Virtual Event Recap: Kyriba Global Summit

We’re still enjoying the buzz and activity from the Kyriba Global Summit. While we focused on optimizing the viewer experience by keeping all sessions short and enabling customizable three-hour agendas, we actually produced 62 sessions in 5 languages, reflecting the insights from executives at 25 corporations, all delivered to an audience of nearly 4,000 registered virtual delegates. For those who missed it, we have compiled below a brief recap of the virtual summit’s highlights.

Kyriba Global Summit began with our Chairman and CEO, Jean-Luc Robert, describing Kyriba’s evolution from a single solution provider that helps our clients see their cash, to a multi-solution SaaS platform that enables our clients to see, move, protect and optimize their liquidity across their enterprise. Kyriba stands ready to support finance teams as they transition to Active Liquidity Management and an integrated, liquidity-centric approach to Treasury, Payments, Risk Management and Working Capital, all designed to deliver strategic value for their businesses.

Samuel Guillon, Kyriba’s Chief Strategy Officer, made the case for how liquidity sudden stops are now an unintended mainstay of modern day economic policy. He shared that plentiful is not the same as continuously available, and all organizations need to prepare for such sudden stops in cash through more active management of liquidity.

Attendees were also given an update on the Kyriba Enterprise Liquidity Network, our rapidly expanding liquidity data and connectivity hub that underpins all Kyriba solutions. Kyriba Enterprise Liquidity Network is a connectivity as a service solution providing a central source of liquidity data upon which to deliver an integrated and connected approach across Treasury, Payments, Risk Management and Working Capital.

At the heart of the event were the learnings and insights given by our clients on their respective journeys, as they lead their company’s response to the challenges highlighted throughout the event. A common theme throughout the stories was the need for collaboration across finance, IT and treasury, as well as with external partners, to deliver incremental wins on a broader finance transformation goal. Stories included those from some of the largest and most recognized businesses and brands, such as:

• Accenture’s Managing Director, Cameron Armbruster and McCormick’s IT Business Relationship Consultant, Amit Garg shone a light on how quickly bank connectivity infrastructure can become a minefield of complexity and rigidity – a bottleneck holding businesses back and brought to the fore as companies scale faster and earlier than ever before. They discussed how McCormick leveraged Kyriba’s connectivity as a service approach to dramatically reduce the time and costs to onboard / offboard banks & fintechs, quickly adapt to new payment standards and put finance back in control of data going back and forth to its banks.
• Ramón Tolk and Sandeep Nene of Avery Dennison’s treasury team described their journey over the last two years in conducting a phased implementation of Kyriba’s Active Treasury and Risk Management solutions. In 2020, they enjoy increased efficiencies and tighter controls made possible by conducting In House Banking, Treasury and Risk Management processes from a single platform. Kyriba’s SaaS platform provided the team with more freedom to operate without relying on IT teams and ensured a seamless transition to working from home in the midst of the pandemic.
• Yang Xu, Kraft Heinz’s SVP and Global Treasurer, talked about how she responded to her CEO’s challenge to unlock new ways to actively manage liquidity “Cash is more of a King during difficult times” said Xu, “During difficult times you will see there’s a distinguished difference between great companies who have been very predictive and cautious about balance sheet management versus companies who have not.”
• Mike Murray, Director of Treasury Initiatives at The Coca-Cola Company, shared the major challenges of managing FX exposures across 135 currencies and multiple subsidiaries. Kyriba has enabled Coca-Cola to see their exposures down to the account level and fully explain their P&L variances while reducing their FX hedging costs and operational expenses.
• For Yann Masse, Head of Large Corporate Sales at BPCE Factor, collaborative supply chain finance will emerge from the economic turbulence of 2020. He said, “the societal dimension has become a major imperative for a certain number of corporates.” He is working to deploy these programs not only to private companies but also to public buyers “the public authorities will encourage communities and public bodies to deploy these collaborative reverse factoring tools” said Masse.
• A panel on ‘Bank Integration & Connectivity in India and China’ with Envision Energy, Danone and the CFO of TataSky highlighted that bank connectivity as a service can enable corporates to maintain more banking relationships for the same amount of effort, thereby increasing price competition and service levels in emerging markets. Additionally, large corporates in emerging markets play a key role in driving local and regional banks to adopt standardized formats and protocols that are needed to run payment hubs effectively.
• Nicolas Bouclet, Deputy Group Treasurer at Eutelsat, provided a testimonial of his experience with Kyriba: “with Kyriba, we noticed a reduction in time for all administrative tasks […]. For example, we made a reduction in the timing of our reporting and the possibility of delivering reliable figures quickly enabled by Kyriba’s analytical tools and capabilities.”

Thank you to all who registered, attended, and participated in our first virtual global event. But it’s not too late to benefit from the content produced for the actual day – all 62 sessions are now available ‘on demand’ . Such was the success of this virtual summit, we’re working hard to plan an even bigger, better and more exciting event in 2021. Watch this space.