Newell Brands prides itself on selling brands that aspire to delight consumers by lighting up everyday moments from products such as marker pens to kitchen utensils and baby buggies yet when it came to its own treasury function, it seemed to have not applied that guiding mantra. Witness 14 cash pools across six different banks; 179 intercompany loan relationships and a tangled web of 27 bank relationships. Add to that, manual processes and only 40% liquidity concentration, and the treasury team had been left at the sharp end when it came to making life easier.

“Every country looked after themselves in their own unique way with local banks and no centralisation of any form, it was like going back to the day of the Jarden Merger,” says Julia Donegan, Global Treasury Director, tasked with migrating a decentralised and limited treasury operation from The Netherlands to Ireland and building what they have today from scratch.

Pooling was inefficient, leaving many cash pools outside the global overlay pool, requiring physical wire transfers between accounts and manual monitoring of pool balances. Too many bank accounts were also outside Newell’s liquidity structure, complicated by a legal entity structure that contributed to the number of bank accounts and static balances.

Administration of intercompany relationships was time-consuming and burdensome for the treasury, accounting and general ledger teams. Treasury also had to navigate transfer pricing risk on numerous intercompany flows partially driven by inconsistent pricing and credit rates on cash balances across the company’s cash pools.

Moreover, there was a lack of transparency throughout the organisation within the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) structure, which was not centrally managed by treasury as it was all carried out locally, and the drivers of underlying cash from operations were unclear.

There was also a lack of real-time transparency and consistent reporting on bank accounts and administration of many corporate electronic banking platforms (some with multiple logins at a single bank). Elsewhere, numerous bank relationships were time consuming and inefficient.