Hitachi, Ltd. is one of the world's largest conglomerates. The company operates approximately 600 entities in more than 70 countries, providing customers with IT solutions, energy and transportation systems, and a wide array of other products ranging from mass-produced industrial equipment to home appliances to highly specialized tools such as electron microscopes custom-built for use in semiconductor manufacturing.

Several years ago, each business unit and group company managed its own currency risk. "Some would reach out to corporate treasury by telephone or email to request FX [foreign exchange] trades," explains Kayoko Mikami, treasury project manager with Hitachi. "But some would hedge their risks on their own, with their own counterparties. And all the different divisions managed their FX exposures and hedges in spreadsheets."

This severely limited corporate treasury's visibility into companywide exposures. "We didn't know how much exposure we had as a whole," Mikami says. "It also sometimes led to unnecessary transactions. One Hitachi company might need to buy U.S. dollars, while another Hitachi company needed to sell U.S. dollars, so both might reach out to their banks to hedge." The increased transaction volume led to higher costs. And, perhaps most problematic, the lack of corporate-level visibility meant Hitachi's FX gain/loss swings were sometimes larger than necessary.