Best practice: Process-optimized receivables financing as a real game changer in Treasury

The relationship already started in 1986. In 2001 RBI was one of 23 syndicate banks in a EUR 603 million OeKB acquisition financing, to my knowledge one of the largest acquisition financings in Austria at that point in time. Since 2004, the cooperation has been expanded and has become an active banking relationship with a wide range of banking services. Today, RBI is the number one core bank within our banking strategy, mandated lead arranger and documentation agent of the current RCF. We maintain the master accounts for our cross-border multi-currency/multi-bank cash pool with RBI and trade a significant portion of our FX swaps and Forwards with RBI. 

The most important goal is diversification in our financing strategy, attractive conditions and flexible financing for our subsidiaries in local currency as well as optimization of our working capital.

I still remember the first meeting with Stefan Gaida, Head of Supply Chain Finance at RBI. In our first meeting, we immediately saw the potential for optimizing the existing solution. We spent a year examining the new solution in theory and then switched to RBI. It was a lot of detailed work, eleven group companies in four jurisdictions and three currencies had to be considered; that certainly has a significant degree of complexity. However, we managed to complete it with great commitment in three months, from signing the mandate until the first sale of receivables before the end of our financial year. Special attention was given to the integration of the two Australian subsidiaries and the treatment of sales bonifications. This was always aligned between RBI and Zumtobel to facilitate the needs and requirements of our business model. With this transaction, RBI is providing the Zumtobel Group with a framework of EUR 100m, which we use flexibly according to our working capital requirements.

Our export business generally runs via the Group's own local sales companies. The most important of these are also selling their receivables under the receivables financing program with RBI. In the respective country, these are effectively "domestic receivables" and not "export receivables". The proportion of cross-border receivables financed by RBI is around 20%. However, there are no differences between local and export sales in the processing of the program. 

Yes, we had receivables financing from 2007 to 2018 on the basis of a relatively basic agreement.

In my view, the RBI solution had three key advantages compared to our previous program, apart from the complexity of the now much more extensive contractual framework reflecting the transaction structure: 

• Financing of small-volume receivables (only insured under discretionary limit). 
• Financing of gross instead of net receivables (i.e., including VAT), RBI was more flexible in this respect than its predecessor. 
• A highly automated purchasing process that requires only one central resource on our side for the administration of the transaction. Previously, data had to be prepared decentrally in the eleven sales companies. Now we have two transactions per month, but the data is transferred in three minutes and then an employee needs around 1.5 hours for internal follow-up. 
  

A major topic in the community is ISO 20022 for cash management and EBICS. We are currently working on a new solution with the Raiffeisen network banks in CEE and are definitely further ahead than most companies thanks to the close exchange with the experts at RBI. I'm always happy when new ideas come along, it always triggers something. RBI has a truly exceptional role for us. No matter what we come up with, we know that RBI is always ready for any challenge.