Bangalore based IBSFINtech is looking forward to becoming the most trusted IT solution partner for Treasury & Risk Management for organisations operating in different verticals.
TM Manjunath, Director – Technical Services, IBSFINtech speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s core competencies and its plans for near term future.
What are the big priorities for IBSFINtech today?
Our vision is to become most trusted IT Solution Partner for Treasury & Risk Management, globally across Industries. Our primary focus is to introduce IBSFINtech’s product portfolio in international markets and invest resources in continuous enhancement of our product portfolio.
We intend to empower our customers with solutions that help leverage technology to implement a seamless flow of data. This will support enhanced integrity and timeliness, agnostic to disparate locations, and provide meaningful information that will aid them to manage and mitigate the inherent business risks.
How do you look at the emerging importance of Real-time treasury solutions? How is IBSFINtech empowering organizations in the same?
In today’s fast paced and volatile Forex Markets, decision making depends on real time and accurate information. Key stakeholders like CFO, Treasury Head and Treasury Department need to have access to real-time information to make critical decisions. Our customers are already reaping benefits of IBSFINtech’s technology solutions viz. Innovative Treasury™ and Innovative Trade Finance™.
The solution provides real-time flow of information, seamless integration with organization’s legacy systems, built-in analytics, and end-to-end management of treasury operations. Our wide spectrum of customers from different industry verticals includes textile to e-commerce to publishers to steel manufacturers.
How does IBSFINtech view the technology usage in the treasury transactions in India today? Do you envisage a scope of scaling up?
A recent survey by Bloomberg highlighted the fact 74 per cent of global organizations with revenues less than $250 million “DO NOT” leverage a Treasury Management System (TMS) for treasury management. Excel sheets and archaic systems still rules treasury systems of multi-billion dollar corporates.
Indian companies remains much slower in technology adoption when compared to their western counterparts. Several Indian companies with over $10 billion forex exposures are still managing Forex with Excel utilities!
Most large companies’ technology landscape includes an Enterprise solution (from large vendors), some legacy applications, and host of excel/home-grown utilities. To make situations complex, most of these systems are standalone, or at least incapable of talking to each other seamlessly. Such complex technology landscape makes it almost impossible to have single-instance of truth about Forex exposure in real-time manner for its key stakeholders like the Traders, Controller and CFO.
But the Indian corporates are gradually catching up, and asking questions with an open mind to accept a treasury management software. Though we believe, perhaps, the single most reason for lower technology adoption could be unavailability of simple but holistic TMS. Most TMS available in market are extremely complex, require long implementation time and involve steep learning curves.
Indeed, there is a huge scope for scaling up. Economic uncertainties and intense competitive markets leave no choice for today’s treasurer, but to scale up and upgrade technologically.
Please share some of the innovations coming from IBSFINtech in mitigating risks?
We, at IBSFINtech, believe in continuous product innovation and development and hence core of the company’s organization is a R&D team fuelling the appetite for product innovation. With regards to product innovation and enhancement, company plans to add Analytics and Hedge accounting to its product landscape to strengthen the product.IBSFINtech products are already available On-Premise and Cloud. We will be soon launching an application on popularmobile platforms.
What is the level of growth that you are expecting from this segment and where is this growth likely to come from?
We expect substantial growth from both domestic and international markets. However, we foresee the international markets are likely to be the source of this growth.
Please share details about your key geographies that you are targeting? What are your plans to increase your global reach?
IBSFINtech is focused to expand its footprints in International Markets, and establish Innovative Product Suite as a global brand in the industry. We are targeting APAC region, MENA region to expand our business globally. In addition to setting up our own regional sales team, we are partnering with established players in respective markets and leveraging the partnership to get more traction in the international market.
What are the challenges that you are facing? Do you seek any support from the market regulators to mobilize the need of real-time?
Key challenges include the evolving business environment and the evolving regulatory environment. Our software handles Exchange ( NSE, BSE, MCX, NCDEX, etc ) related derivatives ( both currency and commodity) and fetches data from website sources like AMFI, and other sources for money market instruments. The key challenge faced here is no seamless integration to get this information.
The regulatory frameworks are dynamically changing and adding to the impact of volatile forex market. Managing the impact of regulatory change, whether at a local or global level, is an inevitable cost of doing business.
The cost and resources dedicated to compliance will continue to grow in the coming years but it will not be detrimental rather will prove to be supportive of growth of this industry. And our product portfolio is strategically designed to adhere to globally acknowledged industry regulatory compliances as well as a corporate’s internal policies; ensuring peace of mind for CEOs and CFOs.
