Misys Global Cash Pooling Released

Misys plc (FTSE: MSY.L), has launched Misys Global Cash Pooling. The new solution enables banks to offer sophisticated cash pooling services to corporate and institutional customers, across multiple currencies, borders, banks and time zones, at a low cost.

In today's economic environment, cash management represents a highly attractive business for banks, featuring low capital usage, earnings stability and return on equity. To compete in this area, however, banks are under pressure to offer more services that add value. In particular, corporate treasurers are demanding that their banks provide cash pooling products on an international basis (JP Morgan Global Cash Management Survey 2007(1)).

For banks, however, cross-border cash pooling is highly complex, difficult to implement and costly. Misys Global Cash Pooling, the latest generation of Misys' award-winning cash management suite, resolves these issues by automating notional pooling, sweeping and consolidated balance reporting across multiple countries and currencies. Designed to co-exist with other back-office systems, the solution delivers the flexibility banks need to both define innovative pooling products and operate in multiple regulatory jurisdictions, whilst minimising operational costs.

As Simon Lord, Product Marketing Manager at Misys, comments: "As more and more corporations consolidate their treasury operations and reduce the number of banking relationships, banks are looking for new ways to compete for business, particularly against the largest global banks. Banks are also targeting the increasingly sophisticated mid-sized corporations and SMEs - hence the demand for intelligent technology solutions like Misys Global Cash Pooling."

Misys Global Cash Pooling uses a rules-based approach for processing standard SWIFT format statement messages, applied to a hierarchy of shadow accounts, to construct a full picture of balances and movements between accounts in the cash pool - either within one bank or across different banks.

The system automatically handles complex sweeping and notional pooling arrangements such as global sweeping (from East to West or from West to East), back valued sweeps, cross-currency and cross-border margin netting, and the administration of inter-company debt. Support is provided for a variety of regulations including the treatment of withholding tax and charging options to cater for VAT in multiple jurisdictions. Simon Lord continues: "Misys Global Cash Pooling helps banks to improve customer service in a cost-effective way - so they can better attract and retain corporate customers and increase 'share of wallet' of those customers. Indeed, the research(2) we carried out suggests banks are seeing an average 14.4% increase in business from existing customers as a result of offering these services."

Furthermore, with Misys Global Cash Pooling, banks can provide corporations with online access to all information relating to the cash pool, either via Misys Cash Portal or the bank's own eBanking platform.