SAP has announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Thomson Reuters to simplify converting cross-border transaction prices into a single currency. This will occur no matter where or when the transaction happens.
Stuart Martin, Thomson Reuters managing director of Risk Information and Learning Services. said: “This is a great example of the power of partnerships to make life easier for businesses, by integrating our trusted data into SAP’s cloud-based software services.”
“At the press of a button, any of SAP’s global customers can now achieve straight-through processing of foreign exchange calculations, simplifying their operations and assisting in reducing risk through a single source of comprehensive pricing and reference data.”
Cross border transaction pricing
The new SAP Cloud Platform-based application – cumbersomely called SAP Market Rates Management, Thomson Reuters data option – offers out-of-the-box connectivity to obtain comprehensive pricing and reference data from the Thomson Reuters Financial and Risk business. SAP Market Rates Management integrates foreign exchange and money market data from Thomson Reuters for more accurate pricing of any global transaction across SAP Cloud Platform. It will be available to SAP customers worldwide.
This partnership aims to make it easier for chief financial officers, treasurers and corporate finance teams to access pricing and reference data. With such data they can calculate foreign exchange transactions and foreign currency risk exposures.
Transaction efficiency
As cloud adoption continues to rise, businesses are preferring:
- the efficiency of out-of-the-box services
- over the complexity developing and proving interfaces with multiple providers.
SAP and Thomson Reuters seek to responding to such needs with their own cloud-based solution. After lowering the introduction costs, this makes easier integration with multiple solutions. It also minimizes operational risks – by ensuring consistency across a customer’s business.
SAP customers will be to subscribe to the new service directly with SAP. The integration of access to Thomson Reuters data, as well as usage-based billing, will be handled by SAP.
Dr. Arif Esa, SAP director of Treasury Management commented: “Globalization and digital transformation are inextricably tied. As businesses become more agile in the cloud, their work can scale and transcend across borders, increasing the need to accurately price foreign exchange transactions.
“SAP Market Rates Management helps facilitate these transactions seamlessly. Our partnership with Thomson Reuters enables SAP customers to tap into a trusted source of market data with ease and confidence.”
What does it mean
The collaboration is the latest expansion of the partnership between SAP and Thomson Reuters. Previous initiatives have focused on businesses and managing third-party compliance and risk challenges.
Businesses operating with cross border transaction pricing exposures hate the uncertainty. In effect this is just another form of risk, one which is unquantifiable without lots of data. That is what Thomson Reuters brings to the party.
While, prima facie, this makes sense – as do the comfort words about SAP doing the integration and billing, there is complexity sitting behind cross border transaction pricing. The two big (as yet unresolved) questions are how much will a customer have to do and what will cost.
