Adam Smith Awards 2020: three award-winning clients

This year, the panel of judges again selected the very best solutions that demonstrate exceptional best practice and innovation in the corporate treasury arena and awarded three Zanders client as category winners.

Kongsberg Automotive, Severn Trent and BAT have distinguished themselves with ground-breaking strong solutions to deal with their treasury challenges. We proudly present you these award-winning clients.

Kongsberg Automotive: winner ‘Harnessing the Power of Technology’

In 2019, Kongsberg Automotive Group AG received an Adam Smith Award for the ‘Best FinTech Solution’. This year, the worldwide supplier in the global vehicle industry won another award, in the ‘Harnessing the power of technology’ category. Two years ago, the company started to successfully transform its treasury function. Kongsberg’s treasury overhaul of centralizing and automating using BELLIN’s tm5 treasury management system (TMS) and Zanders intercompany rating and pricing tool, as well as a comprehensive process optimization, appeared to be is a shining example of a best practice approach, according to all parties involved.

Group Treasurer Abraham Geldenhuys: “A global treasury transformation is a journey that comes with significant change and various challenges but lots of excitement and opportunity! We started our journey with an ambitious vision. From Vision to strategic road map, detail ‘as-is’ analysis, understanding and documenting our functional and non-functional requirements, blueprint, implementation plan and a critical change management strategy. We partnered with Zanders and Bellin, and both stepped up to the plate during this intense and high-paced transformation. It has been, and still is, a pleasure to collaborate with these two class outfits with real depth in their ranks. Thank you both!”

Severn Trent: winner ‘Best Risk Management Solution’

Severn Trent Group is a listed UK water company, is exposed to interest and inflation risk originating from its core business, the regulatory framework, the debt portfolio, future debt planning and an inflation linked dividend policy. Given the complexity of the origination of these interest rate and inflation risks and their correlation, a more integrated and more quantitative Financial Risk Management (FRM) approach was required.

Zanders supported Severn Trent to succeed in adopting an integrated, strategic financial risk management framework to manage its primary financial risks. John Jackson, Group Treasurer of Severn Trent Plc, noted on the added value of the project and collaboration: “The purpose-built risk management tool has given us the ability to provide leading edge analysis to support financing decisions in the future. We were conscious that we were breaking new ground with this project, so having a partner we could trust to deliver was paramount. Zanders’ detailed and collaborative approach helped things run smoothly and any issues were quickly analysed and resolved.”

BAT: winner ‘Best Fintech solution’

As a part of a larger IHC/POBO/ROBO/Bank statement implementation project, BAT identified many business partners that had to be updated with new settlement instructions. The multinational therefore wanted to create and assign standard settlement instructions (SSI) in SAP, at business partner level for specific product types in an accurate, timely and auditable manner. As a solution, BAT automated the creation and assignment of SSI’s for its business partners in SAP using custom robotic process automation tools, leveraging on the SAP Gui scripting API.

Diana Macarascu, Head of Treasury Operations: “Usually, corporate treasures are quite conservative and to some extent risk-adverse people. It is not because of fear but because we want to do right by the company, to have it protected to the best of our abilities and we so like a controlled environment. Yet, as the time passes by, with all the new FinTech solutions available, everyone is evolving, it adapts to changes and progress, and in this sense treasury is no exception, as an operation in itself.

Looking back to what we have implemented through our project, it was not an easy feature and due to the time constrains it was adamant that we needed to look for a faster way to have it implemented. Through the partnership with the Zanders team, which was not only supporting us with development and changes in the ERP system itself, but as well on building the RPA, we have managed to deliver our project successfully, on time.

I need to admit that the RPA project in itself not only supported our project but equally meant an eye opener for myself at least, as it taught me an important lesson – the usage of RPA is only limited by our imagination.”

Once again, we want to congratulate these three winners and all other winner of the Adam Smith awards. For more information on the successful projects mentioned in this article, please contact Evaldas Balkys or Mark van Ommen.