In conjunction with the demerger, two Financial Service Centers were also transferred to Valmet, one located in Montreal, Canada, which serves the company’s units in North America, and one in Jyväskylä, Finland, which serves the company’s large European units. Director of Treasury Market Operations Annika Westerholm says the Treasury’s aim was to create new, consistent payment, reconciliation, and posting processes.
The Treasury also wanted to reduce the number of systems and parallel payment channels in the company.
Global SWIFT connection through SaaS
Valmet’s Financial Service Center in Finland has had a good experience of our payment solutions over a long period of time. Valmet chose our cloud-based payment solution as the new international backbone for cash flow and payment management.
The solution comes integrated with global bank connections through the SWIFT Alliance Lite 2 service. This flexible solution that is independent of ERP systems meets the company’s needs perfectly.
It is in line with our strategy to favor SaaS solutions, and a centralized bank channel supports risk management. Both our IT department and our Financial Service Centers have been pleased with the cloud-based service. We are also impressed with the high level of information security.
Annika Westerholm, Director of Treasury Market Operations.
North America enters the digital era
The new solution was implemented in 2015, first in the company’s Financial Service Center in Montreal.
Up until that point, the account statement and payment processes in the North American Financial Service Center had been highly manual. Bringing the center into the digital era had significant advantages.
Annika Westerholm
Automation for reconciling and posting customer payments has been built using lockbox files provided by local banks in conjunction with check payments, for example. The day-to-day operations of the Financial Service Center are running much more rapidly and effortlessly than before.
It is easier to keep cash accounting up to date, which has improved the Financial Service Center’s ability to support the units’ sales operations. In terms of a centralized Treasury, it is important to be able to trust the cash flow forecasts provided by the Financial Service Centers. When the basic payment processes have been harmonized and they run rapidly and reliably, the quality and predictability of data improve and liquidity management becomes easier for the entire company.
Annika Westerholm
Smart automation
Valmet intends to expand the operations of its Financial Service Centers to cover an increasing number of its units.
We have built a good payment infrastructure, and we want to benefit from it as much as possible.
Annika Westerholm
We continue to cooperate in a project that develops new solutions for automatic reconciliation and posting of customer payments without references.
We are very interested in the opportunities offered by new technologies, such as software robotics and machine learning, and in making use of them to further increase automation.
Annika Westerholm
