Being Prepared: How Treasury Supports a Global Tech Business

In South Korea, the online retail sector is dominated by a tech company called Coupang. Founded in 2010, Coupang is based in Seoul and incorporated in the U.S. state of Delaware. It primarily serves Korea, but has recently expanded operations into Japan and Taiwan as well. Coupang now has a total of more than 65,000 employees around the globe.

“If I had to make a comparison to U.S. tech companies, I would say that Coupang is a combination of Amazon, Netflix, and Uber Eats,” says Eddie Hong, group treasurer. “We are the largest e-commerce player in South Korea, and in addition to our various e-commerce services, our offerings encompass everything from video streaming and cold-chain logistics to food delivery and fintech.”

Adds Marisa Lee, Coupang’s head of international PR: “What is most distinctive about Coupang is the customer experience. We provide end-to-end services for which we own and operate every part of the process—and because we have those fully integrated systems, we can offer an experience like no other. For example, we have a service called ‘Dawn Delivery,’ where customers can order an item by midnight and have it delivered to their door before 7 a.m. the next morning. Dawn Delivery is available across Korea for millions of products.”

Coupang is a leader in the tech sector, yet at the time of its initial public offering (IPO) last year, its treasury infrastructure was outdated. For one thing, treasury staff had to access an assortment of different systems and marketplaces for payment execution and foreign exchange (FX) trades. “Timing is of the essence in paying local employees or injecting capital into local bank accounts,” Hong says. “The multistep processes we were using delayed cycle times and created unnecessary operational risk for the company.”

For another thing, banking technologies that were a few years old required more manual effort than Hong would have liked. In particular, he says, “I hate carrying physical tokens around. You have to be mindful to have them with you wherever you go. Sometimes the batteries die; other times they just stop working. And then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, tokens were expiring but delivery of replacements was delayed for various reasons.” This created a serious bottleneck for treasury. Combined with the added complication of working with banks across different time zones, the token situation reduced the ability of Hong’s team to quickly and efficiently deploy liquidity wherever Coupang business units needed it.

Efficiency challenges also impacted investment earnings. Coupang’s treasury team was sitting on the equivalent of US$3.5 billion in cash reserves as a result of its IPO. Hong wanted to earn the highest possible return on the excess cash but lacked visibility into cash balances in some locales.

All these reasons led Hong and his team to launch a project to optimize efficiency throughout treasury processes. “We are a technology company, and we want our provider to share our core value of using technology to improve society,” Hong says. “We wanted to find a treasury solution that would make a significant difference in our daily lives—for both our cash management and funds flows across the regions.”

After evaluating several options, they decided to roll out Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking, which checked most of the boxes for the specific efficiency improvements they desired. Still, Hong and his colleagues needed to customize the solution. For example, they wanted to use payment templates to minimize the manual effort involved in initiating each instance of a recurring payment. This was an option within the solution, but Coupang needed segregation of duties within the template-creation process—for one individual to be authorized to create the template, but for another individual to approve it before it goes into production. Coupang worked with Goldman Sachs to customize the standard Transaction Banking solution and deploy it across all business units.

Another area in which the solution required some adaptation, according to Hong, was in dealing with regulated currencies. “We have to comply with certain FX regulations in South Korea and Taiwan,” he says. “We worked with Goldman Sachs to adjust the platform’s remittance capabilities so that we would be able to deliver the funds on a real-time basis in these currencies, in accordance with the regulations.”

The result of all the customization is a treasury platform that Hong says is “agnostic of the countries we operate in: We can submit a payment to any beneficiary, regardless of where they’re located, with fewer than five clicks in the dashboard.”

By standardizing on the one solution across all the geographies in which Coupang operates, Hong’s team consolidated payments and FX trades in one system, eliminating the complexity of having to reference multiple systems. This accelerated payment and foreign exchange processes across the board. The platform also eliminated the paper-based onboarding process that was previously necessary anytime Coupang opened a new bank account.

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“Our prior onboarding process was burdensome and extended over several months,” Hong explains. “Documents were snail-mailed from the U.S. to Korea, which took a long time, and the follow-up processes were further delayed. By contrast, we now complete the entire onboarding process online. We view documents, upload them, and track the onboarding process. We can open a bank account much more quickly now.”

The solution’s QR code–driven soft tokens further improve efficiency. “Physical tokens typically added days to the account deployment process, even when they were sent using an expedited overnight service,” Hong says. “Once the local office received a token, someone on our team would have to visit the office and pick it up (we were all still working remotely). Being able to activate tokens virtually through a download—regardless of geographic location—has helped us a lot from an operational efficiency perspective.”

The team paired the new platform with deposits of Coupang’s excess cash into Goldman Sachs accounts that offered attractive yields.

Hong’s team continues to work to improve operational efficiency, but their new, consolidated approach to treasury management is leaps and bounds ahead of the tedious manual processes that Coupang treasury formerly utilized. “We live in a world where technology can disrupt the ordinary course of our lives in a good way or a bad way,” Hong concludes. “There will probably be more disruptions to come in treasury technology, and we need to be prepared to harness those potential disruptions to make a meaningful improvement in cash management and treasury operations.”