Read the excerpt from Treasury & Risk:
Hunt has always used interest-bearing operating accounts, but a couple of years ago, Miller saw an opportunity to earn more by investing excess funds from all its various entities. Short-term investments in money-market funds would be ideal—if the company could automate many of the processes underlying such investments. “Without automation, we could not even entertain the thought,” Miller says. “The extra yield we could pick up wouldn’t have been worth the number of accountants we would have needed to make it happen across all our banks every day.”
Then Miller heard that Kyriba and ICD were planning to develop an API for short-term investments. Hunt was already using the Kyriba system for managing cash, bank statements, real-time payments, and long-term investments. He jumped on the opportunity to be involved in development of the API. “We were customer number one for the API,” he says. The timing was right, because interest rates soon started rising.
“Kyriba and ICD built single sign-on connectivity and an API,” Miller explains. “We helped them alpha test it, beta test it, and we piloted it—and it works great. If we want to move money into a money fund, we go into Kyriba and seamlessly launch ICD. It looks like we’re still in Kyriba, but we can see all the ICD funds that we can buy, as well as our open positions and rate cutoff times. We can easily place purchases on the ICD platform, and the API will generate the wire payment within Kyriba in real time. When we have approved and released the payment, the funds will be sent over, and confirmation of the transaction will appear in Kyriba.” Finally, the Hunt team will use the Kyriba entry to create and reconcile the transaction in the company’s general ledger (G/L).
