Automating treasury and risk management for enterprises: Interview with CM Grover, MD & CEO, IBSFINtech

By Puja Sharma

IBSFINtech is a home-grown enterprise TreasuryTech company providing end-to-end digitisation and automation solutions for the cash and liquidity, treasury, risk and trade finance management (TRTFM), and supply chain finance requirements of medium, large, and very large corporates. Its vision and mission are to become the most trusted IT solution partner for treasury, risk & trade finance management, globally across industries.

Chandra Mohan Grover is Managing Director and CEO of the company, after spending almost two decades in a public sector bank, Mohan took the reins of IBSFINtech in 2010. A strategic mix of domain expertise and exceptional leadership qualities helped him steer the company’s direction towards unprecedented success.

IBS Intelligence interacted with Grover to explore the Treasury, risk, trade finance, and supply chain finance management for small to large enterprises.

What does IBSFINtech focus on?

The firm’s major focus is to digitise and automate this critical function of corporates Treasury, Risk, Trade Finance & Supply Chain Finance function. IBSFINtech’s treasury, risk, and trade Finance management solution is a comprehensive risk management platform for enterprises worldwide, offering on-premise as well as SaaS-based cloud offerings.

It enables the CxOs and treasurers to enhance visibility, improve control, mitigate operational risk, drive automation, optimize business efficiency and ensure business continuity. IBSFINtech’s solution is an “all in one” product, covering multi-asset class, multi-currency, multi-location, and multi-company. The platform empowers the corporate to manage compliance, financial and operational Risks in one solution.

What are the product offerings?

Our product portfolio comprises the following modules:

• Innovative Treasury 7i & Innovative Trade Finance 7i (On-Prem): Exclusive modules for Currency, Hedge Accounting, Commodity and Money Market (Investment) and with exclusive modules for Import-Export Management and Borrowings, Liquidity & Cash Management.

• It’s SaaS TMS InTReaX – powered by Refinitiv data & Analytics: it is in partnership with Refinitiv (erstwhile Thomson Reuters) – one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure, recently launched SaaS TMS, a new age automated treasury management solution – InTReaX™ for cash & liquidity management, currency risk management, and market insights.
• VNDZY – SaaS solution for Supply Chain Finance

It is a comprehensive solution for Supply Chain Finance management, facilitating both Corporations and Suppliers, creating a win-win in the entire ecosystem.

 Speaking of which please share how are you building treasury, risk, and trade Finance management?

The platform is a comprehensive solution, which is highly parameterized, configurable, and designed with a modular approach. The innovative and intuitive design of the platform allows it to easily adapt to the workflows of the corporate and therefore enables high ease of implementation. The platform is master-based with parameter placeholders which can be defined based on the organization’s processes & workflows. User profiles are also defined during the implementation as per the organizational structure. All of this enhances the ease of platform by manifolds.

The firm is built on a robust and secure technology stack, keeping in mind the critical function of Treasury and Corporate Finance that it caters to. It has always remained ahead of time and has been investing in the research of new technologies like AI, ML, RPA, and Blockchain to stay ahead of the curve to continue to offer cutting-edge solutions for this segment.

Moreover, the company is emerging as the integration layer between corporate ERP and Banks, enabling straight-thru processing. Thereby enabling a truly connected ecosystem. IBSFINtech has been the first mover in the Bank connectivity by enabling seamless processing of vendor bill discounting for a retail giant in 2018. The case study was also published in the leading global media, The Global Treasurer back then.

How do you plan to grow in the next couple of years?

Closing the Financial Year 2021-22 on a positive note, we expect our growth in the Financial Year 22-23 to be close to 5X. Considering the accelerated growth in the digitalization of the Treasury, Risk, Trade Finance & Supply Chain Finance function we are expecting that the growth is going to be pretty strong.

We aspire to become one of the Top 3 players in the niche space in the global market in the next 2-to to 3 years. the firm is disrupting the corporate treasury ecosystem and has established itself as a leader in this space in India. With aspirations to be a global corporate TreasuryTech provider, IBSFINtech has experienced phenomenal growth in the last few months.

As part of our growth strategy, in continuation to retaining our leadership position in the country, we intend to set up our presence in the US, Singapore, Dubai during this year to expand our foothold in these global regions.

How are you driving the change among corporate, suppliers, and vendors at the same time?

As we know, the Supply Chain Finance process is cumbersome and has many challenges for corporations, suppliers as well as financial institutions. As a Corporate Treasury & Trade Finance Management solution provider, we introduced VNDZY- an integrated and end-to-end solution for Supply Chain Finance and beyond.

VNDZY is a SaaS solution that builds a connected ecosystem for corporations, suppliers, and financial institutions, creating a win-win in the entire ecosystem. Benefits go beyond, strengthening the entire ecosystem, including, corporations, suppliers, and Financial Institutions. It connects the dots and empowers the complete ecosystem.

For the corporations:

VNDZY empowers the corporations with an integrated solution that ensures working capital optimization, enhances liquidity by providing more visibility, reduces the cost of funds drastically. Smooth working operations lead to safeguarding of relationship with suppliers and therefore enables quality suppliers.

For the suppliers:

Access to financing without impacting own limits. Payment Security is equal to risk reduction and strengthening Business Relations.

What is the future of the supply chain ecosystem and how do you plan on tackling the challenges in this field?

According to Gartner’s strategic supply chain predictions for 2022, by 2026, more than 50% of large organizations will compete as a collaborative digital ecosystem rather than discrete firms – sharing inputs, assets, and innovations.

Corporations struggle with multiple challenges including, on-boarding of multiple vendors, validation of vendor credibility, fraud detection, manual payment processes, and integration between ERP and supply chain financing products. On the other side, suppliers struggle with manual communication and multiple follow-ups to get their payments released, with no visibility on the payment dates, sending out invoices manually, and so on. This amplifies into struggles in maintaining liquidity to ensure business sustainability and also affects the scalability opportunities.

We plan to tackle these challenges through our SaaS supply chain finance solution VNDZY. It will strengthen the entire ecosystem including Corporations, Suppliers, Financial Institutions, and connect the dots to empower the complete ecosystem.

In addition to this, IBSFINtech is already established as an end-to-end solution provider catering to the critical function of Cash & Liquidity, Risk, Treasury, and Trade Finance function of the corporates. The company also plans to launch more products in the segment, catering to dealer finance and PO finance, to facilitate the end-to-end digitisation of the SCF ecosystem.

Hence, through our vast product portfolio, we can enable the end-to-end digitization & automation of supply chain finance.