The technology group Wärtsilä has received the highly valued Adam Smith Award 2021 in the Best Risk Management Solution category by Treasury Today. The Adam Smith Awards are widely recognised as the ultimate benchmark for corporate treasury achievement. Wärtsilä’s winning solution was for its innovative Bank Account Pre-validation service to prevent payment fraud attempts.
Developed in cooperation with the Nordic banking group Nordea, the digital ‘Beneficiary Account Validation’ service provides an effective means for companies to validate their international suppliers’ bank account ownership from the account holding bank before changing payment instructions or adding a new supplier. It adds an extra layer of security to the account verification process, thereby reducing the risk of fraud.
“As a global corporation, handling transactions from around the world, we are constantly exploring ways to use advanced technologies for preventing fraud. For example, being fooled into making changes to vendor master data in our SAP system would be a massive problem, as we pay numerous invoices on a weekly basis to the same suppliers. Eliminating this risk motivated us to collaborate with Nordea in finding new ways to validate supplier accounts,” says Jarmo Nurmi, Corporate Treasurer at Wärtsilä.
"API’s enable two applications to directly communicate with each other and exchange data. The ‘Beneficiary Account Validation’ service works by connecting Wärtsilä’s system directly with Nordea’s, thus enabling data related to bank account validation to be shared. The content of the API query is automatically transferred by Nordea into a SWIFT message, which is then transmitted to the beneficiary’s (i.e. the supplier’s) bank. The solution is seen as an effective defence against cyber-crime," says Liisa Kanniainen, VP, Strategic Partner at Nordea.
Wärtsilä has utilised digitalised processes for a number of years already in optimising overall workflows. In 2019, the company was awarded the EuroFinance Treasury Excellence Award for digital transformation & technology implementation in recognition of its innovative development of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in Finance.
Read more about this by Nordea: https://insights.nordea.com/en/business/automating-beneficiary-account-validation-with-wartsila/
Media contacts for more information on this release:
Jarmo Nurmi
Corporate Treasurer
Group Treasury and Financial Services
Wärtsilä Corporation
Tel. +358 50 329 7029
jarmo.nurmi@wartsila.com
Sari Luhanka
Manager, Global Media Relations
Wärtsilä Corporation
Tel. +358 10 709 5774
sari.luhanka@wartsila.com
Image caption: Wärtsilä won the Adam Smith Award 2021 of TreasuryToday in the Best Risk Management Solution category with the Bank Account Pre-validation service. ©Treasury Today Group
All Wärtsilä releases are available at https://www.wartsila.com/media/news-releases and at http://news.cision.com/wartsila-corporation where also the images can be downloaded.
Wärtsilä in brief:
Wärtsilä is a global leader in smart technologies and complete lifecycle solutions for the marine and energy markets. By emphasising sustainable innovation, total efficiency and data analytics, Wärtsilä maximises the environmental and economic performance of the vessels and power plants of its customers. In 2020, Wärtsilä’s net sales totalled EUR 4.6 billion with approximately 18,000 employees. The company has operations in over 200 locations in more than 70 countries around the world. Wärtsilä is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki.
www.wartsila.com