How Takeda centralized its payments

Creating visibility

Takeda’s implementation of Kyriba Treasury was done in a modular manner, with the first phase focusing on banking and cash management to create visibility. Kyriba was able to gather bank statements, enabling the company to manage their cash on a day-to-day basis. The subsequent modules involved integrating investments, risk management (FX, interest rate and counterparty risk), and managing debt portfolio and capital market activity. Payments settlement was not included in the initial implementation scope.

To address this as part of a second project phase, Takeda moved into the lifecycle of the Payments module, explains Meliosa O’Byrne, Associate Director Treasury Operations at Takeda. “We recognized the need to standardize and harmonize payments for all the banks. We faced challenges due to the lack of connectivity and the absence of a standard approval process in place. To address these issues, we decided to use Kyriba and organized a workshop with the Zanders team to gain better understanding. This was followed by a phased approach to implement the Payments module with seven key global core cash management banks.”

Specific challenges per phase

The first phase started with Deutsche Bank – the primary bank in Europe – as pilot. The focus was to understand the Payment module in Kyriba, processes, and flows. O’Byrne: “A key decision factor to start with Deutsche bank was that our hedging program was migrating to our Treasury entity in Zurich and the volume of payments to support this being the most significant Treasury flows each month.”

Phase two involved Citibank, which covered all Takeda regions (EUCAN, Japan, USA) and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) which was Japan-centric. During this phase, training sessions were provided by Zanders in local language for the Japanese users, which was key element to the success of the project. The EUCAN team was already trained during phase one.

O’Byrne explains: “We started from Europe and then engaged Japan team for phase two. They were working with our back office team to make sure we continued the standardization and harmonization approach identified for Deutsche Bank. SMBC is one of the main banks for Japan and Zanders’ Katsuo Sekikawa became part of the team that managed the implementation from Japan.”

Keisuke Suzuki, Lead Treasury Solutions of Takeda Japan: “With Katsuo Sekikawa, Zanders offered solid practical experience in the banking sector in Japan and knowledge of the Kyriba system – a great contribution with respect to the Japanese banks going live with Kyriba Payments.”

With the implementation of Kyriba, Takeda was able to fully automate the process of treasury payments, explains Suzuki: “This allowed us to have improved treasury payment automation. The centralized data provided by Kyriba enabled us to easily track our transactions, which was particularly important due to our significant amount of external debt, bonds, derivative and ICO contracts.”