Oracle Practice

Today, enterprises operate in a dynamic business environment with an increasingly complex technology landscape. A comprehensive application suite that seamlessly integrates operations and provides value is required to address the challenges posed by disparate enterprise applications.

Businesses across industries are changing rapidly to address new challenges and capitalize on previously unseen business opportunities for business innovations and expansion. Emerging technology are reshaping business processes across industries profoundly. This demands that IT offers more flexible, agile and intelligent solutions to drive innovation and productivity of business processes.

Oracle Fusion Applications is the next generation application suite from Oracle, which is designed and developed on Oracle Middleware. It includes best of- breed functionality from existing oracle product lines.

Arowana has made significant investments in Oracle Fusion Applications to incorporate the best practices that oracle has shared with the company. Oracle Fusion Application Architecture enabled Companies to innovate, build on existing investments and seamlessly integrate with multi-platform systems to maximize their Returns on Investment (ROI) and also adopt easily to new disruptive and emerging technologies.

Arowana is a Gold partner of Oracle. Therefore uniquely positioned to enable Organizations to be early adapters and surmount the initial challenges and reap the benefits.

The company has experience in Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies can help Organizations in continuous development and support. With the engagement of other Organizations in Consultation and familiarization programs Arowana is enabled to leverage the Fusion applications with appropriate tools, accelerators, development methodologies and fusion framework.

From Fry to Fish- Growth of Arowana

Photo Credits: http://www.paintermagazine.co.uk/

There was once an Arowana swimming in the room of our Board of Directors. A sleek and slim fish which waded around in its tank as the men tried to find a suitable name for the company they were going to lay foundation to. That is when one person came up with the name “Arowana”. The fish is known to have several versatile characteristics one of them is adaptability.

Today, opportunities in the IT sector have linked with the advances in the sector. Bangalore being an IT hub has created a lot of opportunities for startup as well as well-established companies.  Amidst all these companies in Bangalore, Arowana Consulting Limited has set up its own establishment as a fast growing IT company.

As a partner proved to deliver solutions with quality, Arowana enables clients in Gulf Council Countries, USA and Africa to outperform competition and stay ahead with the curve of innovation and success. Enterprises who seek our help to transform and thrive, in a dynamic world through our Centers of Excellence, innovative products and co-creation of solutions.

In the year 1999, Managing Director Prince Thampi partnered with Macrosoft Systems in Muscat. The company provided implementation services for ERP applications and other IT services. They believed and worked on the principle of implementing innovative ideas that help us deliver quality products and solutions to our clients. 5 years later, in the year 2006 Arowana was established as an independent company, backed with experience and definite performance, making a leap into large ventures.

Over the past years Arowana has seen tremendous growth in the expansion of its empire. With 7 branches, 200 plus employees and 45 clients, Arowana has in fact grown from a small fry to a large fish.  An Arowana never stops evolving and finding its course through streams.

Arowana Consulting Limited has been appraised in; Customized Software Application Development Projects has been appraised at Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development or CMMI-DEV(r) - Maturity Level 3.

CMMI is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes that ultimately improve their performance.

An appraisal at maturity level 3 indicates that the organization is performing at a "defined" level. At this level, processes are well characterized and understood, and are described in standards, procedures, tools and methods. The organization's set of standard processes, which is the basis for maturity level 3, is established and improved over time.

Arowana’s Bangalore office concentrates on Application and development of products and solutions including Microsoft practice, Oracle Fusion Technologies, Mobile Application Development and Java Development Practice. The off shore is equipped to provide support to all products and solutions, implemented and developed by us. Added to these we also provide consultancy, solutions and services in emerging technologies such as Oracle-e-Biz suite, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Hyperion, Training services, testing services and SAS.

At Arowana we understand the importance of business relationships as well as employee engagement. We nurture a culture of unwavering ethics and mutual respect, our environment is lively to work in, this builds good productivity hence satisfying our clients.

The journey that an Arowana is generally alone, but we as Arowanites take is that of shoal work, the most important secret of building a skyscraper. Taking up challenges in various Industries and verticals and delivering with quality. 

Creating best solutions in an intelligent way

Today, many organizations are facing a crisis of data explosion. This information is so vast and dynamic that needs to be managed into defined, structured and useful information. Corporates use BI as a weapon to fight any fraud, abuse of material and to improve their business because it empowers decision makers at all levels of management.

Business Intelligence is also known as data warehousing as an organization’s information is consolidated to provide quick notifications of the organization’s business expectations, advanced reporting and analysis capabilities. This provides the ability to compare data in order to improve tactical and strategic management.

The process that enables Business Intelligence entails clear definition of business requirements, translated into technical terms by means of Extracting, Transforming, Loading / presenting data, often referred to as ETL or ETP.  Transformation of data into meaningful information requires the application of specific context, derived in a flexible manner. One of the biggest challenges in developing a data warehouse is determining the value of the data you keep. The successful data warehouse will be the result of a balancing act.

Good business Intelligence is the heart of every Organization and data is king, an enabling technology that provides the right context to the right person at the right time, which in turn gives an organization the insight they need to achieve real business agility.

Arowana’s Business Intelligence helps you to understand and embrace strategic planning for business growth, by identifying key trends and patterns in an organizations data. Arowana grants a 360 degree view of the business, enabling one to easily share data across business and give immediate access to vital customer and financial information. There are various tools which we use to integrate the information at fingertips for our customers.

While historically, business intelligence may have provided information at a management level only, extending the reach of business intelligence is becoming more important than ever. Simple, easy to use tools can be used by anyone across the business, helping you to share information across different departments and therefore save time on reporting and analytics.

The right approach to delivering information to the business is innovative thing and flexible designs. An organizations business may survive without applying BI, but must be tactfully enough to outsmart their competitors.

Shopaholic Women, the Ecommerce Fuel

                             

It is probably one of the oldest stereotypes that, women ‘Love to shop’. Well! Not all women do, but a majority does. Men on the other hand may not enjoy the activity as much as women do, there is a handful who love to scroll the net and scamper through a few racks. If not clothes and shoes they are gadget crazy shoppers. This is not just a mere stereotype, there are researches which back up these theories, using these theories Ecommerce markets grab the big piggy bank.

Women are indeed the Rocket fuel of Ecommerce. Forbes quoted an insightful study by Aileen Lee, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and buyers, which states why women dominate ecommerce. Women are majority users of social network around 55 % of social networkers are females. Her point is not just to be proud that women purchase more shoes or books or surf for more restaurants online than men, but rather to point to the business reality that women are the dominant purchasing population. Women are 70% of the customer base and they drive 74% of revenue.

Having said this Large Ecommerce companies in India such as Myntra, Flipkart, Amazon, Ebay are making use of this information in a very smart way. They know that woman are amplifiers and routers of the social web, placing women as their targets strategies are built  to sell and market branded goods.

Ecommerce uses big data analytics as their secret weapon to target their audience. Keeping in mind that there has been exponential growth in digitalization and prevalent social media experience, ecommerce uses big data tools to collect, manage, dispense and control structured and unstructured product information across B2B commerce channels. Accurate online content informs customers, builds trust, and helps to improve the opinion of the brands; this also gives their customers better shopping experiences.

There are a wide range of ecommerce softwares like shopify, 3Dcart, volusion, big commerce, pinnacle cart, Go daddy. These are fully integrated ecommerce software solution packages that gives the website owner control of all aspect of the website, not just a product catalogue. Imagine a website that would allow your customers to place an order for your goods and when they sent their order to you, your stock or inventory database will be updated immediately, outwards goods are notified and the customer is sent an advice from packing staff when the goods are shipped. With these smooth functioning reasons and plenty of crazy women shopaholics who get lured into the sirens of the sea of ecommerce, retailers have their money bags full.

What do shoppers look for?

Traditionally women take hours to shop; most of them love to look at ten options to buy one that suits them best. Several women window shop, for best buys wait for the End of season sale to buy the same at discounted prices. Ecommerce allows a shopper to spend hours surfing the net for hundreds of options, compare and buy and many other options. Ecommerce is basically a process of searching for and selecting products from online catalogues and then checking out with various payment options.

A shopper finds this delightful as sites offer attractive discounts, lower prices and varied options in comparison to mortar stores. The product gets delivered, with tracking details, pay on delivery option, neat packages and the last but the best option 30 day return policy. You don’t like it tell the retailer why and it is exchanged with money back offers as well. 

An ecommerce retailer benefits at the same time. As the analytics saves time by reducing paper work, errors in keying in data, shorter lead times for payment and return on investment in advertising, faster delivery of product. They also have the ability to handle complex situations, product ranges and customer profiles without the situation becoming unmanageable.

Conclusion

In e-commerce, female purchasing power is also pretty clear.  Sites like Zappos (>$1 billion in revenue last year), Groupon ($760m last year), Gilt Groupe ($500m projected revenue this year), Etsy (over $300m in GMV last year), and Diapers ($300m estimated revenue last year) are all driven by a majority of female customers.

Aileen Lee says, “Women in tech have been missing a key insight. If you figure out how to harness the power of female customers, you can rock the ecommerce world of business.”

Come to think of it none of us can put down those attractive extra 50 percent offs from Myntra or Flipkart, that too when they keep flashing up on your screen and you suddenly recall that it was your last glance on that particular ecommerce site, and we do end up shopping.

References: 

http://www.unilogcorp.com/pdf/Big-Data-Analytics-in-B2B-ecommerce-v2.pdf

http://www.bustle.com/articles/19853-why-do-women-like-to-shop-more-than-men-stereotype-or-not-researchers-have-their-theories

http://www.dynamicwebs.com.au/tutorials/e-commerce.htm

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet/


Find out more about Arowana: www.arowanaconsulting.com

Corporate Treasurer's Role

A treasurer in any department play’s a key role. Any institute, industry or a large organization will have a treasury section which requires knowledgeable people to handle it. Treasury is a sector which involves several key risks related to interest rates, credit, currency, commodity and operations. Large organizations face some or all of these risks to varying degrees. Corporate treasurers generally manage corporate finances and ensure a judicious use of surpluses in Investments and money

markets.Treasurers serve as financial risk managers that seek to protect a company’s value from

the financial risks it faces from its business activities. When a risk arises, it can arise from any and many sources, the role requires an understanding of many businesses and the ability to relate and communicate with various financial professionals.

Much before the 20^th century, many companies were small, family owned and family run, but toady with the evolution of public ownership many large international conglomerates have boomed that trade publicly on one or many global exchanges. The CFO (Chief Financial Officer) is responsible for analyzing and reviewing financial data, reporting financial performances, preparing budgets and managing financial expenditure and costs. Along with checking the corporation’s financial health, integrity and security, he is also responsible for carrying out the Board’s directive in organizational policies associated with the financial exposure of an organization, while transacting any third party

financial arrangement. Adherence to policies will be monitored to avoid preventable financial exposure. In many Banks and corporate organizations, lack of proper risk management leads to

several external influences. There are many corporate solutions in the Market to handle these risks. Majority of these risk management tools comes with a large numbers of bells and whistles, making the product expensive or difficult to use and manage.

What an organization requires is, fully integrated solution covering cash, debt and investments, financial risks treasury accounting, basically a straight forward Treasury and Risk management solution. Companies need to ensure that their corporate financial strategies are appropriately aligned, then ensure the returns are adequate and that appropriate risk management techniques are
deployed.  It is clear that executive management and corporate treasury departments have and will need to respond to this new environment. Secure banking relationships and sources of financing

have become more precarious.

Executive management now requires more information and reassurance. Assumptions about risks and hedging strategies will routinely be more robustly challenged and tested. Corporate treasurers will need greater knowledge of the financial markets together with the ability to make strategic assessments and communicate them effectively to executive management. It is likely to be an exciting and challenging time to be in treasury management. Arowana Consulting Limited, joined hands with certain leading Corporate Organizations and Treasury Domain experts to develop a simple product called Arowana Risk and Treasury Solution (ART) which is suitable for any Corporate Organization, involved with day to day Market operations in the Money Markets and Currency

Markets.Treasurers are increasingly assuming more strategic roles in companies. They have moved

beyond managing working capital to becoming increasingly involved with working with a company's senior management to manage risk and boost the bottom line. 

Arowana’s Solutions

At Arowana we understand that ‘off-the-shelf’ products and solutions cannot fully meet any Organization’s automation requirements. Tailor made solutions will then have to be built to work in conjunction with the software to bridge the gap.

‘Off the shelf’ products come with many unwanted bells and whistles. All these come at an additional cost. Besides they need additional investments in both Hardware, in licences and they consume valuable resources which in turn creates a pressure on Infrastructure.

As a CMMI Level 3 Compliant Organization, we have systems and processes in place. We are passionately devoted to agreed timelines and Quality. Our well-equipped Development centres are staffed with competent delivery teams that can handle projects in emerging technologies. Our Development teams are trained routinely on all technologies. We have an In-house Quality Testing Centre of Excellence with skilled resources and latest tools which, certifies all releases after comprehensive testing.

Arowana understands the challenges in Managing and implementing projects. We have competent in house functional consultants, Solution Architects, technologists and Business Analysts that can understand your Business, accurately scope the tasks to deliver the products and solutions needed. One of the biggest concerns is often the interfacing capabilities of the solutions. This is where Arowana’s vast experience is Product and solution engineering comes in. We can provide solutions that can be optimized to suit your requirements and work seamlessly with your existing investments, to enable you to get a good user experience. 

Our Consultants and Analysts will study your existing investments, understand your pain areas and work with you in building solutions that will enable you to increase efficiencies.  Arowana will be a reliable and credible partner in your endeavours to achieve better utilization. We can help you upgrade and use emerging technologies to leverage optimum results in your pursuit for growth.

Arowana an IT Service Provider

From products that help airlines manage and fly their staff better to offering services to stock markets on mobile platforms, Arowana is a company which expands itself in the world of new-generation IT solutions.

Established in the year 2006, Arowana has grown its way around the IT markets, creating products for the present and future needs. With an aim of global reach and local presence we have extended our clientele across Middle East, India, USA and Africa.

Safety and quality are of the greatest importance to any customer, being a company appraised at CMMI Level 3 we assess every new project in a defined manner and deliver them with precision.

We maintain a business standard while delivering our solutions to your business needs. Building on more than 10 years of experience in various domains and centers of excellence, we have come out with various products and services with proven success. We are now placing ourselves firmly in global markets. We keep moving ahead to bring about, “World Class” products.

Arowana has teams of highly experienced professionals, who have deep understanding of your business needs; we access to appropriate technologies and custom our solutions to specific requirements.

Our Centers of Excellence fosters best practices and implements a continuous improvement process for a practice, keeping in mind the changing dynamics and improvements happening in the practice space.

Our centers of excellence focus on Oracle products like consulting, implementing, training, roll outs, upgrades, provide business analytics using Hyperion practice and planning. Our current focus is on providing services and applications through secure cloud computing platforms. We also continue to invest heavily on delivering meaningful Business Intelligence through Big Data Analysis.  Using internationally approved methods and equipment’s we test your products to meet quality requirements. We provide training to our project handlers so that they use hands on approach while handling projects and tasks.  Our CMMI Compliant development and management helps you in engineering your product with quality assurance using the best applications to develop our products and services. Our existing range of products and solutions are built to work across platforms and data bases. With the growth in technology and use of products and services developed on mobile integrated platforms, we provide products that can be used on mobile platforms.

As a customer, quality is an important factor to you. Our client- focused understanding helps us to use innovative approaches while developing products under our areas of excellence.

Our products and Solutions are developed based on various verticals like Aviation, Telecom, Manufacturing, Retail, Real estate and Master developers, Government, Banking and finance sectors, Public sectors and Healthcare.

As globalization has transformed the world’s markets, consumers look out for new and innovative products which meet their required standards. Technology plays a key role in product development as well as product use. Technology has transformed the use of products the end user expects uniform systems which can manage varied manual tasks making it simple to use.

The solutions provided by Arowana are tailored to meet the needs of various industries. We work with ease and flexibility. We have the experience to deliver the right solutions for your business.

We strive to improve our products with quality and precision.

Ticket to Ride

Suzie has been working as a flight attendant with a major airline for the past 8years. She enjoys every bit of her career. She has seen the world, travelling has allowed her to see continents and countries that she feels she may not have seen otherwise. Travel has been her passion since childhood and this was the best way for her to explore the world. Besides the travel involved in the job, most airlines allow their employees to travel for free or at greatly reduced rates. Although Suzie benefits a lot from Airline Staff travel discount, yet she faces a major drawback with this system.

Suzie is currently 31 years married and has a family in Yorkshire. She avails travel benefits tickets for herself as well as her family. If Suzie has to book these tickets she must contact the travel desk of the airlines, which is headquartered in Cologne, Germany. The travel desk needs to go through her records, check the availability of date and flight seats, there a procedure of hierarchy approvals that needs to be processed after which the travel desk confirms a ticket. On the flipside Suzie could lose out on a lot benefits, there were high changes of her losing out on confirmed staff seat. There are no listings or booking for staff members, this makes the staff travel unpredictable and chances of Suzie being bumped off a flight, since airlines give their revenue passengers priority over their staff. Many airline companies have strict rules, if the staff travel privileges are utilized, the staff must report for their duty immediately. This task of ticketing was getting uphill, not just for the staff but for the airline as well.

Airlines began to sort for a solution which could be consolidated, hence reducing the hassle in ticket booking for the staff. This is when the concept on Airline Staff travel Booking came in. The Pass Bureau of the airline handles all activities related to staff travel, be it Leisure or Duty travel they are responsible for the bookings. They involve a wide range of activities from booking of flights to accommodation, some   airlines occasionally book car rentals for employees who travel on business. 

Now if Suzie were to travel to Malaysia with her family for a “Truly Asian”, experience, her staff tickets would count under leisure travel. She is eligible to travel at her own will. The only problem she has been encountering here is the ticketing process she and her dependants have to go through, to track down tickets and get a reservation for seats at the time she desires to fly.

Besides leisure travel, airlines offer duty travel or business travel. Business travels are more critical since employees travel purely on Duty. These travels are business related the employees need to be given a smooth service. Apart from this, the staff travel department also becomes responsible for arrangements for visiting consultants to the airline, which may be grouped along with business travel and travel of temporary employees. Other activities that may be done by the staff travel department include jumpseat travel, vendor travel, travel agency travel, and deadhead travel. At times, the responsibilities related to staff travel for a partner airline may also be handled by the main airline's staff travel desk. Handling and managing all this was a risqué job.

The airline company, for which Suzie worked for, heard about a staff travel solution that could make the process of ticketing seem seamless and easy. A system through which staff could booking tickets more easily with 24/7 support from anywhere at any time. 

 The company wanted a module that would make quick ticketing process hassle free, user friendly and easy software that could be integrated on all modules at the same time it must be maintenance friendly. 

The staff travel mainly comprises of human resource team, payroll, revenue accounting, finance and IT.  The services are used by all staff members in the organization and retired staff. The staff team maintains a good relation with their staff; they take feedback, pain areas and try to address the same. The biggest concern of the staff was the ticket claims.

An airline staff travel system addresses to all the staff travel issues faced by the airline staff travel desk. The system was designed and integrated to allow all the staff to book tickets online at anytime from anywhere. The staff travel system has a booking engine to carry out live air bookings. The automatic ticketing system reduces the work load on the processing agents, eliminating errors while computing taxes and fares.

All Staff Travel Systems are designed and integrated to bring a smile a smile on the faces of staff like Suzie. When a staff member checks into the site to apply for a ticket, the process is quick and it save processing time. Agents can now relax as the responsibility of processing has been lowered from their shoulders. The tracking system works with accuracy hence helping the agents to track the requests of the requester en route.

Duty travel approval saves an employee time in approaching their supervisors. He can claim his expenses after returning from duty travel. The automated online transfer of Duty travel claims the amount to salary, thus saving manual input into financial system. 

Staff travel system has now picked up pace in the market, airlines sort to implement the system in the company. Staff travels management carters to a global delivery system, providing various flight benefits customized by the airline to tailor to their staff policies.

The system has modules that offer privilege and business travel benefits, these benefits are categorized for each staff according to grade. Based on the eligibility, the staff and immediate family members are entitled to various Travel booking Privileges or recreational benefits. The airlines takes into account, the hierarchy and position of the staff before the ticket discounts are determined.

As per the airline travel policies various duty travel claims and management benefits are offered to the staff.  Travel requests can be routed through approval hierarchy defined for the staff. The passengers can view their booking history and manage their bookings. The system enables the traveler to view his/her approval and travel status.

Airline booking systems also have modules to generate reports, manage bookings and profile management. Mr. Alexander, who works on the HR team for an African Airlines feel that this system has the best performance level. He quotes, “15 years ago, managing records was a hard task, everything was manual and there were many errors recorded in our system. After the implementation of staff travel system this task is simple, the system integrates with our HR modules. We have very few chances of errors now.”

The airline system has a unique login Id for every staff member. The member can view his profile and manage the same. He or she can check the status of their tickets as well. This helps not only the staff as well as the managing team to work smoothly.

The customers can book tickets anywhere at any time using credit card, debit cards maestro cards or pay at counter.  Now there are no more hassles at the Travel desk, just an easy Airline booking system.

“Before our company had adapted to airline booking system, there were a lot problems and confusions at the travel desks.” says Suzie.

Airhostess Samantha shares how easy Staff travel system has made their travel. She says,” My siblings now enjoy the pleasures of a first class travel; we get tickets based on Zonal Employee Discounts (ZED) and interlining. Travelling has never been more fun.”

Airline staff travel systems are now gaining momentum, more airline companies are using this system as it is organized reducing the rate of manual work.  Staff travel solution processes every booking segment in the respective GDS or reservation system of the airline operating the particular flight or leg. In this way, interline settlement between the user and other airlines easy reducing costs and effort considerably. 

Now Suzie has no worries booking a ticket, be it Leisure or Duty. Staff Travel System does it all. Like Suzie several airline staff members now find travel easy. With a click of the mouse or with the touch or your cell phones staff travel systems makes your leisure and duty travel enjoyable.

You can read More such articles from our Newsletter 

http://www.arowanaconsulting.com/Downloads/Newsletter.pdf

Good Bye Orkut

The First time I had a email id and a social media account I was barely in high school. 10 years back children of my age were even not allowed to have an email account let alone a media account, as we had to be 18 years to have an account for socializing.
The first few networking sites that  launched were a trial and error attempt to encourage socializing online   Friendster, Friend-of - a-Friend, Hi5, these online friend networks were just basic in nature where one could meet friends, add friends and chat to some extent.

It was January 24th 2004 when Google had launched this media platform. Its popularity grew in leaps and bounds, indeed socializing online was a talk among young teens of my age at that time. Other online friend sites slowly began to fall out of grace. 

Google's Orkut stood out, developed by a Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten created a soaring success as a social networking site, In less than a month after it was launched, it became the talk of the town. Orkut could boast of having close to 1,00,000 members and seemed to have been discussed everywhere both online and offline.

I had a Hi5 account as well and it  worked on  simple concepts. After  joining the site, one describes his or her interests, particularities and you make a list of friends, invite them to join. When Orkut set foot, it was not just these basic details that we had to put up, we could invite our friends, navigate and look at their friends and make connections with people whom we did not know at the same time who shared our interests. In this way we became a part of our own network and thus created new ties .

That's basically it.  All a tad trite,  a great way of doing away with your time, although admittedly it must be fun to suddenly find an old friend in this way. Orkut was incredibly hip, and it was especially popular among the internet savvy.

Just in a few months Facebook was founded. At first Facebook took time to lay its foundation but once it stood firm, it topsy-turved everything for Orkut. Facebook became a skyscraper and Orkut stood like a hut no match to Facebook at all. 

Today Facebook  is the pioneer in social networking.It is the 2nd most visited website (Next to google) in the world and according to Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it has approx 1.28 billion active users. Now Orkut ranks in the 89th position of social media with more than half of its traffic from India and Brazil. Google managed to sustain this social media for a decade and finally they have decided to put the media to a full stop. Google has now decided to focus on YouTube, Blogger and Google+ which have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world.

According to Economic Times: Orkut, Google's first social networking site, will cease to exist after September 30th, 2014, with the Internet giant deciding to shut down the service launched 10 years ago which is very popular in India and Brazil,  however, did not do so well in other parts of the world and lost sheen to rivals like Facebook. All Orkut users have also received an adieu mail stating that it will close down in September. 

Now that some of us including myself cannot recall how our Orkut profiles once looked, since we have completely lost touch. After ten years of sparking conversations and forging connections, It is time to say good bye to a social network that would have been a part of networking lives at some point.

 

Tête-à-tête with Ravi Kumar

S G Thampi: Increasingly the role of a Treasurer in an Organization is becoming more important and separated from the CFO's role. The role and the department is being spun off as a Revenue Centre. Going forward - what do you see?

Ravi Kumar: With increasing volatility in interest rates, different stands taken by Central Banks all over the world to protect their own interests and the overall exposure a company has in various financial assets (which contribute more than 50 % of their real assets) means that any edge the company can get by obtaining superior yields on these assets will contribute directly to their bottom line. These assets and liabilities can be surplus cash, borrowings or investments. So a Treasurer is here to stay and he has the very specific role of ensuring that Global events, volatility and other perceived and real risks are harnessed to the benefit of the Company.

S G Thampi: What are the products that a Corporate Treasurer uses to manage assets and liabilities?

Ravi Kumar: Show me your Cash flows and let us engineer a bespoke solution - seems to be the mantra in almost all cases.  There is an explosion in the last few years as far as innovation goes, for designing solutions based on needs and based on short term to long term views.  For example there is a widespread view that the Quantitative easing commenced by the Federal Reserve Board will lead to interest rates rising and easy money becomes less available. So if you are a borrower what would you do to reduce your interest payout? If you have surplus - you need a plan to increase your yield!  There are several products available to help you mitigate the risks with respect to interest rate volatility. These are for both the asset side and the liability side of the balance sheet. The new kind of risk that is gaining ground is the Competitive advantage risk. A product developed in a Country having a devalued currency will give the manufacturer an advantage over a product created in a Country whose currency has appreciated. We have seen this before when Japanese and Korean Car Makers flooded the markets in Europe and America.

S G Thampi: Is there is a dependency on Technology to handle increasingly complex products, engineering bespoke solutions and monitoring and controlling Financial assets, liabilities and the activities of the Corporate Treasurer.

Ravi Kumar: There are three pillars here. They are first - Financial Market innovations, second -emergence of new technologies with faster processors, bigger data storage, reliable architecture, easy and user friendly access and third the Regulators who are increasingly by their actions controlling and impacting the markets. The Market player’s needs technology to grasp the impact of the confluence of these three forces, technology that can provide relevant and timely information, transparent and clear bench marks closely aligned with the markets. It will be of great value and going forward I can definitely state that there is no way Financial Innovation can go on without ever improving technological support.

S G Thampi: Global events can impact markets and create volatility which can go beyond a regulators ability to control. Markets get buffeted and an uncertain period can be very unnerving for a Treasurer. How does a Treasurer address that, given the fact that news can flow from many directions and can impact decisions without any ability to verify the facts.

Ravi Kumar: Communication Technology has improved. Rapid innovations, wireless speeds, Smartphone's etc means that all market players are in touch 24x7. News flows from many directions. Ultimately decisions have to be taken.  There is abundant news, reviews, MIS from many sources and a fairly clear picture can be understood within a short period of time.

S G Thampi: Treasury operations and markets have shifted from the dealing rooms of banks into the dealing rooms of corporates. Many Bank dealers and Treasurers have moved to Organizations. Similar infrastructure which only Banks had earlier, is now available with Corporates. What is the impact going forward? Will banks be sidelined?

Ravi Kumar: The Volker rule placed some restrictions on the speculative trading done by Banks. Banks therefore have trimmed their dealing rooms and is emerging as a facilitator for managing client funds.  So Corporates today a choice. Their business goes to the Banks who manages provides best services, who provides tailor made financial innovations at beneficial rates. Corporates are witnessing global events and increasingly they want a say in monitoring their assets to tide over shocks that global events periodically deliver to the system. Unpredictable events that impact their fortunes (termed as Black swan events) are happening more often and mathematical models cannot mimic or predict such events and their after-effects as each event is quite specific. A clearly enunciated treasury policy is needed and yes, the Organizations will have a increased say in the way their assets are handled and they would like to do it directly to maintain independence and secrecy. All this provides IT Companies to develop and deliver systems that facilitates the Corporate Treasurer to obtain information on Liquidity and stop loss based on alerts.

S G Thampi: Is individual participation far off? Considering that there are more and more billionaires and even well informed and reasonably well to do people in Middle Class who are not risk averse? Will such products be of use to them?

Ravi Kumar: I Think this is the next logical step. The consequences for the wealth management industry  managing the portfolios of High Net Worth Individuals will have to improve transparency and also cope with increased demand for better performance at risk of losing business.  The products will help in hedging exposures and also in monitoring assets. I see mutual funds and pension funds using these tools and it will slowly percolate to the common man as well. I already see these happening in stock exchanges where individuals trade and with commodity trading and currency trading thrown open, there will be more awareness which will lead to the increased use of these products.

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