ServiceNow is a California-based software company that has developed a cloud computing platform to help companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. It employs more than 22,000 people and works with over 8,100 enterprise customers worldwide, including approximately 85% of the Fortune 500.
The company is growing at around 26% per annum and Claire Wang, Senior Treasury Manager notes the treasury team has doubled in size over the last four years to enable and support the company’s rapid growth as well as drive scale and efficiency.
“We use Kyriba to automate our liquidity activities, FX trading and settlement processing as well as overall in-house bank management,” explains Wang. “In 2023 we partnered with Actualize to further improve our treasury operations with a particular focus on process automation. In addition, we leverage Excel Custom Reporting, Open Reports Studio, and Analytics to automate and consolidate some of our treasury reporting and analytics.”
The operations, risk management and accounting functions encompass several different groups, which can naturally lead to information and data becoming siloed. It is not uncommon for companies to spend 80% or more of their time manually compiling data, leaving relatively little time for analysis.
The focus for ServiceNow was shifting that paradigm so that data could be accessed and aggregated in a more timely fashion, enabling its teams to spend more time analysing and providing insights to business partners.
The treasury team included business partners in the project, recognising that while treasury would be leading the project the outputs would be meaningful and actionable across other areas of the organisation.
“As a global company, we have a significant number of intercompany loans that need to be managed,” says Wang. “In the past we needed to pull three or four different reports into one Excel file and share it with our tax, legal, and accounting teams for various reasons including accounting entry validation for interest payments or withholding tax calculations.”
The company was able to consolidate all these reports into one file, so it only needs to download that one file once a month rather than download multiple different reports.
In terms of counterparty risk management, ServiceNow has a defined investment policy. “We have a number of parameters governing our cash and investments and the ability to pool data gives us a real time view on our counterparty exposures,” says Wang.
The company also has access to FX settlement reconciliation functionality, which enables the treasury team to view all its trades and identify any trades that did not settle successfully.
“This is very useful,” says Wang. “In the past, our analysts had to examine each settlement and manually review potentially dozens of trades associated with that payment. This functionality report literally saves us a full day of analysis every time we roll our balance sheet hedges.”
A separate report shows the operations team exactly how much to settle to each bank for every trading entity.
