The company’s FX and liquidity challenges were highly complex and all revolved around volume, variety, and velocity. To ensure that it could build a solution that would help it in all areas of control, speed, and scalability, it worked collaboratively with TreasuryXpress to customise its cloud-based solution.

Collaborative FX solution delivers impressive benefits

The challenge

The company’s FX and liquidity challenges were highly complex and all revolved around volume, variety, and velocity. Clearsettle receives around US$2.7m in transactions daily into numerous bank accounts across the globe. The ability to track and manage these transactions accurately and make real-time payments back to the merchants while managing its own FX and internal liquidity, was becoming more challenging every day.

Clearsettle did not have an efficient or centralised means to manage these transactions across more than 30 different banking systems. It knew it would soon be facing the perfect storm of high transaction volumes and FX complexity. Getting connectivity to its banks and achieving centralised visibility of its liquidity was critical. Equally important was finding a way to become more nimble and intelligent in how it managed its FX liabilities.

The solution

The C2Treasury TMS from TreasuryXpress enabled Clearsettle to create a controlled, centralised and auditable hub for managing liquidity and inbound and outbound payments processing. The final solution incorporates a number of special features including:

• On-demand bank connectivity and centralisation.

  Using the cloud and API connections allows it to centrally manage all payments and every bank that the company and its clients work with.

• Liquidity control and payment security.

  All payments now go through an intensified four-step process that also allows the firm to monitor all of its own liquidity in real-time across all of its bank accounts.

• Currency matching and optimisation.

  Clearsettle has reduced FX trading and improved margins. Connectivity allows it to identify same-currency liquidity amounts that can be used to settle payments, eliminating the use of FX wherever possible.

• ‘Smart’ FX trading and liability risk management.

  Its payments gateway pushes transaction information into the TMS which then collates and makes automated decisions on that information based on pre-defined FX trading rules and thresholds, automatically extinguishing its liability.

Best practice and innovation

As a startup, Clearsettle did not have a treasury management system nor the budget and bandwidth of more mature operations. It was crucial that it put a solution in place that would keep pace with its projected rapid growth. To maximise its budget and minimise implementation resources, it needed a thorough plan that would deliver:

• Flexibility and integrability of the treasury/connectivity solution.
• Bank connectivity diversification and expertise.
• Speed and ease of implementation.
• Solution cost and scalability.

As a payments gateway and transaction facilitator, Clearsettle is unique. There was no single solution on the market that could support its need for broad connectivity, custom integration requirements with its FX trading provider and payments engine. Mindful of its USP, time-to-market was crucial. To ensure that it could build a solution that would help it in all areas of control, speed, and scalability, it worked collaboratively with TreasuryXpress to customise its cloud-based solution. This collaboration allowed Clearsettle to create a comprehensive API-driven solution.