Hemstreet picked up on FXpress' ambition to become more than the niche player its name suggests. It had been expanding from its FX exposure measurement and management core for about five years, notes Eric Newberg, senior analyst at the Bala Cynwyd, Pa., firm. "When we decided to add cash functionality, we wanted a client we could turn into a stakeholder," he says. The talks led to a "strategic business partnership," with Textron playing a significant role in the development of the new cash module.

Textron had started working with FXpress 10 years ago, initially with a leased system used to facilitate management of foreign exchange transactions, Hemstreet explains. At that point the software was PC-based and installed on only two computers at the Textron corporate headquarters. When the Web-based version, known as FIRST, became available, Textron was one of the first adopters of this new technology. The payoff for Textron was rolling the system out to a broader audience, which meant implementing the exposure front-end at business units world-wide. In addition, Textron was able to integrate the FXall trading portal into the FXpress exposure management system, moving that activity closer to straight-through-processing (STP).

When FXpress talked with Textron about expanding FIRST to include a cash module, "we saw a good fit with where we wanted to take our cash management," Hemstreet says, "so we decided to buy the entire suite, even though much of it was still in the conceptual stage." The envisioned FIRST system would include foreign exchange, commodities, investment and debt, cash, and bank relationship management. Textron seized the opportunity to be the first customer of the cash module and to play an integral role in its development.

The FXpress FIRST suite offered huge improvements in cash visibility, Hemstreet says. "We use Soci?t? G?n?rale in France but had no direct access to their data before the change. We're getting daily data now that we never saw before," he reports. The new solution gives Textron same-day visibility of 85% to 90% of its global cash, compared to about 60% before it made the move.

The Web-based technology is slick. "BancBridge goes under the bank Websites, gets to the tags and retrieves the data on our schedule," Hemstreet says, describing the critical bank communication part of the cash module FXpress found at the pioneer in HTTP scripting. "The older, traditional asynchronous dial-up was cumbersome and expensive," FXpress' Newberg explains. "Everyone wanted to get away from modems. It was either host-to-host communication or HTTP scripting, and we went with HTTPs."

In the past, data was gathered using a dial-up modem programmed to call the various banks, and now it often means using a data aggregator. BancBridge's HTTP scripting scours bank Websites and, in Textron's case, lets FXpress act as the
aggregator. Textron can pull not only the usual day-old data but same-day data, and the company can also push data through the system to the bank–such as check issues, ACH files and investment orders, BancBridge's Craddick says. "This means tremendous savings for Textron," he claims. And it gets around the problem of the different security layers used by different banks, he adds.

More broadly, moving from a PC-installed treasury workstation to the ASP-hosted FXpress FIRST platform allows Textron staffers to access the system anywhere from the Internet instead of from just two PCs in the corporate office. That's a big gain in convenience and an even bigger gain in business continuity preparation, Hemstreet says. (FIRST is also the critical hub in Boeing's 2007 Alexander Hamilton Gold Tool-of-the-Year award-winning project.)

Implementation is a work in progress. While the FIRST debt module is up and running for Textron Financial, the finance subsidiary that does the high-volume debt issuance, it is not yet in use at Textron's corporate treasury. But the investment module, linked to a Bank of New York Mellon investment portal, has been a home run for Textron, Hemstreet testifies. Textron corporate treasury and four of its pool managers use the investment portal daily to invest surplus cash in various locations. A Textron corporate finance team monthly reviews the investment markets and decides what kinds of safe, liquid instruments are appropriate. Then the various investment pool managers do their investing through the BoNY Mellon portal. They can only buy investments the corporate finance group has approved, so control is strong. And since all trading is conducted through one on-line portal, treasury can now see just what the investment managers are buying and selling, he points out.

"Returns are up across our global investing footprint," Hemstreet points out. "We're not taking any more risk, but we're earning better returns. And with better visibility, it's easier to benchmark, and our performance metrics are more reliable."

Cash forecasting is still a challenge, Hemstreet admits, but says that should change in 2009 when the FXpress forecasting functionality is implemented. Also arriving later this year is a dashboard display feature that will let the treasurer and CFO see at a glance the company's global liquidity position and trend line analysis, he says.

Foreign exchange hedging, the original application, is now "as close to straight-through processing as we can get," Hemstreet notes. Business units around the world enter their positions, which treasury reviews. The appropriate trades, dictated by business rules, are ordered through FXpress and executed through the FXall Internet portal. "It's all electronic. There's no paper involved. We can see and control what is happening, but we don't have to touch anything," he says.

It helps that FXpress excels at working seamlessly with treasury software it doesn't own. At Textron that includes BancBridge for cash reporting, the Bank of New York Mellon for investing, FXall for FX trades and trade communication with JPMorgan Chase, Textron's issuing and paying agent. "FXpress does it all for us," Hemstreet says. "We don't have an IT staff to support treasury, but with this degree of vendor-supplied integration, we don't need one."

For all its growth, FXpress doesn't claim to rival the offerings of SunGard, Wall Street Systems and Reuters-Thomson. "We're moving slowly and methodically, building out what we offer to current foreign exchange clients," Newberg says. "We can do dynamic cash positioning and bank relationship management now, but we're just starting on integrated payments functionality. Someday we might compete head-on with the big workstation providers, but not yet. We're focusing on our 115 to 120 current corporate clients." These include mostly large global corporations, some of which use FXpress in combination with ERP systems or treasury workstations, he notes.

The ability of mosaic solutions to deliver STP is becoming the holy grail of sophisticated global treasuries. While the world in general and banks in particular might take pride in a beautifully designed Website, treasury staffs don't much care, BancBridge's Craddick notes. "They just want straight-through processing so they can come in in the morning and see that systems have done the processing," he explains. "They want a process that is secure, fast and automatic."