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Merck’s Global Banking Makeover

Treasurer Mark McDonough, one of the finance pros on the 100 Most Influential list in 2012, describes the benefits of standardizing the pharmaceutical companys payments.

By Susan Kelly | Updated on July 19, 2012
Merck’s effort to standardize its cash management and payments worldwide by implementing a single global banking interface has produced many benefits, says Mark McDonough, treasurer and vice president at the $48 billion pharmaceutical company. But he acknowledges that the process was not easy.

Before New Jersey-based Merck implemented the global banking strategy, the company’s “transactional banking activities [were] very much geared to local market needs and local market banking processes,” McDonough says. Advances in technology, as well as Merck’s move to a standard global ERP platform and shared-services environment, paved the way for deploying a single payments file format worldwide, an effort that Merck’s treasury began to roll out in 2008.

“What we have done is say to our banks, ‘We will give to you a single payments file,’ and the format of that payments file is standard around the world,” McDonough says. “It can support several types of payments, but it’s a standard interface around the world. We present the same interface to our banking partners in Asia-Pacific and to our banking partners in Europe as we do in North America.”

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