TreasurUp, a 100% subsidiary of Rabobank, will provide part of the online currency risk process for the Belgian bank KBC. The Belgians offer the automatic hedging instrument of the Utrecht fintech under their own name to business customers.

Many entrepreneurs still work with complex hedging procedures. They extract data from the accounting package and link it to Excel and use it to determine where the company is exposed to currency risk.

Not everyone is equally good at that, says CEO of TreasureUp Niels van Daatselaar in an explanation. “Excel is very personal. What one treasurer sees as a logical process is incomprehensible to another. If someone drops out due to illness or vacation, the entire system will fail. “

Functionalities

Through the TreasurUp platform, companies can not only hedge currency risks, but also process payments and keep an eye on liquidity. “We are removing the Excel sheet and linking it to all kinds of functionalities, including liquidity and working capital.”

The start-up is still a small one in its domain. This year, the platform expects to process around € 3.5 billion to € 4 billion for two thousand companies. Van Daatselaar emphasizes that many of the customers are small companies and not large corporate companies.

After the company joined the Finnish bank OP Financial Group in June last year with the customer base, KBC Belgium is now also following. Bank and start-up came into contact with each other at the beginning of 2018 and have actually been working together for several months. If the collaboration proves successful, KBC Group is considering using the solution in other countries as well. Including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Ireland.

Independence

According to Van Daatselaar there is more in the barrel. He says he is talking to a large bank in both the United States and Scandinavia and has done a pilot project at one of the larger British banks. “Tier one in particular shows interest in our solution.”
By cooperating with banks and not approaching companies themselves, the company avoids troublesome supervisory procedures. “We worked at the bank for years. We know the bottlenecks in terms of regulations. “

TreasurUp originated from Rabo’s Moonshot project – a program that allows Rabo employees to work on their own company during working hours. The goal of Moonshot is to stimulate innovation from our own home. The hedging start-up presented its business idea to the general public in April 2016, then still under the name EasyTrade.

The fintech is currently discussing with Rabobank whether it can stand on its own two feet. Van Daatselaar expects to be able to report more about this in a few months.

Originally published in dutch in FD