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Asia Pacific Sector Insights
| Keysight Technologies Inc.
The Solution
Keysight’s global treasury and banking
architecture was tailored to support the specific
needs, challenges and ecosystem across several
key functional stakeholders — including (but not
limited to) the commercial business, treasury,
global sourcing, shared services center, financial
services and accounting, information
technology, tax and legal.
In January 2014, a Singapore-led project team
from Keysight and Citi was established as the
central command post for project oversight,
control and execution. Cross-regional and
cross-functional teams across Asia Pacific, North
America, Europe and Latin America regions,
collaborated to ensure a seamless and successful
global implementation, towards a common goal
of achieving key milestones ending with a final
go-live date of December 23, 2014.
The comprehensive solution set is comprised of
the following key components:
•
Global credit facility
— Citi established
a “Follow-the-Sun” program to optimize
aggregated global clearing limits by
transferring excess capacity back-and-forth,
across regions and time zones to support
Keysight’s day-to-day cash management
activities around the globe. Required facilities
supporting the global card program were also
put in place.
•
New account opening, legal entities
name change, novation of operating
accounts, banker guarantees and relevant
documentation execution
— Globally, this
involved over 230 accounts across 30
markets. In Asia, this included 100 accounts
across nine markets. Global co-ordination
was centrally managed from Keysight’s global
treasury center in Singapore.
•
Integrated cash management solutions
— A combination of domestic, and cross-
regional, automated end-of-day, daily target
balancing cash pooling structures were
established with Keysight’s global treasury
center in Singapore as the pool header.
– This approach involved 15 local currency
pools globally with an overlaying group credit
interest optimization solution in Asia Pacific.
– USD and EUR are further concentrated to a
single global cash pool in London on a daily
basis, with good value dating through a “Follow-
the-Sun” sweep – all delivered through Citi’s
robust single global concentration engine.
– In Asia Pacific, a group credit interest
optimization program was also implemented
to further enhance the group total yield of
returns for the region.
– SWIFT FIN and FileAct were implemented to
support Sungard’s Integrity for making and
recording treasury and intercompany funds
settlement.
– The integrated solution enables Keysight’s
treasury team to gain full visibility of cash
flows, as well as consolidate and manage
group daily cash positions across 37 legal
entities and 27 countries globally, in a fully
automated and efficient manner.
•
Integrated cash management solution
—
Citi’s extensive global network enabled the
delivery of a full cash management service
model to Keysight and its subsidiaries. A
single, robust global host-to-host file based
connectivity via Citiconnect for Files was
fully integrated with Keysight’s Oracle ERP
to support straight-through payments and
reporting reconciliation. Enabling a high level
of process standardization and consistency
to Keysight’s India and Malaysia shared
services centers. With market standard ISO
XML version 3 file formats being successfully
implemented for Western Europe to support
Single Euro Payment Area compliance, and
some elected countries in Asia, Brazil and
Mexico, plans are under consideration towards
achieving full standardization of file formats
to the remaining regions.
To support Keysight’s spin-off strategy and objectives, the treasury teams of Agilent and
Keysight partnered with Citi, their global cash management and trade bank, to implement an
integrated working capital management solution covering cash management, liquidity and
investment, trade services and finance, and commercial cards.