When animals around the world need help, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) springs into action. The global nonprofit organization is headquartered in Washington, DC, and maintains an international operations center in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

“For more than half a century, IFAW has led conservation and rescue efforts affecting individual animals as well as entire species,” said John Kluza, group treasurer for the organization. “We take a collaborative approach to addressing both animal rescue and conservation, engaging with everyone, from the grassroots community to the highest levels of global policy-making, to bring about long-lasting change. term.

“Here on Cape Cod, we are well known for responding to a wide range of marine mammal strandings,” he adds. “However, we also operate various programs supporting animal welfare and conservation around the world. This includes on-the-ground response to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, and man-made disasters anywhere in the world. For example, we recently had a team in Poland for two months to help refugees and their pets in distress following the crisis in Ukraine. We have created and continue to support a position filled by Ukrainian veterinarians to provide services during the crisis, for as long as it takes. We also provide food and supplies directly to distressed animal shelters in Ukraine. »

To facilitate these types of services on virtually every continent, IFAW operates through 20 affiliates. “One of the things we pride ourselves on is the ability to move resources quickly and get program work done where it’s needed,” Kluza says. “We have found that an organizational structure with individual locally registered entities around the world that share a common board and management team optimizes resource allocation and improves the ability to mobilize very quickly in the event of a crisis. need.”

IFAW uses a shared services model to provide affiliates with financial and other services through the International Operations Center and a Financial Assistance Center in the Netherlands. The organization provides global treasury services and support for global financial technology infrastructure from the Massachusetts office. “We provide cash flow and funding support to our affiliates, while individual offices retain their autonomy,” Kluza explains. This structure complicates global collections, disbursements and liquidity management.

“Our transaction volume is not huge, but there are disparities in payment standards, settlement systems and compliance requirements in the regions where IFAW operates,” says Kluza. “Even in developed countries, there can be a lot of nuance and different data elements required. Then, in emerging markets, we have a lot of regulatory issues around transaction codes and central bank reporting, which makes supporting payment transactions rather complex for our three-person global treasury team.

In years past, these challenges have been compounded by inefficiency-ridden processes and technology infrastructure. The treasury group only had day-to-day visibility into approximately 75% of the organization’s global bank accounts. “In most cases, we were able to view non-transactional activities using banking portals and external applications,” Kluza explains. “But we really couldn’t connect to all of our banks the way we wanted, and sharing information with stakeholders across all departments and affiliates was a cumbersome manual process.”

When IFAW decided to deploy a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Kluza decided it was time to review the treasury technology architecture as well. He and his team wanted to move away from SWIFT and banking portals and connect directly with banks via SFTP and application programming interfaces (APIs). To determine their other needs, they initiated a comprehensive needs assessment.

“We started by collecting and documenting treasury procedures across our entire organizational structure,” Kluza explains. “Using a variety of information sources, we reviewed day-to-day operations and processes for gathering short- and medium-term cash flow information. Next, we approached stakeholders in each of these processes to discuss what they need from the Treasury and their banks. »

Identifying the different stakeholders, contacting them and starting a discussion about the needs took time, but it was worth it, says Kluza. “When communicating with different audiences, it’s very important to make sure you understand and provide the appropriate level of granularity for that specific group,” he adds. “We explained what we were doing and explained why we wanted to make these changes. But we have also tried to be flexible and pragmatic. We could approach them with best practices and ideal procedures, but those recommendations might not work best in a given region or for a given team. It was very important to listen to what stakeholders had to say and adjust our plans if necessary. »

Not only has this approach reduced process and technology barriers once the changes are underway, it has also boosted buy-in from all IFAW affiliates. “And that established accountability,” adds Kluza. “It is important to be responsible. Everything doesn’t always go perfectly. If you are going in one direction during the implementation phase and it becomes clear that your plan will not work well, you must be prepared to work with stakeholders to find a better way of doing things. Transparency and flexibility help convince people to support the project. »

Eventually, through this collaborative planning process, the Kluza team decided to move to a cloud-based cash management system. This would save the resource-constrained nonprofit from having to maintain physical servers, storage, and SWIFT or alternate communications technologies.

“We didn’t want to dedicate internal resources to maintaining on-premises treasury technology infrastructure,” Kluza says. « Privacy and GDPR issues [the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation] add to the complexity of cash data management. Our goal was to simplify technology management as much as possible.

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The project team chose TIS as their new cash management system and began working with that company’s implementation team to establish secure SFTP connections with all of IFAW’s banks. “We have automated communications between our banks and TIS, including the import of data and transaction files, account statements, etc.,” Kluza explains. “We also moved to ISO standards to improve consistency. So whether we receive files from Standard Bank in Zimbabwe or Bank of America in the United States, we are looking at the data in the same file format. TIS processes incoming bank statements and transaction acknowledgments and transmits these and other region-specific data files from our banks to IFAW’s ERP and CRM systems. Additionally, TIS accepts transaction inputs in multiple formats and then adjusts them, if necessary, to meet each bank’s requirements. Thus, almost all information and data entering and leaving the system is in our standard format. »

The Covid-19 pandemic slowed the rollout of the new cash management system, but eventually nearly all IFAW affiliates made the move. Banking communications are not yet completely homogeneous in the world, but they are close. “We have a few banks in Africa that will only generate statements in MT940 format,” says Kluza. “But about 97% of our banking communications are now standardized.” He estimates that central treasury now has same-day visibility into more than 90% of the organization’s global accounts.

“Anyone within IFAW or our affiliates with the appropriate system permissions can log into the cash management system and view daily statements, data files, or transaction details at any time,” Kluza reports. “In the past, we had to manually transfer a lot of this information to a shared server, or maybe even email it to some parts of the world. The new process means cash is no longer a bottleneck, so end users can see their cash balances and data faster, and cash can focus on other activities instead of responding questions from foreign subsidiaries.

He points out that the new processes have also improved risk management at IFAW. “A medium-sized nonprofit faces many of the same cash, currencies [FX], interest rates and operational risks that a multi-billion dollar company faces,” Kluza points out. “The overall amounts may be lower, but the impact of failure to manage these risks is just as dire.” Improved transparency of bank account data and accelerated cash flow visibility enable IFAW’s global treasury and finance teams to better manage their financial risks.

Additionally, the system now provides the Kluza team with robust yet easy to manage security controls. “This allows us to limit access to banks, accounts, data and system functions for each user based on their business needs,” Kluza explains. “This is extremely important when dealing with stakeholders from multiple subsidiaries and departments who require personalized system access.”

Finally, he concludes, the initiative has raised the profile of the treasury group. “Treasury has always been a trusted financial division,” he says. “But I think our new ability to manage all of IFAW’s banking connectivity and outbound payment processing, automate processing of incoming data files, and make bank statements and cash positions available other stakeholders and systems has increased the importance and reputation of treasury within the hierarchy of the organization.