Photo of Steve Elms, Citi, John Taxiarchos, Maria Gonzalez, Anna Kotina, Hasbro, Chris Jameson, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and James Mitchell, Reval.
This global cloud-based SaaS addresses this company’s fragmented technology and highly manual operations to gain greater visibility into the company cash and introduce a much more streamlined approach within treasury.
Martin R. Trueb
Senior Vice President & Treasurer
Hasbro is a global company committed to creating the world’s best play experiences, by leveraging its beloved brands, including Littlest Pet Shop, Magic: The Gathering, Monopoly, My Little Pony, Nerf, Play-Doh and Transformers, and premier partner brands.
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The challenge
Hasbro’s main objective was to unify its fragmented and highly manual operations to gain global visibility into cash, to strengthen oversight of its cash management, FX, intercompany loan and invoice management.
Martin Trueb, SVP and Treasurer, Hasbro, explains: “Given the seasonality of our business, FX risk management represents a more-than-average critical risk. We make commitments early on in the year that we do not realise until later in the year; our ability to lock-in margins in local currencies is paramount. Many of our foreign exchange exposures flow through our international treasury centre (ITC), so most of our international cash flow comes together there.”
The ITC is also Hasbro’s international in-house bank. It handles most of the incoming and outgoing information of its day-to-day funding outside of the Americas, and executes a global intercompany netting process on a monthly basis. In addition, where the company has been growing in terms of new operations – whether in India, China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa or Thailand – its treasury groups engage with local management to make sure bank accounts are opened and that they have access to local funding as needed. It also needs to ensure compliance with myriad local regulations, which are different around the world. In particular, the ITC was faced with an increasingly complex business environment for managing cash, netting and transactions for 55 entities, handling upwards of $1bn per month.
With growing regulatory issues around the likes of Dodd-Frank, Basel III and the BEPS initiative, the company was facing a requirement to provide increasingly detailed back-up accounting documentation.
The solution
Hasbro treasury created a more globally-aligned treasury organisation across three teams. This streamlined manual processes across cash and liquidity management, in-house banking and payments, FX trading and risk management, and hedge accounting. Treasury operations, ITC and capital markets groups now work on the same cloud-based platform.
Hasbro chose Reval to create a global cloud-based platform for all of treasury and risk management, including the provision of the necessary accounting and compliance information. While a global system was key, the team were also looking to maximise straight-through processing to connect the information flow using a common, software-as-a-service system. This was achieved through Reval’s STP community of partners, which extends the value of Hasbro’s investment in the system.
Trueb explains: “We use Fides, FXall, Thomson Reuters’ market data and SAP, all without leaving the system. Reval is unique in its connection to Fides for bank connectivity, so we did not have to seek out another source ourselves.”
Best practice and innovation
The three groups in treasury operations, ITC and capital markets were at different levels of readiness in terms of technology use. The ITC had limited systems relative to the inherent complexity of its operations, so what it has been able to achieve is truly game-changing. It continues to realise and understand the opportunities the global platform is creating and is already seeing a global impact.
“By eliminating time-consuming manual processes and disparate, unsupported technology, we are now providing leadership with real-time information, spending time on strategic planning and forecasting and learning new ways to manage our treasury responsibilities globally,” says Trueb.
Key benefits
- Visibility into all bank account activity.
- Time saved equivalent to one FTE.
- Eliminated over 30 Excel spreadsheets.
- Improved affiliate planning and short-term forecasting.
- Improved decision making/compliance reporting.
- Simplified and enhanced intercompany cash structure.
- Enhanced visibility to netting/treasury transactions.
- Workflow and processes integrated and unified.
- Global disaster recovery support.
- Access to global dashboards and reports.
- Improved communication and collaboration between the internal treasury groups.
