Photo of Dean Wu, Schindler (China) Elevator Co Ltd and Phil Carmalt, DBS.
Treasury management at elevator and escalator provider Schindler is well established but needed optimising and bringing up to date. The company joined forces with DBS to successfully address the challenge by implementing a multi-currency account solution; a digital cross border payment solution; and SWIFT GPI.
Dean Wu
Treasury Manager
Shanghai, China
Schindler is one of the world’s leading providers of elevators, escalators, and moving walks, as well as maintenance and modernisation services. The group has over 1,000 branch offices in more than 100 countries.
in partnership with
SWIFT gpi plays a key role in optimising treasury management at Schindler
The challenge
Schindler China has a well-established treasury management infrastructure in China after decades of operation but its operations needed to be optimised. The company needs to deal with transactions in various currencies every day and with different banks so it has opened a large number of accounts to facilitate the business. The company’s target was to reduce the number of accounts to improve efficiency and save operational cost.
Also, unlike with domestic RMB payments whose turnaround time is short and initiation is simple, cross-border payments can be problematic for large corporates due to regulatory reporting and supporting document requirements.
The company faced two major problems on this particular front:
- The process of submitting supporting documents and the details required in the submission documents varies across banks. The company was unable to find a fully digitised solution with the simplest supporting document requirement.
- If for any reason, the beneficiary is unable to receive the money on time, the company is required to check with its remitting bank. It takes any time from half a day to several days for a bank to come back with the reason and this delay impacts its relationship with its suppliers. The company was looking for a simple way to track the transaction.
The solution
Schindler partnered with DBS to address these challenges through a combination of three solutions.
Firstly, Schindler China now employs a multi-currency account (MCA) solution, which enables the company to handle domestic/cross-border payments and collections in 11 major currencies, using the same account number.
Secondly, Schindler China is now able to use an end-to-end fully digitised solution to make cross-border payments. Not only can Schindler China give payment instructions and regulatory reporting information online, but also submit the supporting documents online.
Finally, through SWIFT gpi, Schindler can track cross-border transactions on a real-time basis through DBS’ e-banking platform, IDEAL, allowing it to check the status of package delivery in a similar fashion to DHL. The service is provided to Schindler with no additional charge.
Best practice and innovation
The successful implementation of the solution has helped optimise treasury operations. For collections, whatever the currency is, the buyer needs to remember one unique account number to make the payment to Schindler. Schindler also does not have to do FX conversions if it has not opened an account in the currency of the received funds – the funds will be automatically credited into Schindler’s wallet account. For payments, Schindler will have full discretion on the currency wallet to be used.
The digital cross border solution delivers convenience while being fully compliant with the regulations. It has enabled Schindler to provide digital or scanned black and white invoices, considerably speeding up processing.
SWIFT gpi is a key feature of the overall solution, significantly improving Schindler’s visibility of payment to suppliers. It has also made engagement with suppliers much easier.
Key benefits
- DBS’ Multi-Currency Account solution has minimised the accounts opened for multi-currency transactions, thus resulting in reduced operating cost and improved efficiency.
- DBS’ Digital Cross-border Payment solution has streamlined the entire cross-border payment process for Schindler and improved its efficiency and convenience. It saves at least five minutes per cross-border payment transaction.
- SWIFT gpi solution has given Schindler its most efficient way to track cross-border payment transactions at real time, using the DBS e-banking system. Schindler no longer has to wait for several days to get feedback from any bank.
