FiREapps Exposes Vulnerabilities to Corporate Revenues, Margins and Balance Sheets From Foreign Exchange Volatility

FiREapps, the leading provider of Foreign Exchange Exposure Management Technologies, today launched a major software release that enables multinational corporations to predict, analyze and proactively manage FX exposures to balance sheets and cash flow forecasts, enabling them to protect margins, revenues and the value of their firms from foreign currency volatility. This latest edition, FiREapps 4.0, introduces visibility into forecasted cash flow exposures, empowering corporations to make optimal policy-based accounting and economic decisions that insulate revenues and margins from the adverse effects of foreign exchange volatility, while assuring compliance with industry regulations. With this latest release, enhancements to FiREapps’ ability to manage foreign exchange exposure to balance sheets make it easier for companies to share data with existing ERP systems and drill down into the root causes of their exposures.

“Many Treasury departments are forced to approach foreign exchange exposure management as an art rather than a science, in large part because of their lack of confidence in the data that drives their decision-making,” said David Parker, vice president of finance at Getty Images. “FiREapps is helping us better understand our underlying exposures, so we focus more on managing and protecting the value of our business, and less on crunching numbers.”

FiREapps 4.0’s forecasted cash flow-related FX exposure management capabilities are packaged as a new software module called ForecastFX. Previously available balance sheet exposure management capabilities are now offered as TransactionFX.

ForecastFX expands upon FiREapps’ fundamental approach to structured and disciplined data management, analysis and rules-based decision-making. Flexible, template-driven tools allow FX managers to tailor the data they gather to create their cash flow forecasts, streamlining and institutionalizing the process to reduce effort and eliminate critical errors and omissions. Using ForecastFX, customers can model and analyze the impact of foreign exchange exposure over a user-defined time series, applying a “Hedge Factor” that reflects a company’s degree of confidence in its forecasts over time. ForecastFX helps companies to act on this analysis by making recommendations on appropriate future currency actions to mitigate the impact of foreign exchange volatility. As a result, treasurers are empowered to better manage their cash flow hedging processes and eliminate the uncertainty of foreign exchange impacts on forecasted revenues and margins.

In addition, FiREapps 4.0 introduces enhancements to TransactionFX that expand companies’ ability to manage their balance sheet exposures related to monetary assets and liabilities affected by foreign exchange.

New features include:
Secure file management that enable companies to upload and share data on the FiREapps system for easy version control and auditing;
Encrypted “straight through” data processing from corporate ERP and general ledger systems to streamline data gathering and management;
Customizable foreign exchange rates, enabling companies to rely on FiREapps’ systems rates, or their own exchange rate data.

“By turning the haphazard art of foreign exchange exposure management into a reliable, repeatable science, FiREapps is empowering multinational corporations to assert control of their financial statements and eliminate surprises from foreign exchange exposures for the very first time,” said Wolfgang Koester, CEO of FiREapps. “As the currency tides inevitably change, CFO’s that have not yet established enforceable accounting and economic policies will be lost at sea. We are committed to empowering CFOs and treasurers with the visibility, technology and resources needed to lead the economic strategy of their corporation, backed by sound accounting, and optimized decision making that improves the predictability of foreign exchange impacts to corporate performance.”