CitiFX Publication - From Crisis Management to Business Recovery

1. Upskilling – The acquiring of new skills for current positions with a view towards productivity gains 2. Reskilling – Learning completely different skills for new positions, with a view towards redeployment 3. Flexi-work – Voluntary reduction of work hours for capacity and cost reduction Of the three approaches, upskilling is most easily attainable. Unlike reskilling, it does not require incremental capacity elsewhere in your organisation and given that these employees have related skills, their propensity to be upskilled would be higher. From an employee morale perspective, upskilling may similarly have an advantage over the other two approaches in that employees are less likely to feel displaced from their current roles and the notion of being able to undertake higher order work could in fact elevate their sense of corporate worth and value. The resultant narrative from upskilling, productivity gains, would also be a compelling one for people managers, most especially within an environment where headcount and expenses are closely scrutinised. In the domain of FX management, team managers should critically examine tasks that their team members perform, with a view towards outsourcing operationally manual and low value tasks. Immediate opportunities may potentially be found in those where FX is an ancillary function, such as FX tasks that are embedded within business payments, or the target rebalancing of liquidity in different currency accounts. The argument for control and transparency has been long held but in an environment where control implements are available, businesses should revisit the subject of outsourcing. When outsourcing these tasks to service providers, businesses should at a minimum implement the following measures to retain control and confidence over the outsourced process: 1. Service Level Agreements 2. Reports - with configurable frequencies and compatible formats. STP routing support would be an _ added advantage 3. Regular service reviews with your service provider 4. Periodic benefit assessments, e.g. expense savings, productivity gains With a defined outsourcing plan for low-value FX transactional tasks, teams may then turn their focus to the upskilling of their workforce and readying themselves for business recovery post COVID-19. Key Takeaway: Outsourcing is a quick medium-term solution that frees up staffing capacity. It could also ease expense pressures while allowing business managers to focus on unlocking productivity gains from existing teams. Guidepost 3: Synchronise Cash Optimisation and Risk Management Practices In the wake of recent market turbulence, corporates with best-in-class treasury technologies have certainly benefited in many areas – none of which are more important than liquidity visibility and risk management practices. Absence of such infrastructure has certainly highlighted vulnerabilities in treasuries’ ability to strike the right balance between liquidity needs and future revenue protection. That being said, even those with sufficient treasury technology capabilities in-place, treasuries should be regularly assessing if they are deploying a risk management framework that strikes a balance between near term liquidity needs and protecting future revenues and earnings 1 . 4 5 Foreign Exchange Guideposts for Corporates in a time of COVID-19