From Frustration to Automation: How Fuseable Simplifies Treasury Governance

To another one of our Partners We Trust interviews. I'm here with Nick Clarkson, good friend of myself, known Nick for many years. In fact, I placed Nick as he'll talk about in a moment in his previous role as group treasurer at Rigby Group. Nick, you talked about when you were there, a lot of the pain that you faced about managing group structures and that then led to Fusible. So rather than me do any talking, I'm going to get on to you. Nick, if you would take us back to the beginning. When you're a group treasurer, what were the problems that you faced and you were running into?

So I think a lot of the good work that happens in the corporate space is cross functional, and I think that's probably a familiar story to everyone. So you've got treasury, tax, legal, CFO and so on, all working together in some capacity, but their systems are generally fairly siloed in nature. So you end up with sort of data scattered around different systems or buried in servers. And so it's quite difficult to build up that unified view of the group. But as much as anything, it also creates this admin loop and what they really need to do is collaborate in the same space. And I think the genesis of this is really around group structuring information, which I think will become more clear as we speak.

But what was the tipping point of you saying, actually, I need to do something about this?

So I guess the genesis was an idea I was always reverting back to the group structure chart, which is really useful. Right? But it's a static document in most organizations and I think that's actually the strategic blueprint of an organization that. But it's lifeless, it doesn't really do anything. So the idea really was to bring that to life, not just creating a visual interactive map, but actually building a true picture of entities, relationships between companies, and then being able to bind documents, events, data sets to that group structure so that it becomes a living, breathing piece of collaborative technology for all of those users, rather than just siloed solutions for specific functions. I'm not saying all software is siloed, but it is definitely a common theme in the corporate space. So that was probably a frustration and perhaps a desire to try and build a solution based on my own experience in various multinationals.

So you then started Fuse and what would you say, like Fusible gives a Treasury team that they don't have today? As you said, you could have a static vision of it, you can have it mapped out and now we understand this. Matt who one of your original Clients I connected you with. He said to me, I said, oh, what was it like to. You had to plug it in, switch it on, do that. You went, no. I was like, oh. He said, no. We plugged in it, mapped out everything, did everything for us. It was like they had done that. I'm like, oh, wow. He said, it was just so easy. Obviously you've been there, but how would you say it helps the treasury team particularly?

I suppose if I was to describe it simply or simple as possible. It's legal entity governance or entity management that only goes so far. So we do legal entity governance plus group structuring. Companies don't. It's not just looking at a group structure. It's also the relationships between companies through a Treasury tax, CFO lens. That is things like intercompany lending, intercompany trading, banks, bank loans, covenants. Being able to overlay that true picture of the organization. There's many other things, but things like security groups, cash pools, being able to actually visualize those, see that information in a visual canvas bind data, documents, events to all of them. It's just that additional layer which I call the group structuring layer, which then makes it cross functional. Right. So Legal might own the entity management solution, but it has utility for other stakeholders, core stakeholders. But actually this touches upon utility potentially for boards, for auditors, for banks, advisors, tax authorities. It goes on M and A teams. At some point people would like to interact with these data sets, but it's either a buried document or it's a siloed structure chart with only limited information owned by Legal. That for me is the gap. Trying to turn this very important strategic asset into a collaborative piece of technology for treasurers. Obviously that plays into the modeling of intercompany loans, the trading activity, banks, covenants, the documentation attached to them, the events. Yeah, and all the banking facilities. It has real utility for treasury there because then they can actually access all the legal entity information that they need to see beneficial ownership. They've got AML KYC type data. It all sits there, resides there.

I remember when we had our first initial conversation. I said this is all very well, this is great for a big, huge, multinational global group and everything else, but who's fusible built for then explain that to me because I know you explained it very well to me as a bystander, as it were. Would you explain it?

Yeah. So I mean, we can support organizations with 20 entities up to 20,000. We've built it full scale. So if I guess maybe 2020 is an estimate. But that's the point at which you start to have that complexity challenge. And taking a visual first approach. So we can serve midsize groups all the way up to the largest multinationals and we're moving in the direction of serving fund administrators and the advisory firms that support them. So multi organizational workspaces so they can dip in and out of client portfolio entity structures as well. But I suppose within the corporates it is treasury, tax, legal, cfo, the line in can be through any one of those functional areas. And what we say is, do you have a copy of your group structure chart? Because if you do, you can get started. It's as simple as that really. And we're trying to build it with the ethos that you intuitively know how it works. And I think this is where corporate software struggles. They're certainly powerful in their capability, but are they built with the end user in mind? I'm quite a design LED person, so I think design should win the day in the end. And I think the goal really is for people to enjoy using the software, not tolerate the software. And that's the core principle running through how we build the application.

Can you give us like a practical example or a case study or something? How long does it take to put in?

I mean we offer a free trial. If you wanted to build your group structure, let's say you had 100 companies, you could do that within one day. And that's not just a visual map, that's actually binded within our database as well as all the data sets, it's there. So that's step one. And then treasury might want to model the financial relationships across the group. You could start there or legal would say, I'm going to model out all the governance information or the events, so the starting point doesn't really matter, but it really is about get the group structure in and we'll see how quickly it works. But it's very much build as a day one go live tool. There is no steep learning curve, you know how to use it and if not, we're here to support and there's a resource center. So yeah, we're trying to bring down the barriers. A lot of the challenges corporate professionals have is a lack of time. Once you see how it works, you realise it's actually going to save you time. But also just for an onboarding perspective, trying to bring down those barriers for.

The client and without naming a client. But can you give us a practical example of where you've switched on for someone or what have you Done.

One of our early customers, the pilot, started actually with the treasury and Tax team and so they were kind of product champions. They loved where we were going with the product. They signed a, like a multi year arrangement with us. But ultimately the legal team, general counsel, company secretary bought into the application and I suppose that's the cornerstone of the application. It's true legal entity governance, but it has utility in the finance areas as well. So it was a sell through treasury and Tax into the legal function and that was proof of the cross functional need that was our product market fit confirmation and that's been true of our subsequent clients as well. It's not just legal, it's serving other teams too.

Yeah, and if someone's watching this saying this could help us, what should they do next and what are the steps?

Yeah, so they can go to feasible.com or you can find me on LinkedIn or obviously on your partner's page. We offer a free trial and what we like to say is if you've got a copy of your group structure before the end of the trial, you're onboarded so you don't even need to make a commercial decision. We very much want to be a value led business and I think when people see the application they realize that to be the case. So yeah, free trial, no expectations. And if you're you come along for the ride. We give you a red carpet treatment and access to the whole team. So we'd love to hear from people.

And yeah, we've got the link on the page so go to Treasure Recruitment partner slash fusible and take part. Just a nice relaxed chat, help you with your structuring visibility and all the things you didn't know you were missing out on. There you go. Thanks very much.

Thanks so much mate.

You thank.