Twilio and Rakuten tackle foreign exchange challenges using cloud apps

Any company doing business internationally needs efficient processes for operating in a multicurrency finance environment. Those processes range from handling intercompany transactions with entities around the world to ensuring exchange rates are always accurate for customer transactions, plus staying up-to-date with the central bank rates needed to meet statutory requirements.

Twilio, a global communications company, and Rakuten, an ecommerce company, are two businesses in very different industries that are tackling foreign exchange needs using a similar strategy centered around Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP.    

Oracle Cloud ERP can be extended with third-party software that addresses unique needs companies have working with multicurrency. One such tool, FXLoader, can fully automate the loading of foreign exchange rates into Oracle Cloud ERP for the conversion of foreign currency transactions. The application provides up-to-date currency conversion and loads rates from more than 60 central banks, allowing finance teams to choose the frequency and timing of those rate checks and to verify that rates were effectively added to the system. The FXLoader app is an example of how Oracle Cloud users can remain agile in a complex international business environment using capabilities from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

Accuracy and access to central bank rates

Twilio provides a customer engagement platform that helps companies build more personalized relationships with customers, using channels such as WhatsApp. Twilio needed a single enterprise ERP platform to simplify their systems. The organization wanted a more effective system for accounting, reporting, and analysis, and as a global company also needed to load central bank rates and have visibility into fluctuating foreign exchange rates.

Previously, Twilio had too many systems with little integration between them, which meant too many manual activities, scalability problems, and data duplication. Twilio had acquired multiple companies over the years, which left the company with numerous platforms to manage financials. Maintaining these multiple instances led to disparate supplier onboarding processes, duplicate customer records, and other data integration challenges, says Sowmya Mamdur, senior manager of financial systems.

Before moving to the cloud, Twilio had around 20 financial applications they were running, resulting in a lack of a central source of truth for data. Moving their systems to Oracle Cloud ERP simplified the process of collecting, organizing, and analyzing data for Twilio and now ensures that teams are using data that’s up-to-date and complete.

“Scalability is required to get a business running effectively,” says Mamdur. “But we had to manage a lot of manual activities to report and consolidate data properly. As Twilio grows and our business needs become more complex, we needed a central, enterprise-level ERP with an integration platform.”

Now that Twilio has adopted Oracle Cloud ERP, the company gets new efficiencies from process automation and leadership can make decisions faster. Twilio can also work with multiple currencies using FXLoader. Mamdur says FXLoader pushes notifications about central bank rates that she needs to track to meet statutory requirements. “FXLoader notifies us when there is fluctuation,” she says. “We can act on correcting the rates right then, which saves a lot of the time and manual effort of going back into the system to change it.”

Visibility into intercompany transactions

Rakuten is an ecommerce and online retailing company that operates in 29 countries. To accelerate growth and improve business processes, Rakuten’s leadership was looking for an enterprise cloud platform that would simplify expense reporting, centralize data, and manage complex intercompany transactions with entities around the world.

For Rakuten, a cloud-based solution helped eradicate the manual labor and processes that were consuming so much of their financial team’s time and energy.

Previously, fixed assets were tracked in spreadsheets and staff manually created journal entries for expenses. “It was a lot of copying and pasting on my part,” says Daniel Genkin, Rakuten Americas manager of financial systems.

Rakuten turned to Oracle Cloud ERP to automate the manual processes that were slowing the accounting team down. This has helped them eliminate the use of manual entry, spreadsheets, and the potential of any manual error. “Now we have hours of time back where we’re not having to manually do that work,” Genkin says.

For example, Oracle Cloud ERP allowed Rakuten to deploy FXLoader to fully automate currency exchange rates into the system. FXLoader’s speed and accuracy make intercompany transactions more efficient, eliminating the need to load exchange rates manually into the system.

“To be the multinational organization that we are and to work with all of our intercompany partners, it is crucial to have correct, uniform, and timely data,” says Genkin. “FXLoader is, in my opinion, one of my favorite integrations we have with Oracle. From a business process perspective and a financial systems perspective, it’s an absolute win.”

“Out of all the integrations we’ve done with Oracle, FXLoader is my favorite.” — Daniel Genkin, Manager of Financial Systems, Rakuten USA