Mitsubishi UFG Securities – Operations Cash Management System Automation

Context

A financial institution, heavily involved in stock and bond trading, is using many bank accounts in different currencies in several different banks to settle their trades.

After the trading day ends, the Operations team must perform several bank transfers to ensure no bank account is in overdraft and any surplus funds are transferred to the Treasury team for overnight investing. This process takes a team of three around one hour to complete.

Failure to achieve the above will result in significant overdraft fees or loss of income.

Challenge

We were initially tasked with automating bank transfers – Operations team wanted to provide an Excel spreadsheet with required transfers and our automation would action them, saving the time needed to enter transfer details manually and reduce the risk of fat-finger mistakes.

Solution

Instead of jumping in and implementing the requirements provided, we interacted with the Operations team and developed a deeper understanding of their daily process.

We have suggested a wider scope of work: since we could get access to current account balances, our automation could calculate the optimal transfers itself.

We’ve prepared a simple website that presented suggested transfers right after the market close for the Operations team to review, modify, and approve. The team had full visibility of the planned transfers and would see the projected closing balances. The projections are updated in real-time after any modifications are made, with any overdrawn accounts clearly highlighted.

The solution took less than a week to implement. The team workload was reduced to a few minutes with virtually no scope for costly mistakes. What is more, there was an additional cost saving in bank transfer fees, as our automation was designed to perform necessary fund movement in the smallest number of transfers possible.