Doing business abroad brings myriad challenges for treasury teams, from currency exchange issues to language and cultural differences to regulatory and political considerations. Doing business in markets where funds transfers are tightly controlled by the government ratchets up those challenges to another level. Moving cash across borders is notoriously difficult in many emerging markets. And developing visibility into account balances and funds flows can require a huge amount of manual effort.

The winners of the 2019 Alexander Hamilton Awards in the category Best Practices in Restricted/Emerging Markets found innovative and effective ways to overcome these challenges:

• Bronze Award:  PingPong Global Solutions has built its business around e-commerce merchants' need to quickly and easily repatriate funds to their home country. To streamline the process, especially for its large customer base in China, PingPong worked with its global partner bank to establish a virtual account structure in which each merchant has a virtual account for each currency in which it does business. Now customers can see account balances, perform currency conversions, and transfer funds through a custom solution PingPong developed for management of the virtual accounts.
• Silver Award:  To improve the efficiency of its global treasury group, Microsoft needed to increase automation in its processes for collecting bank account information in markets such as China, Korea, and South Africa. The company worked with banking partners to achieve automated data flows into Microsoft's treasury systems, even from unusual types of accounts, such as MMDAs and HYDDAs. As a result, Microsoft's treasury leaders can now see 99 percent of the company's global cash balances, at a glance, on their mobile phones.
• Gold Award:  Flywire specializes in supporting cross-border payments from individual payers to institutions such as foreign universities. In one of its largest markets—India—the company was stuck with an assortment of manual processes due to rules around documentation needed to support any conversion of rupees. Through a partnership with its global bank, Flywire also set up a virtual account structure and developed a technology solution that automates processes around both funds transfers and the collection of information that RBI requires.

All three companies emphasize the importance of working with knowledgeable partners in emerging markets. "If we'd walked into the RBI [Reserve Bank of India] up front, by ourselves, and said, 'We're going to take all this digital and online, as an American offshore company,' I don't think the conversation would have gone much past that point in time," says Ryan Frere, executive vice president of global payments for Flywire. "Our case is much stronger if it's coming from a financial institution that is registered in-market than if it's coming from us. So we frequently pursue these types of joint conversations with central banks to get approval for our model. And that's how it worked in this case."