Tomato Newsletter "News 'n Views" No. 144 – December 2011
2011 is almost over - hard to believe! It’s been our privilege to present you News ‘n Views throughout the year. This has been an eventful year for us at Tomato and no doubt for you too. Congratulate each other on jobs well done and slow down a little for the remainder of the year! We plan to do the same!
Haben Sie unsere Weihnachstskarte erhalten? Danke vielmals für die Komplimente zu dem Zitat, das wir auswählten. Es freut uns, ein Thema angestossen zu haben, das viele berührt.
Falls Sie es verpasst haben, hier das diesjährige Zitat von Albert Einstein:
“Jeder ist ein Genie! Aber wenn man einen Fisch danach beurteilt, ob er auf einen Baum klettern kann, wird er sein ganzes Leben glauben, dass er dumm ist!“
Unser Kommentar: Es ist wirklich unser Anliegen, Einzelnen und Gruppen ihre eigene Genialität aufzudecken und ihnen aufzuzeigen, wie sie diese in ihrer Arbeit anwenden können. Verblüffend, wie sich dies auf die Moral und Produktivität auswirkt!
Wir wünschen Ihnen und Ihren Angehörigen Gesundheit und Glück im neuen Jahr.
Regula Spottl and the Tomato Team
In Today's Issue:
TOMATO UPDATES
Santa Apéro, December 2 at Our Office
Brown Bag Lunch, December 7 in Rapperswil
FINANCE AND BANKING
Payment Factory to Improve Control, Centralize and Save Cost
Studie weltweiter Unternehmensbesteuerung
How Can Corporate Treasurers Become more a Strategic Partner?
Risk Management Blog - Three Lessons from the Euro Crisis
Risk Management: Top Concerns in 2012
Sustainability Is Expanding the CFO's Role
IT
Gartner: Neues Pflichtenheft für CIOs
Santa Apéro, December 2 at Our Office
At this year’s annual Apéro, we enjoyed the company of colleagues and clients over wine and appetizers. For those of you who made it, thanks again for joining us to celebrate. Once again, the dishes from Ghana offered by Lesley Riwar, our African friend, were a huge success.
Martin reminisced about Tomato’s upcoming 20-years anniversary. He explained how our philosophy of attaining clients works. To make a story short, we contact new finance and IT staff and stay with them in regular contact via phone or via our newsletter over many years. Meanwhile we serve our clients to the best of our ability, reach excellent results and make sure that the word about our quality is spread to many of our contacts.
Overall, our guests looked back on the relationships over last twenty years with pride.
Brown Bag Lunch, December 7 in Rapperswil
On December 7, Tomato was on the road for a Brown Bag Lunch for the third time this year. For these lunches, we travel to various regions in Switzerland, chose topics that top treasurers’ list of concerns; and the invited people don't have to travel more than 30 minutes. This way, treasurers have a full day at the office and can attend a workshop over lunch with other treasurers. Details:
Brown Bag Lunch (English), Brown Bag Lunch (German)
Six treasurers we've worked with over the years participated in the recent Brown Bag Lunch in Rapperswil. The strong Swiss franc and Payment gateways were first on these treasurers’ mind.
What they appreciated most is the small group setting and us knowing their systems. We were able to answer such questions as “What would you do if you were in my shoes and presented with this and that issue?” with doable steps towards a desired solution.
Payment Factory to Improve Control, Centralize and Save Cost
In the last six months, Payment
Factories have become one of the hottest topics for our clients and treasurers
in general. In the October issue of this newsletter we pointed to the gtnews
article The Strategic Value of a Payment Factory and in the blog posting of Oct.
4, we referred to our discussion during the last Brown Bag Lunch of a
decentralized payment factory we implemented.
Gtnews published yet another article on Payment Factories, in which Dennis Gniewosz of JP Morgan Treasury Services illustrates how payment factories are excellent for improving control, centralization and cost savings. He cautions that the process of implementing a payment factory requires “organization discipline” that involves the “power to address the internal and external issues that come with structural change.”
(Full story... registration required, free)
Martin’ Comment:
Our clients also have initially been cautious exactly because the
organizational discipline needed is intimidating. Having completed a project
and been involved in others, we have the experience to guide treasuries in the
process. Feel free to call us with concerns and
questions at 044 814 2001 or via andreas.carl@tomato.ch; and visit our
website where under “Publications” you will find documents which we publish
after completing a project.
(Decentralized payment factory via SAP and Swift...)
Studie weltweiter Unternehmensbesteuerung
KPMG hat eben den „Corporate and Indirect Tax Survey“ veröffentlicht. Die Studie vergleicht 125 Länder weltweit mit den kantonalen Steuersätzen. Ergebnisse:
- Der Durchschnittssteuersatz global ist in den letzten elf Jahren kontinuierlich von 29% auf 23% gefallen.
- Europa hat jedoch im Vorjahresvergleich einen leichten Anstieg zu verzeichnen.
- Die Mehrwertsteuersätze sind weltweit seit drei Jahren relativ stabil und liegen derzeit bei durchschnittlich 15.41 Prozent.
- In Europa ist aktuell ein leichter Anstieg der Mehrwertsteuersätze zu verzeichnen.
(Publikation in pdf Format... 72 Seiten)
How Can Corporate Treasurers Become more a Strategic Partner?
Risk management was one of the top issues discussed at the conference of the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) in Boston from Nov. 6-9.
In an Executive Institute session, CEOs and CFOs discussed steps in the evolution towards strategic risk management. Mario Cornacchio, Jr, treasurer of Bose, explained “how the environment of ‘inconceivable’ volatility and rate of change has given the treasury an opportunity to lead.”
The GTNews blog “AFP Conference 2011 Blog - Becoming the Strategic Partner” lists some examples of how participants improved risk management. It also offers tips on how treasurers can increase their profile via the idea of ‘personal branding’ and it outlines six principles of marketing which can be applied to self-promotion.
(Full story... registration required, free)
Risk Management Blog - Three Lessons from the Euro Crisis
In his latest Risk Management Blog, Kevin Lester, Contributing Editor of gtnews, elaborates on three lessons he learned from the Euro crisis. These lessons are:
- There’s no such thing as ‘risk free’ in financial markets
- Financial engineering can’t turn lead into gold (or Greek debt into Bunds)
- Derivative contracts aren’t bulletproof
The lessons are not unique to the euro crisis of course; and the outcome of the crisis will be dictated by “factors as unpredictable as popular will and the persuasive powers of Europe’s political leaders.” What’s certain is that the impact on the financial landscape will be profound and lasting, Lester asserts.
(Full story... registration required, free)
A related story in the NZZ in German: „Kein Gliedstaat ist «too big to fail»: Was die Euro-Zone von den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika lernen kann“
Risk Management: Top Concerns in 2012
Every year, the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) publishes a list of so-called “risk hotspots” they develop from discussion with clients, surveys and observations. CEB offers their findings to senior executives for use with their boards and internal-audit teams so they can discuss how the company should do risk assessment.
CBE identified the top 8 risks for 2012 as:
- Information security
- International operations (was not a concern three years ago)
- Excess cash
- Corporate culture
- Compliance
- Strategic change management
- Third-party relationships (was not a concern three years ago)
- Cost-reduction pressures
- HR
- Social media
Since the 2008 ranking, project management and taxes are no longer on the list.
The CFO.com article “What to Put on Your Risk Radar Screen” elaborates on the findings.
Sustainability Is Expanding the CFO's Role
Previously, sustainability was outside the domain of the CFO’s role. Since investors, business customers and other stakeholders increasingly want to connect a company’s financial performance to its social and environmental impact, CFOs role has expanded as they are getting involved in the “management measurement and reporting of the companies’ sustainability activities”.
The CFO.com article by Kate O’Sullivan introduces Ernst & Young’s report “How sustainability has expanded the CFO’s role.” There is a “definite increase in the number of CFOs recognizing the importance of the sustainability function," O’Sullivan writes. "It's a business opportunity. It isn't just about reporting. It's about the opportunity for increased revenue generation and reduced costs," she adds.
Phased Approach to a “New IT Organization”
Is reorganization going too far? That was my initial impression when I read in a PWC’s article “Some Fortune 500 [financial] companies are eliminating their Chief Information Officer (CIO) positions entirely, with IT staff being allocated to business units to provide the units with more control over technology resources.”
The article Disconnected: Why Fixing the Business/IT Divide Now is the Key to Survival doesn’t support such moves, saying that such an approach may “create technology silos, increase data fragmentation, cause confusion about IT’s role, increase security and compliance risks, and decrease transparency across the organization.”
However, the role of IT is changing and the article describes the role of IT in a phased approach to the “new IT organization.”
How to Define a CIO’s Success?
Modern CIOs balance project portfolios, available resources and governance, which requires them to be strategic communicators, project managers, customer relationship managers.
John D. Halamka, CIO and associate dean for educational technology at Harvard Medical School, explains in his article The New Metrics for CIO Success in CIO.com what he is doing to become a more effective CIO:
- He is going to identify key business customers and meet with each one to make sure their priorities are reflected in the current IT operating plan and the five-year IT strategic plan.
- He is standardizing communications so key customers receive monthly updates about their priority projects.
- He is defining a process for managing IT projects across the enterprise.
(Elaborations on the definition of CIO success and strategies...)
Gartner: Neues Pflichtenheft für CIOs
CIOs müssen den Wert des IT-Betriebs immer wieder rechtfertigen. Um die interne Positionierung ihrer Abteilung zu stabilisieren, müssen sie gemäss Gartner vier strategische Trends beachten:
- Daten treiben das Geschäft: Aus den riesigen Datenmassen, die Unternehmen schon besitzen und täglich neu generieren, muss die IT relevante Informationen extrahieren.
- IT muss sich messen lassen: Heute können CIOs noch in zu vielen Fällen den Mehrwert von IT für das Business nicht quantifizieren. Das muss ändern.
- IT muss Gewinn abwerfen: Investitionen in IT müssen bis 2020 nicht mehr nur auf der Kostenseite auftauchen, sondern Gewinne erzielen.
- Erfolgsabhängiges Gehalt: Trägt der IT-Leiter mit seinem Team zum Geschäftserfolg bei, wird das auch finanziell honoriert. Produziert die IT hingegen nur Kosten, darf der Verantwortliche auch mit keinem Bonus rechnen
Diese Trends bedeuten laut Gartner-Vizepräsident Partha Iyengar grundlegende Änderungen für traditionell geführte IT-Abteilungen. „Wenn sich ein CIO finanziell rechtfertigen muss, darf er keine effizienzsteigernde Massnahme auslassen, da er persönlich an der Optimierung gemessen wird.“
Computerworld Artikel Gartner: CIOs müssen Business-Nutzen beweisen
From the Desk of Regula Spottl, Greensboro, North Carolina
This time, I'm finalizing the newsletter in New York. I flew up yesterday morning and spent the day in Manhattan doing some shopping, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and dining at an Italian restaurant in the Bronx. This afternoon, we're invited to a friend's birthday party, and we plan to go a movie afterwards.
When in New York, first thing in the morning, one of us goes to the Deli to buy coffee, buttered sesame rolls, croissants and three papers: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. I love the ritual as well as leisurely spending over an hour reading papers and discussing some of the news.