‘Helping industries outrun leaner and cleaner’ is the stated corporate mission shown on the website of ABB, the multinational electrification and automation technologies group headquartered in Switzerland. Switch on an office light or use the coffee machine to brew an espresso; chances are you will be using some form of ABB technology.

As a global technology leader in electrification and automation, ABB is seeking to enable a more sustainable and resource-efficient future. Incorporated in Switzerland and headquartered in Zurich, the group employs 112,000 people and reported 2025 annual revenues of US$33.2bn.¹ Reflecting its two original home countries, it is dual listed on Stockholm’s Nasdaq Nordic Exchange and the SIX Swiss Exchange in Zurich.

In 2024, ABB introduced a new corporate tagline, “Engineered to Outrun.” The vision is clear: for industries today, simply ‘running’ is no longer enough – they must outperform. ABB’s mission is to help industries and individual organisations deliver on that. A broad portfolio of industrial technology products caters to customers across the utilities, industry, transport and infrastructure industries.

The company is particularly well positioned to capitalise on key global megatrends. Rising electricity demand and the energy transition is fuelling significant investment in power generation, renewable integration, grid modernisation, energy efficiency, and industrial decarbonisation. At the same time, rapid advances in digitalisation, artificial intelligence, and evolving supply chains are increasing demand for ABB’s electrification and automation solutions.

In line with ABB’s wider vision to ‘outrun’, the group’s Corporate Treasury team has been working to become leaner and more efficient in recent years. In the words of Jan Hausin, ABB’s Cash Management Workstream Lead Europe, the focus has been “all about automation, centralising control and reducing risk”.

In recent years, ABB has been proactive in modernising its treasury structures, including a project launch to roll out its in-house bank (IHB) globally. The group implemented a global payments on-behalf-of (POBO) concept, where the IHB legal entity executes accounts payables, salary and tax payments for group companies around the world where legally permitted. This effort has been very successful. Whereas five years ago hundreds of bank accounts were used to carry out payments locally, today more than 60% of ABB’s global payables are made from less than 10 bank accounts. POBO is in use for 16 currencies globally. Direct debit collections (collections on-behalf-of, aka COBO) are also carried out via the IHB legal entity.

The transition to an IHB model stems in part from the finance leadership’s move to a centralised corporate treasury function; a departure from the devolved structure that previously existed. This shift, which began in 2019, has seen ABB move from a country-specific treasury model – whereby country organisations such as Germany, the US, China and India had their own treasury function – to regional, process-led teams.

The regional centres, known internally as ‘Cash Management Centres of Expertise’ (CAM CoE), now report into ABB’s central treasury engine in Zurich. Hausin heads up the CAM CoE Europe, reporting to Jean-François Carter, Global Head of Cash Management, who oversees the group’s corporate Cash Management function from its Zurich headquarters.

Hausin cites technology as a key enabler for the transition. This took the form of the group’s migration, also started in 2019, to SAP S/4HANA – the strategic project being undertaken by SAP customers to modernise their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems – as outlined in Figure 1.

“The migration to SAP S/4HANA was a major collaborative team effort between the Treasury, Information Systems and the Finance teams, who were the key enablers on this journey, and we now operate on a very powerful system,” he says. The move away from regional systems to a global platform gave ABB the scalability and functionalities it needed to operate a global IHB and its core concepts: payments, collections and receipts on-behalf-of as well as book transfers for internal flows.

“Without this sophisticated technology we wouldn’t be where we are right now,” continues Hausin. “Over the past three years we’ve gone from a country-by-country set-up to a truly global workstream and a process-led, scalable organisation.”

Carter agrees, noting that standardisation was integral in the transition from “spokes of the wheel in different countries into one global hub”.

In August 2014, ABB first rolled out an original virtual account solution. This was a year after Hausin first joined ABB and when the shift to a centralised treasury model was taking root. However, he reveals that the group was “not an early mover on using the on-behalf-of model”, as initially the decision was taken to implement the model in Germany alone, before extending it to other countries. The learning points gained from what amounted to a pilot project then allowed ABB to “break barriers” and roll out the IHB model more widely between 2023 and 2025.

“The IHB implementation with ABB was a great success, demonstrating the clear benefits of a truly global treasury engine”
Banu Suman, Head of Corporate Cash Management Sales, Deutsche Bank Switzerland

The roll-out was a significant step as it widened the IHB structure from a German to a global one – a classic example of treasury evolution and how what Carter describes as a “start local, with a limited scope and upgrade later to a larger target picture” made a smooth expansion possible rather than attempting too much too soon.

The end result is what he terms “a very powerful engine that could be used across multiple jurisdictions and currencies”. Some of the core benefits of the IHB implementation include greater control over cash, and uniformity and standardisation across systems, entities and transactions. Carter notes that Deutsche Bank was a natural partner to work with on the IHB implementation, given the bank’s longstanding relationship with ABB.

Banu Suman, Head of Corporate Cash Sales, Switzerland at Deutsche Bank adds that “the IHB implementation with ABB was a great success, demonstrating the clear benefits of a truly global treasury engine”.

ABB and Deutsche Bank have continued to evolve the IHB structure, with the next step the addition of virtual account numbers. Available since 2022, these make it possible to switch a classic account number of a physical bank account (which is being closed in the process) to a virtual account number, or IBAN. The bank account is thereby ‘virtualised’ and can be used going forward without imposing a change in payment details on customers, thereby materially reducing project timelines and the inconvenience for ABB’s business partners.

ABB already has this solution available in Germany, and it has been used successfully in the UK, with Switzerland next in line. Direct debit mandates can also be placed on EUR, GBP and this will soon be available for CHF-virtual accounts, making the correct allocation of the corresponding debits seamless.

“It makes life easier for our businesses across the world to work with internal IHB accounts instead of a landscape of physical accounts,” says Hausin. “If adjustments need to be made, then they can be made for all entities at once. There’s less burden on the businesses in individual countries to manage banks and bank relationships. Add to this, benefits such as KYC being easier and shorter accounting timelines.”

Virtualisation has also acted as an opportunity for ABB to evaluate its internal processes and how it does things, such as dividend payments or treasury instruments made within the group. “Having an in-house bank with virtual accounts has really helped us with overhauling these processes,” Hausin adds. “Just to take one example, ABB’s country organisations annually pay a dividend worth many hundreds of millions of euros, and before 2025, it was always a physical payment, whereas now these are simply bookings in the IHB. And we’ve also seen huge improvements in terms of how we settle between our group companies, which now effectively happens cashless, and within the IHB.”

“We’ve seen huge improvements in terms of how we settle between our group companies”
Jan Hausin, Cash Management Workstream Lead Europe, ABB

Having a central cash management capability opens up a host of further opportunities, such as streamlining the group’s FX operations. Hausin explains, “It’s one thing to centralise your euros in Europe, but before now we’ve essentially had every ABB subsidiary operating multiple bank accounts, depending on which currencies they transacted in. And depending on the currencies in use, we can now often limit that to one or even zero bank accounts per entity.”

In addition to partnering on virtual accounts, ABB also uses Deutsche Bank as its main CHF cash management bank; a logical next step given the bank had added CHF to its cross-border payments solution earlier in 2025, to join the USD, GBP and EUR capabilities.

With ABB’s tradition of identifying what its factories of the future will be producing and the technology required to make this possible it should be no surprise that this spirit of innovation has shaped its treasury of tomorrow.

Lead image: © ABB

Sources

¹ See Q4 2024 results at abb.com