantees on a single platform. This led to delays in issuance, a higher than necessary cost to the business and the risk of missing deadlines for tenders and other bank guarantee delivery timelines.

The solution

Led by Takeda’s Assistant Treasurer, Urs Berger and supported by Ben O’Higgins and Meliosa O’Byrne, the company’s Financial Risk Management team selected ELCY as its bank guarantee management platform. Central to the choice was the platform’s simple, user-friendly interface and integrated nature of the solution.

Using the software, Takeda can now centrally request and amend bank guarantees, which are delivered and stored in one location with the platform serving as a global database.

Bank guarantee requests are created in ELCY, approved through the four-eyes principle, and then released to the banks using SWIFT messaging. The software provides Takeda with a standardised method to manage its bank guarantees issued to external beneficiaries, replacing the various platforms and manual, paper-based methods offered previously by individual banks.

Best practice and innovation

By implementing the platform with its core banks and issuing all new bank guarantees through the web-based solution, Takeda was able to centralise and simplify almost all of its bank guarantees into one global system of records.

The solution was rolled out in a short period of time, as Takeda only needed to onboard banks that were already fully integrated into the ELCY platform and able to issue guarantees globally.

In addition, Takeda was able to establish global umbrella credit facilities between its central treasury entities and a small number of core banks, under which bank guarantees can be issued on behalf of local entities.

Key benefits

The benefits of the solution included the following:

• The straight through process allows Takeda to communicate with its guarantee issuing banks using one platform, while the whole process can be centrally controlled by treasury. The standardised process means that the issuance and amendment of bank guarantees is now significantly more efficient and more accurate.
• The simple and cutting-edge technology reduces the average time taken to issue bank guarantees, especially as Takeda no longer has to request wet signatures for new guarantee requests and amendments. It has also increased the number of guarantee facilities to which the local teams have access.
• As all guarantees are kept in a single and central platform, system-generated reports can be run for the entire global portfolio, improving the access to complete data and accuracy of reporting.
• The centralised and standardised guarantee process means that Takeda now have a full audit trail of all guarantees if required.
• The solution was straightforward to implement and allows flexible scaling, meaning that new banks and entities can be onboarded quickly.

Takeda has been able to streamline its guarantee fees by setting up global umbrella facilities with competing core banks, resulting in reduction of bank guarantee fees of more than US$500m.

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