Photo of Manish Joshi, General Electric.

GE opts for interest optimisation solution across META region

The challenge

GE is a global player in healthcare, energy and aviation and has large operations globally, including in the Middle East and Africa. Considering that several countries in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) in which GE operates are trapped liquidity markets, this opens GE up to risk including cash visibility, returns on trapped liquidity and idle balances, depreciation of currencies, repatriation processes and more.

GE wanted to primarily solve the issue of cash visibility and enhance returns through a solution that was more scalable, simple, and easy to implement. This included removing the manual processes for deposits in each market, which required extensive forecasting, was very people intensive, and hindered the company’s ability to take advantage of aggregated operating balances. This led GE to set a goal of embracing true working capital efficiency mechanisms and investment analysis in a bid to automate investments in local currency markets across the Middle East and Africa.

The solution

To start with, GE identified the markets in scope and chose eight key markets it wanted to commence aggregating the balances. Its bank’s interest optimisation solution was adopted and now provides the following advantages:

1. Yield enhancement: obtained automated competitive interest rates through a structure that accommodated various currencies.
2. Countries and currencies: the structure provided for both local and foreign currencies and countries across META.
3. Reporting: the bank was able to offer a tailored reporting (daily and monthly) that could be reported into GE ERPs and the ability to track and validate the monthly interest earnings.
4. Scalable: through standardised documentation process and centralised project management, GE managed to implement the solution within two weeks of agreement. In addition, the structure allows GE to add new countries in future in an agile manner.

Best practice and innovation

This solution allows GE to manage its visibility of cash in each of the countries, provide daily reporting of the aggregate balance across all participating countries and helps optimise returns across all the participating countries in an automated fashion. GE has now managed to automate the entire investment process.

Key benefits

• Process efficiencies.
• Return on investment.
• Increased automation.
• Risk mitigation.
• Improved visibility.
• Errors reduced.
• Number of banking partners/bank accounts reduced.
• Manual intervention reduced.
• Increased system connectivity.
• Future proof solution.
• Exceptional implementation (budget/time).