Treasury Leaders SummitTreasury Innovator Award finalist: Akoni

Treasury Innovator Award finalist: Akoni

At last week's Treasury Leaders Summit, we spoke to each of the Treasury Innovator Award finalists about their history, the thinking behind their proposition, and their plans for the future.

Akoni is an Open Banking innovator providing solutions to businesses for better financial planning. Specifically, Akoni’s platform helps businesses with cash management and export planning by leveraging a wide range of data sources, accounting integrations and Open Banking. Akoni does this by providing a one-stop shop for actively monitoring and managing company cash deposits and overlays this with sector, trade, risk and accounting data to create deep insights and clear actions tailored to the company’s needs.

How did the idea behind your service originate?

After previously being frustrated with the lack of resources available to SMEs when she was managing over £50m in cash, our co-founder and CEO Felicia Meyerowitz Singh decided to take a DIY approach and set up Akoni to addresses this inequality by providing a digital cash management tool designed specifically for midsize businesses and investors. Our vision is to “democratise” financial product access and management of multi banks, as previously treasury tools were only available for large multinationals and this has now changed in large parts due to innovations in Open Banking.

What is your customer base?

Akoni has over 750 midsize businesses and high-net-worth individuals on the platform.

What differentiates you from competitors?

Akoni provides solutions bespoke to business size, sector and stage of business cycle based on live financial data. It differs from the market, providing the following:

  • Secure and precise risk and governance. The platform partners with Fitch Solutions on a proprietary data-intensive statistical model that allows for a comprehensive assessment of the credit quality for more than 23,800 rated and unrated banks globally. This means that customers can use the trusted model to select banks based on their level of risk.
  • Data and insights: Akoni provides sector reports to assist in cash management, using nine key ratios that are specific to the organization and relevant size of income and employees. The insights can help to provide guidance to improve overall cash management and are provided as a separate value add service.
  • Product prompting: Akoni’s platform not only allows the user to find the best interest rates but it actively prompts and alerts them as better products become available. This saves customers time and resources in researching the market themselves.
  • Customer-centricity: Akoni is committed to transparency and only charges fees as stated, and does not take any additional fees from banks, meaning that all products listed are those best suited to the customer, and unbiased.

How does your product make treasurers’ lives easier?

We help treasurers maximize the return on their cash deposits, quickly, easily and securely by allowing them to find the best interest for deposits, and giving them a single, easy-to-use place to manage their money. Our platform also provides personalized cash management tips and guidance, and benchmarks reflecting similarly sized companies with the simple aim of helping businesses improve and increase the bottom line. This saves treasurers time, effort and worry, and helps businesses earn more.

What are your plans for the future?

Akoni’s vision is to provide financial solutions bespoke to businesses across their business life cycle. In terms of cash management, we are constantly developing the platform to add new currency features, increasing our number of panel banks, as well as working alongside large banks to white label the tool for their requirements. In addition, Akoni is expanding its offering and has just launched a trade intelligence export platform to help businesses along the export journey, syncing with Open Banking data to make the international trade process and associated financial demands (from insurance to funding) seamless.

 

 

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