Mind Energy saves three hours a day and gets a live view of cash across 140+ bank accounts with FinanceKey

Introduction

Mind Energy, a Danish energy trading company with €12.8B in revenue, moves large sums of cash every day across more than 140 accounts across multiple banking partners and currencies. With large settlements and margin payments flowing in and out daily, its treasury team needs accurate, up-to-date information to ensure cash is available where it’s needed.  It must also maintain effective oversight of its cash positions and exposures, particularly on days with significant cash flows.  

Problem

Before FinanceKey, collecting balances from every bank account took Mind Energy’s treasury team an estimated three hours every day. 

To prepare its liquidity forecasts, the team needed to know the balances across its bank accounts, both at the previous day’s close and throughout the current day. This meant logging into individual banking portals, checking balances and manually transferring the figures into its forecasting system. 

The team also needed to track large margin payments and maintain effective oversight of cash positions and exposures. 

“We would have to log into each bank and almost point a finger at the screen to read what the numbers were. It was quite time-consuming and not very modern.” – Tommy Hallum, Senior Treasury Specialist, Mind Energy 

Looking for something smarter and more automated, the team came across FinanceKey at a Treasury 360 event, where another company’s treasurer presented how they used it to manage a large number of bank accounts. 

Solution

FinanceKey gives Mind Energy a single, live view of its cash. The team uses FinanceKey in four main ways: through an OData integration for liquidity forecasting, tailored liquidity views for monitoring cash positions and bank exposures, transaction lookups to check individual payments, and subscriptions and alerts to stay on top of important cash movements. Together, these remove the need to log into individual banking portals, saving the team an estimated three hours of manual work every day. 

1. Automating cash flow forecasting 

FinanceKey automatically sends Mind Energy’s bank data into its own database through an OData integration, a standard way of sharing data between systems. The data then feeds the team’s existing liquidity forecasting model. 

This allows the team to update its forecasts with previous-day and current balance information without manually gathering figures from each bank. 

The team keeps working in the forecasting tools it already uses, now with up-to-date figures. 

2. A live overview of liquidity and bank exposure 

Mind Energy uses tailored liquidity views, built together with FinanceKey, to monitor balances across currencies, banks and cash pools, including how currency positions change throughout the day. 

The treasury team closely monitors cash positions, currency exposures and balances across banking partners, allowing it to take action when required.  

“The main benefit is that we have the live overview. That gives us the opportunity to handle those days where there’s huge cash flow better and more confidently.” – Tommy Hallum, Senior Treasury Specialist, Mind Energy 

3.  Looking up individual transactions

When a large margin payment is due, the treasury team needs to know exactly where the money is. Alongside its liquidity views, Mind Energy uses FinanceKey to look up specific payments. 

Instead of checking account by account across separate banking portals, the team searches for the transaction in FinanceKey and can confirm in seconds whether funds have arrived or a payment has gone out. 

4. Monitoring balances with notifications and alerts 

Mind Energy uses FinanceKey’s balance alerts to monitor cash positions against configured thresholds, receiving notifications when an account crosses a configured operational threshold. Checks run automatically throughout the day, so the team is alerted as soon as a key account drops below its minimum balance. 

This is particularly useful when managing large cash movements, helping the treasury team identify when action may be needed without constantly checking individual account balances. 

The team is now setting up more advanced alerts with the help of Ask FinanceKey, FinanceKey’s AI assistant, simply by describing what it wants to monitor. These include different notification thresholds, notifications based on total exposure to individual banks, and alerts when holdings in a currency fall below a set minimum.