For years, currency analytics provider FiREapps—which was acquired by Kyriba two years ago—has analyzed the quarterly earnings calls of large public companies in North America and Europe. The goal of these analyses is to identify how many of the calls include comments by executives on the impact foreign exchange (FX) has had on the business's financials.

Released last month, the company's latest "Currency Impact Report" covers Q3/2020 earnings calls of 1,200 organizations that derive at least 15 percent of their revenue from overseas. Its key finding is dramatic: The proportion of executives who commented on currency impacts fell from 290 (24 percent) of the 1,200 companies studied in Q2/2020, to 117 (less than 10 percent) of those in the Q3/2020 report. In fact, the proportion of companies mentioning currency impacts on their earnings calls in Q3 was less than half that of any other report from the past two years. The shift was particularly profound for North American companies, which fell from 246 referring to currency impacts in Q2/2020 to 69 mentioning currency impacts in Q3/2020.

Treasury & Risk recently spoke with Wolfgang Koester, former CEO and co-founder of FiREapps who's now chief evangelist for Kyriba, about how treasurers of multinationals should leverage the findings of the January report to prepare their business for the future.