Ashraf Abourida (Surecomp): Time to Move on Credit-Line Visibility
Ashraf Abourida, head of product at Surecomp, tells François Masquelier, Chair of ATEL, how multi-bank platforms consolidate fragmented bank portals into a single view, so treasurers can finally see and manage their credit lines: utilisation, headroom, SLA, turnaround and pricing. With API and AI-driven automation speeding the process by 50 to 60 percent, the human stays in the loop only to decide. His verdict: it is time to move.
An interview with Ashraf Abourida, head of product at Surecomp, by François Masquelier, Chair of ATEL.
“The concern and the issue are still the same, but good news, we have a solution.”
Ashraf Abourida, Surecomp
What are the main priorities for corporate treasurers today?
They have been the same for quite a long time. Treasurers still struggle to get visibility on their credit lines with their banks. Even smaller corporates work with multiple banks, and every bank has its own portal, its own fragmented environment and its own guarantee standards. Corporates themselves are complicated animals, with multiple organisations, country specificities and often different internal systems. So they fall back on old-school tools like Excel to manage their portfolios of trade instruments. The challenge lies in consolidating all that into one view, so the treasurer can take proper decisions on bank relationships: which credit lines are utilised and to what extent, the headroom, the SLA, the turnaround time, the pricing.
How can you consolidate this mass of data in one single platform?
Technology already offers sufficient multi-bank platform capabilities to consolidate everything, even with connectivity to the different ERP systems. The efficiency gains from proper visibility and decision making based on data are huge, and that is where we leverage our RIVO platform. Treasurers need to manage their liquidity, their risks and their credit lines, while anticipating what is coming. With a cockpit view and a dashboard covering all the entities managed from a global treasury centre, and the banks connected to it, you no longer need to enter a bank portal or send emails to a bank.
Are you able to increase the efficiency and reduce the time?
Automation is the name of the game. As soon as the ERP system holds the information for a deal between the corporate and its counterparts, you extract the data with APIs, or with AI for unstructured data. The treasurer immediately decides to which bank to send the request, without adhering to each bank's standards and portals. Once a bank is selected, the process starts running. That improves wallet sharing between banks and cost, although cost is not everything: the SLA matters too, if one bank takes five to 10 days to reply. Reciprocity also counts, since you give flow business to banks that support you in lending. AI will be an immense game changer, speeding up the process by 50 to 60 percent, because interpretation no longer requires a human. You only need the human in the loop to take decisions. So it is time to move.