“Cash is king, but we have the whole royal family”
VIDEO | In an environment characterised by irregular financial flows, cash is undeniably crucial. However, it's not just about cash being king; the entire "royal family" of financial controls must be in place to ensure everything runs smoothly, says Jacob Koch during his presentation at Treasury 360° Nordic 2024.
Better Energy, which operates approximately 350 renewable projects across four countries, faced a significant challenge. Each project functions as a separate entity with one or more bank accounts per company, spread across multiple banks. “Every time we had to check our liquidity, we had to review over 450 bank accounts across eight banks with different setups,” Koch explains. This laborious process took around two and a half hours and provided data that was already outdated by a day. Consequently, these checks were only conducted weekly, posing risks of inefficiencies and complicating cash flow forecasts.
The solution came from Finland-based FinanceKey, which uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to link directly to the banks, summarising the data on a dashboard. “Now, my team and I can simply open the dashboard and instantly view our cash balance,” Koch says, reflecting on the profound impact this near real-time visibility has had on the group’s liquidity management.
Jacob Koch is head of treasury at Danish renewable energy developer Better Energy.
Read an interview with Jacob Koch here to get more details on his experience using APIs.
• News from Treasury 360° Nordic 2024, at Copenhagen Airport on 23 May, is gathered here.
• And why not spread the posts in our LinkedIn flow? Sign up to follow it if you don’t already – and spread this post!
• Find here the main conference website, with agenda.
• Download the 68-page event magazine here (including a packed 7-page agenda section).
• Many sessions appear in full as videos in the days or weeks after the event.