Kyriba Unifies and Enriches Customer Data to Turn It into Action with Qlik

Kyriba was born in the cloud, and it’s been part of the company’s DNA since day one.

Kyriba is a global leader in liquidity performance that empowers CFOs, Treasurers and IT leaders to connect, protect, forecast and optimize their liquidity. As a secure and scalable SaaS solution, Kyriba brings intelligence and financial automation that enables companies and banks of all sizes to improve their financial performance and increase operational efficiency.

Kyriba’s real-time data and AI-empowered tools enable its close to 3,000 customers worldwide to quantify exposures, project cash and liquidity, and take action to protect balance sheets, income statements and cash flows. Kyriba manages more than 35 billion bank transactions and $15 trillion in payments annually and gives customers complete visibility and actionability, so they can optimize and fully harness liquidity across the enterprise and outperform their business strategy.

Our digital strategy is built on three pillars:

1. The interconnection of the customer’s networks via various protocols. The company invests massively in APIs to achieve this.

2. Boosting the value of customer data by unifying and standardizing it from across the customer’s entities.

3. Enriching the data and distributing this enriched data to the customer’s other systems.

As Product Director, Data and Analytics at Kyriba, my responsibility is to use analytics to move this strategy forward. When I joined Kyriba eight years ago, my initial mission was to build our analytics offering for our customers. Today, my objective is to create new analytics products that will help customers transform their data into usable information and knowledge.

All of this requires a state-of-the-art analytics platform. For that, we use Qlik.

Seeking an Enterprise-Grade Analytics Partner

We couldn't turn to just any partner to help us build our analytics tools. We had a specific series of requirements. First, a solution would have to be 100% cloud-based, ensuring security and performance. To put this in perspective, 20% of Fortune 500 companies are Kyriba customers, so these elements of enterprise readiness are non-negotiable. For our customers, we want the best technology on the market.

Advanced analytics users appreciate visualizations that are dynamic and granular enough to allow for detailed investigations.

Another consideration was the quality and power of the visualizations achieved through the partnership. When I first joined Kyriba, I saw an opportunity to find new ways of improving our analysis functions. We wanted to create new analytics products to replace traditional spreadsheet-based analytics. While we are a solution that helps CFOs make strategic decisions, oftentimes our end consumers are advanced users who manipulate numbers all day long, and visualization and analysis of finances are essential for good decision-making. These users appreciate visually appealing analytics that help make sense of the numbers, but the analytics must be dynamic and the data behind the analytics granular enough to allow for thorough, detailed investigation.

On the other hand, our end users are numbers people, not necessarily technical people. A partner solution would have to enable self-serve analytics without assuming any technical expertise on the part of the user.

Our final requirement was the strength of the partnership itself. Our digital strategy is built on the value of unifying, reconciling, enriching, and distributing customer data. A partner would have to demonstrate their willingness to seamlessly integrate their solution within our product, which would require a thorough understanding of our business and our strategy. The business model underlying this partnership should ensure mutual success for both parties.

Our partner requirements in hand, Kyriba began an in-depth search and technical evaluation of products on the market.

We Found a Market Leader Who Surpassed the Competition

We started by selecting a shortlist of three analytics vendors based on the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We then subjected these three solutions to a series of rigorous tests over two months, using real business use cases. At the end of this process, Qlik emerged as the best solution for reasons both technical and cultural.

From a technical standpoint, Qlik is a 100% web-based, enterprise analytics tool with powerful, dynamic visualizations. Qlik’s unique analytics engine would show our users the bigger picture and allow them to explore the finest details, all within an easy-to-use interface. This is significant, as analytics tools are now how users communicate daily with senior management. Including Qlik’s UI in our products would enable true self-serve analytics for the non-technical user—just what we wanted. In our tests, Qlik also proved flexible enough to respond to an infinite number of use cases.

Qlik’s dedicated sales and technical teams also demonstrated OEM expertise and a strong culture of partnership, going far beyond the competition in our due diligence process.

A Solution That’s Essential to Growth

Qlik is now fully integrated into our products as an OEM analytics module dedicated to treasury business. Our customers appreciate the platform’s visualizations, which present the figures from the aggregate to the most detailed level. Users interact with these dynamic analytics, slicing and dicing to find the information they need. They can also create their own dashboards. Qlik’s intuitive UI empowers users to do all this without any technical expertise.

Intuitive UI allows non-technical users to self-serve with data.

Kyriba embarked on this project with the aim of bolstering our products by offering a fully integrated, enterprise-grade solution that would turn data into useful, accessible knowledge. We succeeded on all counts. The proof is in the numbers: Around 300 Kyriba customers (representing approximately 1,200 end users) around the world are now equipped with Qlik technology for analytics.

We consider this solution essential to Kyriba’s continued growth, as self-serve visual analytics are now a real differentiator for Kyriba in the treasury-management software market. Turning a prior weakness into a strength improved our reputation as well. For our customers, deploying Qlik is fast and easy, with no need to involve their IT department. This in itself is a strong argument in Kyriba’s favor for many of our potential customers.

From my perspective, the biggest benefit of working with Qlik is the simplicity. That Qlik has such a wide offering in terms of solutions technology makes this a one-stop shop for us. It would have been impossible for Kyriba to reach the same level of quality if we had tried to develop these solutions ourselves. Qlik has been great for internal analytics and also as an OEM vendor. It’s very easy to integrate Qlik inside your own product, and then scale that solution. After seven years of partnership with Qlik, Kyriba has zero regrets.

Using Qlik to Capitalize on AI

Remember, the first two pillars in Kyriba’s digital strategy are to unify and standardize customer data, and the third pillar is to enrich the data and distribute it to the customer’s various other systems. We achieve this presently through the AI built into Qlik’s associative engine, which turns customer data into actionable information. But there are still more ways we could use analytics to add value for the customer, and several AI streams for us to explore.

One stream is to qualify the customer’s current situation with historical data. This leads naturally into improved forecasting ability. Based on previous cash flow, for example, a customer could better predict their cash flow in the coming days, weeks, or months. We are also using AI to control the data, such as in preventing fraud attempts. The final AI stream is advising our customers on the best portfolio of transactions in order to maximize their liquidity while minimizing costs.

Qlik has always been a very supportive partner ready to adapt to Kyriba’s constraints and business objectives. It’s a relationship based on trust rather than control. And when a situation starts to feel too complex, Qlik knows how to make it simple. As the world accelerates, so does the demand for live data. We use Qlik Replicate to stream data into our analytics, reflecting any changes as soon as possible. And as we continue to pursue opportunities, Qlik will work alongside us.