Stable Currencies vs. the USD
This article is written by HedgeGo The past few weeks have seen very wide swings in international stock and bond markets. Long-term interest rates have risen across the board, not only in the US but also in Europe and Japan. In particular, interest rates have undergone a correction in recent days, which has been felt globally. Rising interest rates, as we have seen in recent weeks, are a sign of market dysfunction. Central banks have not – of course – intervened, but we can assume that it would not have taken much for them to do so openly. Stock and Bonds Markets Have Been Volatile. Currency Markets Have Been Resilient. The yen’s strength is not unusual in the face of capital market turbulence, as large Japanese investors are among the first to sell assets in such a risk-off environment in order to avoid risks to their own yen balance sheets. As a first step, this process has led to a rise in the yen of just over 10% this year, which has so far been in line with the euro, against which the yen has remained stable. The other Asian currencies showed stability against the USD, rather than weakness as would have been expected in a “perfect storm”. In the past, the baht and ringgit have shown weakness during equity market sell-offs. What is probably unique about the current situation is that decades of correlations are breaking down. This is indicative of a fundamental change in the system; the political tensions we are seeing today are merely an expression of the change that is already taking place. It is no secret that Asia has a growing, young and hardworking population that is enjoying prosperity and growing self-confidence based on these characteristics. Asians no longer see themselves as inferior to the West. They are seeking greater autonomy and self-determination, both internally and politically. Trump’s approach of imposing very high tariffs on all countries, including those in Asia, is probably just an attempt to slow down this development of independence and to integrate the much smaller economies into a network of relationships. In recent years, ASEAN has been trading more and more with each other and has also greatly expanded its trade relations with China, which now does more trade with Asian economies than with the US. ASEAN integration is not an attractive development for the US either. As can be seen from Trump’s comments on the EU, any form of agreement that reduces US influence is an attack on the US. This is not even geostrategically wrong, but the way the Trump administration is going about it – all-out bulldozer attack – will provoke more resistance than interest in Asia. To Protect Own Reputation It is almost amusing how the US is trying to paint a picture of China being forced to seek a deal with the US. China shrugged off the imposition of 20% tariffs without comment. The increase to 34% was a slap in the face that Xi Jinping had to take in full, but he did not want to lose face (with his cadres and the people). The escalation to 145% tit-for-tat tariffs confirms this. The US can wait a long time for China to beg for negotiations, which will not happen – it will be interesting to see how the US deals with this. The other Asian countries, facing tariffs of up to 50%, are likely to feel the same way as China. Given their strong trade links with China, it is unlikely that Vietnam or Malaysia will turn their backs on China in order to be on good terms with the US. Again, this is about maintaining their own reputations with their own people, who in many Asian countries have large – and powerful – Chinese minorities. Also Read Join our Treasury Community Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click [HERE] or fill out the form below to get more information. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.
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9 Hidden Risks of Managing Debt and Hedge Programs in Spreadsheets & How Modern treasury software solves them
This article is a contribution from our partner, TreasuryView Spreadsheets might seem like an easy solution for treasury management, but they create more risks than they solve. Manual processes, outdated data, and a lack of real-time visibility lead to costly mistakes. That’s why CFOs and treasury teams, also from SMBs, are switching to Treasury Management Software (TMS). Through conversations with finance teams who upgraded from spreadsheets, we identified the 9 biggest risks that held them back—and how switching to Treasury Management Software solved them. 1. Small Errors in Spreadsheets = Big Consequences A single misplaced decimal, a broken formula, or a copy-paste mistake can lead to millions in miscalculated exposure. These errors often go unnoticed until it’s too late to fix. ✅ With treasury software: Automated calculations remove human errors, ensuring reliable, accurate financial data. 2. Making Decisions with Outdated Financial Data Markets shift daily, but spreadsheets stay static. Without current interest rates, FX rates, and debt refinancing conditions, every decision is a shot in the dark. ✅ With treasury software: Up to date market data keeps your decisions informed and proactive—not reactive. 3. Wasting Hours on Manual Work… in 2025 Updating debt schedules, generating reports, and fixing formula errors costs your team hours every week. Manual processes drain time that could be spent on strategy. ✅ With treasury software: Automated reports, cash-flow forecasts, and exposure tracking free’s up hours every week, letting your team focus on higher-value tasks. 4. No Clear Risk Exposure Visibility Spreadsheets store numbers—they don’t analyze them when computer lid closed. Hidden risks go unnoticed until they turn into actual financial losses. ✅ With treasury software: Instant dashboards highlight risk exposures before market moves impact your bottom line. 5. Data Silos & Version Confusion Who’s working with the latest file? Are the numbers even accurate? Treasury teams spend too much time chasing updates, increasing the risk of misalignment and costly errors. ✅ With treasury software: Connected work ensures everyone works with the same, up-to-date data—no back-and-forth emails needed. No new spreadsheet versions needed. No data overwriting. 6. No Audit Trail & Compliance Risks Who changed the reference rate fixing in last month’s overview? No one knows. Spreadsheets don’t track changes, making audits a nightmare and leaving your company exposed to compliance risks. ✅ With treasury software: Every change is logged automatically, ensuring a clear audit trail for compliance. 7. Data Loss & Security Risks A laptop crash, accidental deletion, or an employee leaving—and critical financial data or knowledge is gone. Spreadsheets have no security controls, putting sensitive treasury data at constant risk. ✅ With treasury software: Secure cloud-based storage protects your financial data from loss or unauthorized access. 8. No Way to Test Hedging Scenarios Treasurers need to stress test financial positions taking rising interest rates, FX volatility, and liquidity risks into account—but spreadsheets make scenario planning incredibly slow and unreliable. ✅ With treasury software: Built-in scenario simulations let you plan for different scenarios, including doing nothing. More about hedging. 9. Spreadsheets do not Support the Growth More debt, more FX transactions, more risks. Spreadsheets don’t scale—as business complexity grows, so does the manual workload and the potential for costly mistakes. ✅ With treasury software: A cloud software that scales with your business, without adding complexity or extra manual work. Why smaller Treasury and Finance Teams Are Switching to Treasury Management Software ? Spreadsheets may be familiar, but they’re holding your treasury team back. Treasury Management Software (TMS) replaces error-prone manual work with: ✅ Live Market Data – Stay ahead of risk with real-time interest rates and FX movements. ✅ Time-Saving Automations – Cut manual processes and free up hours every week. ✅ Clear Risk Visibility – Spot exposures before they impact your P&L. ✅ Scalable & Future-Proof – Treasury management that grows with your business. ✅ Better Security & Control – Centralized, cloud-based access with full audit trails. Also Read Join our Treasury Community Treasury Mastermind is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click [HERE] or fill out the form below to get more information. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.
A comprehensive guide to different hedging programs.
This guide is from our content partner, Ebury To manage currency risk, companies need to develop hedging strategies to minimise the impact of currency fluctuations on their margins. There are mainly three commonly used hedging strategies that companies deploy: 1. Static hedging program It is usually associated with a conservative risk profile and a high protection level. Here, you purchase one or multiple forward contracts simultaneously to cover your entire exposure. Upon entering a new period, you purchase a new set of hedges to cover the following period. 2. Rolling hedging program Here, you hedge a fixed amount to a future date. In this program, you continuously extend hedges with new hedges at a later date for the same tenure, thus ensuring continuous coverage. This helps you maintain a constant hedge ratio, smoothen volatility and achieve more stable and predictable hedging outcomes. 3. Layered hedging program Hedges are applied in progressive layers, and you do not need to achieve a 100% accurate forecast. Each hedging period has a set hedge ratio. As your hedging period comes to an end, you top up the hedge to meet the predefined hedging ratio set out in the policy. Hedge ratios are usually greater for near dates when predictability is higher and lower for further dates. The longer the tenor of your strategy and the higher the frequency, the more ‘smoothing’ effect on volatility you create. A quick overview of different hedging program Good to know Having covered different hedging programs, your choice of the right strategy for your business is based on many factors – visibilityof future transactions, risk tolerance, exposure assessment, sensitivity analysis of exchange rates and many more. Also Read Join our Treasury Community Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click [HERE] or fill out the form below. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.
Understanding the Differences Between Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Know Your Customer (KYC)
This article is a contribution from one of our content partners, Avollone When I started my career years ago in the ethics and compliance sector, it wasn’t completely clear what the difference was between Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Know Your Customer (KYC). To be honest, it’s still rather unclear and difficult today to understand how and why the two are not the same. Why? It’s because the terminology, when used in general (that is all situations from internally between colleagues, externally with counterparties and overall with LinkedIn posts from various organizations), many people often will say CDD and KYC interchangeably. But, in my opinion having worked with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) for over two decades, CDD and KYC do represent very distinct processes – each with unique purposes and scopes. And understanding their differences is key for effective implementation. A Bit of Background The term Customer Due Diligence (CDD) comes from FATF recommendations and is often the term used in regulation that refers back to FATF recommendations. On the other hand, Know Your Customer (KYC) is not used as a term in regulation. It is more of a sector standard term. Maybe that is also why so many use it in different ways. So, my comments are also based on what I think of KYC and how I’ve experienced the work associated with the term KYC. Starting with the Similarities Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Know Your Customer (KYC) do share a common purpose: identifying, assessing and mitigating risks associated with business relationships or transactions. Both are essential parts of compliance frameworks, especially when it comes to preventing financial crimes – such as fraud, money laundering and the financing of terrorist groups. Differentiator: KYC – The Foundation of Customer Identification Where the two diverge is that KYC is a regulatory requirement that focuses on verifying the identity of customers before establishing or continuing a business relationship. Its primary goal is to ensure that financial institutions and businesses know who they are dealing with, and KYC processes typically involve collecting and verifying basic information – for example, identification documents, proof of address and information about the customer’s source of funds and wealth. KYC is the starting point for any compliance framework, providing a baseline understanding of the customer’s legitimacy, and as you’ll see below, KYC can actually be considered to be a subset of Customer Due Diligence. Differentiator: CDD – A Broader Risk Assessment CDD goes beyond the initial identification step of KYC – as CDD is a much deeper investigation into a customer, vendor or counterparty – to assess their risk profile with a wider range of related tasks and activities. CDD processes evaluate factors like financial history, business activities, beneficial ownership structures and connections to high-risk jurisdictions. Note that CDD is not limited to onboarding; it extends to ongoing monitoring, enhanced scrutiny for high-risk clients and investigations into potential red flags. The Relationship between KYC and CDD Simply put, KYC is a part of CDD. KYC provides the “who,” while DD examines the “why” and “how” of a business relationship. And together, they form a complete, robust framework for protecting businesses and maintaining regulatory compliance. At the end of the day, it would be less confusing if everyone aligned on the same terminology. But this may not change easily in everyday practice, so it’s important for everyone to clarify the usage of important terms when working together – not just for these two acronyms (CDD and KYC), but also with the many others within AML that are also used interchangeably – which I’ll be writing on further in the future (such as Know Your Business (KYB), Due Diligence (DD) and more!) Also Read Join our Treasury Community Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click [HERE] or fill out the form below. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.
FinanceKey Secures €3M to Eliminate Manual Work in Corporate Finance Teams
Helsinki, FINLAND – June 10, 2025 – Finnish fintech company FinanceKey announces a new €3 million seed funding round to scale its client base, expand into new markets, and accelerate the shift to fully automated enterprise treasury systems. The round was led by Maki.vc, a Helsinki-based early-stage venture capital firm, with participation from existing investor First Fellow Partners. Many large enterprises still struggle with outdated tools, fragmented systems, and spreadsheet-heavy workflows. In fact, treasury and finance professionals in large companies spend the majority of their time on low-value tasks like reconciliations, payment execution, and bank integrations. Without a clear, real-time view of cash across accounts and entities, finance teams struggle to manage liquidity, forecast accurately, or respond confidently to shifting market conditions. FinanceKey offers a fundamentally different approach: a single, streamlined platform that connects banking, ERP, and treasury systems, standardizes financial data, and fully automates payment processes. It delivers real-time visibility, automation, and control in one unified platform. The solution streamlines global treasury operations, reduces manual workload, and enables finance teams to operate with precision and agility. Designed for flexibility, the platform can be used as a standalone dashboard or integrated seamlessly into existing systems, with no custom development required. FinanceKey is tapping into a major shift: finance teams are no longer just back-office operators but strategic powerhouses. The company was founded by former Nokia treasury leaders Veikko Koski, Macer Skeels, Tiago Batista, and Rony Meyer, who experienced firsthand the limitations of legacy treasury tools and set out to build a system designed for the speed and scale of modern finance teams. With over €1.5 billion in payments automated to date and steady month-over-month growth, FinanceKey is already used by multinational clients including Nors, Bravedo, and Obton, who have reported up to €1 million in annual savings through payment automation in the first year. The global treasury management software market is projected to reach over €10 billion by 2030, with broader financial operations and embedded finance platforms pushing the total opportunity beyond €100 billion. The new funding will power FinanceKey’s product development, team growth, and expansion across Europe, while accelerating FinanceKey’s mission to transform the global treasury infrastructure. “We’ve seen firsthand how disconnected systems and repetitive manual workflows slow finance teams down; they deserve better tools – ones that unify fragmented data, automate workflows, and free them to focus on strategic decisions. This funding lets us scale a platform already driving results for top-tier enterprise clients,” said Veikko Koski, CEO of FinanceKey. “Treasury teams are turning to FinanceKey because we’re not just patching over old problems – we’re tearing up the rulebook,” said Macer Skeels, CTO and co-founder of FinanceKey. “We’re reimagining how treasury works, with a platform that lets teams move faster, adapt freely, and evolve without limits.” “With FinanceKey, we finally have real-time visibility across our global accounts and a solution tailored to each region’s complexity. Within months, we replaced a fragmented, manual Excel process involving 20 people with a streamlined, automated system. The savings achieved through the group’s treasury management using this tool far exceeded our expectations. FinanceKey isn’t just a vendor, they’re a partner helping us shape the future of treasury”, said Tiago Prista, Head of Finance, Nors Group. “The team at FinanceKey has deep expertise and has created a product that solves a clear, urgent need in the market,” said Tim Bolte, Venture Partner at Maki.vc. “The traction they’ve achieved with large enterprises speaks volumes, and this is just the beginning.” “FinanceKey is building the kind of infrastructure every treasury team wishes they had, clean, reliable and easy to integrate,” said Kim Groop, Partner at First Fellow Partners. “They’re not just adding a layer of visibility; they’re simplifying the entire treasury backbone.” About FinanceKeyFinanceKey is a real-time cash management platform that helps companies gain visibility, automate payments and simplify treasury operations. Founded by former Nokia treasury leaders, the platform consolidates financial data into one accurate, actionable view – giving finance teams the clarity and control they need to move faster.financekey.com About Maki.vcMaki.vc is a Helsinki-based pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm that champions the entrepreneurs who rewrite the future. The fund invests in deep tech and brand-driven companies across consumer and enterprise spaces. Maki.vc’s team and global network share the vision of entrepreneurs as champions and challengers, drawing on the experience of scaling some of the strongest technology companies in the Nordics.maki.vc Media ContactAlex CannonHead of GrowthFinanceKey+34 603 566 965alex.cannon@financekey.com
Pix Reinvents Recurring Payments — and Corporate Treasurers Take Note
From Treasury Masterminds Brazil’s central bank is rolling out Pix Automático on June 16, 2025, a recurring-payments feature for the ultra‑popular Pix instant‑payment system. Since Pix launched in late 2020, it has outpaced cash, debit, and credit cards—handling over 26 trillion reais (~US $4.6 trillion) in transactions in 2024. Now, with Pix Automático, Brazilian consumers can authorize everything from utility bills and gym memberships to digital subscriptions with a single one‑time consent Analysts forecast that this could channel at least US $30 billion in e‑commerce payments over the next two years. It also represents a big win for financial inclusion: roughly 60 million Brazilians without credit cards can now tap into subscription‑based services A European Counterpart: Wero Steps In In Europe, the Wero digital‑wallet initiative—developed by the European Payments Initiative (EPI)—is positioning itself as a unified, sovereign alternative to US‑dominated payment networks Launched in July 2024 in Germany, it quickly expanded to France and Belgium, and is entering the Netherlands in 2025 While Pix is already offering recurring payments, Wero currently supports only person‑to‑person (P2P) transfers via phone numbers or QR codes. It plans to support subscriptions, e‑commerce, and POS payments through 2026–2027. Thus, Pix leads in recurring payment capabilities—but Wero is steadily catching up, with an eye on European unity and financial autonomy Competitive Positioning: Pix vs. Wero Feature Pix Automático (Brazil) Wero (Europe) Live Date June 16, 2025 Rolled out P2P mid‑2024; subscriptions in 2025–2026 Recurring Payments Yes Planned for 2025 Integration with businesses Via Pix‑enabled banks & fintechs like PagBrasil Through EPI banks, merchants, Worldline, and Revolut soon Scope Instant‑debit subscriptions P2P now → subscriptions/e‑commerce next Coverage National; expanding internationally Pan‑European rollout Brazil’s centralized approach has enabled Pix to move faster and capture full recurring‑payment coverage. Wero is building its capabilities through a coalition of banks and fintechs, aiming for cross‑border scale. What Corporate Treasurers Should Know 1. Lower friction in collections For Brazilian firms—especially SaaS, utilities, and subscription‑based businesses—Pix Automático simplifies recurring billing dramatically. No more “boletos” or complex direct‑debit arrangements; just one upfront consent. 2. Enhanced cash flow predictability Automated debits help reduce payment delays and defaults—crucial for forecasting liquidity. According to industry estimates, recurring payments via Pix could increase collection volumes by up to 30% versus one‑off slips or QR codes 3. Better inclusivity Brazilian companies can now serve nearly 60 million consumers who lack credit cards but can use Pix—expanding market reach significantly . 4. European treasury analogies European treasurers should monitor Wero’s rollout. While some banks and partners like Revolut and Worldline are already integrating Wero for P2P and e‑commerce recurring payments aren’t live yet. But when they arrive, Europe’s treasurers may face similar options and benefits. 5. Strategic advantage & resilience For multinationals operating in both regions, tie‑ins with Pix and Wero can reduce reliance on global card networks and cut cross‑border payment costs. In Brazil, Pix is already a third‑party‑free system; in Europe, Wero is the stepping stone to greater payment sovereignty. Outlook: Already Ahead—or Close Behind Corporate treasurers should: In payment innovation, Pix has sprinted ahead—and Wero, though a late entrant, is coming in strong. Smart treasurers will track both closely. Also Read Join our Treasury Community Treasury Mastermind is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click [HERE] or fill out the form below to get more information. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.