New Online Community (www.Fxbestpractices.Com) Launched to Help Managers of Corporate Foreign Exchange Share and Learn Best Practice
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — October 23, 2006 — FiREapps, the leading provider of Corporate Foreign Exchange Management Technologies, announced today the launch of www.fxbestpractices.com, an online community developed to help corporate accounting and finance managers share and learn best practices related to the increasingly complex challenges of managing foreign exchange processes. The site is aimed at people faced with the challenges of managing foreign exchange on a day-to-day basis, who, until now, had no place to improve their knowledge and understanding of the complexities of managing foreign exchange inside multi-national corporations.
“Collaboration is one of the greatest benefits of the internet enabled technology movement,” said Wolfgang Koester, CEO of FiREapps. “For many years, as we were advising corporations about foreign exchange, there were two common questions we were constantly asked. What are other companies doing? What are best practices? They asked because many of them felt that when it came to foreign exchange they were working in a vacuum all by themselves.”
Unlike other areas of accounting and finance such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Cash Management, where colleges and universities have established curriculum and training courses are available for accreditation, there is surprisingly little structured education and training for foreign exchange managers. As such, managers of foreign exchange must learn on the job, where the consequences of making mistakes can be quite severe. To complicate matters further, there has, until recently, been very little in the way of systems and technologies to support the foreign exchange process. As a result, foreign exchange managers have been left to their own creativity, instincts, and the use of spreadsheets as their system of record for understanding their company’s foreign exchange exposure.
“Our vision for the www.fxbestpractices.com knowledge center is to be an interactive forum with lots of informative, up-to-date resources assisting anyone at corporations needing answers to foreign exchange and currency related questions, distilling the notion of working in a vacuum with nowhere to go,” said Koester. www.fxbestpractices.com will help those faced with the challenges of managing foreign exchange remain current on best practices, raise important issues and trends for discussion, create awareness of new topics and trends, and provide users with access to business case tools to help justify system, policy, and process improvements.
“During my time as Chief Financial Officer at Microsoft, I was impressed by the strength of the professional networks that finance and accounting professionals participate in. Having an online forum around risk management best practices is a natural and highly valuable extension of these types of organizations,” said John Connors, partner of Ignition Partners, LLC and board member of FiREapps, Inc. “The fxbestpractices.com site really delves into an area that has until now been underserved.”
Interested community participants can examine the site content, blogs, and other resources on the site by simply logging onto www.fxbestpractices.com. For people interested in participating in the various forums and blogs, they are asked to register into the community.
About FiREapps
FiREapps, a subsidiary of Rim-Tec, Inc., is the leading provider of Corporate Foreign Exchange Management Technologies. The company provides technologies and services that help corporations optimize foreign exchange processes. These solutions help customers mitigate risk while increasing profitability and operational efficiencies. FiREapps has offices in Scottsdale, Arizona and Portland, Oregon.
