Giving financial decision makers a clear view

Feedback from Nordea customers uncovered the need for creating a solution that provides companies from SMEs to large corporates with a real-time overview of their cash, liquidity and FX positions and reduces the time it takes for them to gain a snapshot of their company’s financial situation.

Nordea’s new Dashboard provides real-time aggregation of a company’s key financial data, conveniently packaged in a single user-friendly front end. So far, the solution has been rolled out to 1600 Nordea customers, with more being continuously onboarded.

Rolling development

The Dashboard has been developed in stages as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This means it has been introduced with value adding features to benefit early users, whilst allowing time to further adapt and develop the offering based on rolling customer feedback. By focusing on introducing a core set of functions rather than a completed product, Nordea aims to gather customer input at the same time as minimising development costs. It is hoped that tailoring the Dashboard in a step-by-step way will eventually lead to a solution with a higher likelihood of success.

Britt Rifbjerg, Head of Digital Trading & Advisory at Nordea, says: “We’re on a journey to give our customers better digital services that help them become more productive and efficient across their operating channels and gives them an altogether better experience. The intention is to provide customers with benchmarks to see how their business is trending as well as, over time, suggestions as to how they can improve their financial situation.”

Meeting the needs of Treasurers and CFOs

From the beginning, the development of the Dashboard has been very much about a collaborative process, listening to Treasurers and finance teams in SMEs and larger corporates to try to find a solution that supports them in their daily work.

Britt Rifbjerg continues: “From our first interaction with customers, we gained a pretty good idea of what it was they felt they were missing, and the solution began to evolve from there. We have continued to hold a number of interview rounds and this has undoubtedly been a dynamic co-creative project. Right now, our initial roll out has been focusing primarily on SMEs. Amongst larger corporates, there are plenty more ideas that can be included in the future direction of the Dashboard.”

Birgitte Hoff, Liquidity Management & Corporate Channels at Nordea, adds: “We know that in order for Nordea to provide relevant decision-making information for our customers, we need to do something different from what we have today. Providing a Dashboard is a way of making sure that we are relevant for our customers both now and in the future by giving them a modern way of easily accessing the information that they need. The Dashboard is a modern e-banking tool that gives users easy access to information on their favoured device. The key thing here is gaining a real time overview of your liquidity and the ability to gather the facts needed in order to plan for the coming period.”

Supporting strategy

In the long term, the goal of the Dashboard is to give Nordea customers the tools to better plan ahead for the benefits and challenges the face and therefore be more ready and equipped to deal with them.

Esben Warming Pedersen, Senior Technical Product Owner at Nordea, says “Many of our customers are still exporting numbers from their different accounts to excel spreadsheets, converting currencies and doing the sums themselves just to get an overview. As their data is scattered in many systems, it was obvious that there is a need for gathering all of their financial data in one place. The Dashboard will undoubtedly give our customers the chance to move from an operational role into more of a strategic role. Simply by having much easier access to performance data and insights we can help them in making strategic decisions because they can now see insights that they would otherwise have to have spent time doing manual workarounds to achieve.”

Britt Rifbjerg concludes: “Many of the companies we have spoken to are actually still quite operational in their outlook but becoming more strategic is definitely an ambition for them. We have an ambition to be a partner for our customers and help them on that journey to become more strategic in their own role. Developing a tool like this is clearly an important step in the right direction.”

Creating a clearer picture

Esben Warming Pedersen says: “An obvious question is what is the total cash balance of my company today? We take all of the balances of all their accounts and convert them into their home currency so that they know how much money they would have if all of the accounts were in their home currency. We are also developing the Dashboard to include accounts and balances from other banks. The Dashboard presents historical cashflow graphs, aggregated across many accounts, to show how their business is developing. Upcoming payments are included in cashflow forecasting to provide a prediction of changes to balances. We also added a multi-layer of analysis into their transactions so that they can really see where they are earning and where they are losing cash. By providing instant insights that can also be accessed on the go via a mobile version, we want users to feel that they are on top of things and know where their company is heading.”

“On the Dashboard itself, key figures and visualisations are drillable, allowing the user to click on them and move down a layer into the data. This makes it possible to see the list of transactions that lie behind the numbers, creating an advanced level of transparency. The idea is a user can move up and down in the abstraction layer based on their role and needs within the company,” adds Esben Warming Pedersen.

Birgitte Hoff concludes: “The Dashboard is ideal for giving customers a quick ‘start-of-the-day’ overview that can guide their decisions. It was pleasing to see that many of the pilot customers that are currently using Dashboard access the solution around 7.30 in the morning. Starting the day by getting an overview of their financial position is exactly as we want it.”

So far, there have been a number of positive comments from Nordea customers: “I love stuff like this, where you can see how you are doing. This is really good,” comments a CFO from a Danish company. Another adds: “It is nice to see the comparison with last year. Then I can see how our fluctuations look compared to last year.” “It gives a really nice overview,” says a CFO from a Finnish Company.