American Tower

American Tower has a global footprint, working with 35 banks and 300+ accounts around the world. The company wanted to implement a treasury management solution that would automate manual processes and unify treasury operations.

• Fides ONEHub
• Hybrid Service Bureau
• SWIFT Service Bureau
• Cash Management
• ERP & TMS Integration

• Unified treasury management system
• Improved operational efficiencies
• Reduced business risk

American Tower (NYSE: AMT) is a leading independent owner, operator and developer of wireless and broadcast communications real estate founded in 1995. Its global portfolio includes approximately 149,000 sites and is experiencing rapid growth. In addition to leasing space on towers, American Tower provides customized collocation solutions through in-building systems; outdoor distributed antenna systems and other right-of-way options; managed rooftops; and services that speed network deployment. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, American Tower has offices across the United States and in 15 additional countries.

Over the past two decades the need for mobile data has increased exponentially. During this time, American Tower’s business has increased to meet this business need, growing from a spin-off of American Radio with a single location to a conglomerate that owns towers in 16 countries. The growth of their ecosystem spawned a need for operational efficiencies and consolidation. Domestic transactional functions that once could be managed through Excel spreadsheets and by logging onto online bank portals became far too large and complex to be managed manually.

In 2014, recognizing the need for change, American Tower brought in new staff to transform treasury operations. One of that team’s first orders of business was to implement a new treasury management system – Reval – and the second was to reorganize treasury globally.

The American Tower team was initially more concerned with TMS capabilities than with bank connectivity. But when they started to centralize global treasury operations, they found Reval’s partnership with Fides to be a valuable asset.

Fides has been Reval’s preferred bank connectivity provider since 2011, when the two companies announced a partnership that included Fides joining Reval’s STP Community. Fides’ bank connectivity offering is now part of Reval CORE – a pre-configured package of cash and liquidity management functionality from the Reval cloud platform.

One of the first things American Tower was able to successfully implement was onboarding more than 300 bank accounts onto their system, and setting them all up with automatic bank account statement reporting.

This connectivity allowed American Tower to automate and streamline many functions which had hitherto required a significant number of processes and taken a significant amount of time for the treasury team. These processes included logging on to a number of different bank portals, sending emails, and making phone calls on a daily basis in order to get different international operations completed. Now, this is done instantly every day with Fides. Over 99% of American Tower’s bank accounts are now connected and set up to handle treasury payments from within the Reval TMS.

American Tower would eventually like to run everything through the TMS, doing away with the need to ever access any of the individual portals they have with different global banks. Not only will this centralization provide increased efficiencies, it will also strengthen security.

American Tower currently handles accounts payable in a decentralized manner. In each country, they use Oracle’s accounts payable module. One goal for future is to set up direct team and connections in different countries using that module to transmit files directly to each of the banks, similar to the treasury operations setup.

Fides is the world leader in multibank connectivity, payments and transaction communications. A market leader for more than a century, Fides is committed to making financial operations as efficient, transparent and secure as possible for all organizations. More than 4,000 clients rely on Fides for efficient cash and liquidity management, through connectivity to more than 13,000 banks and comprehensive workflow, reporting, conversion, validation and security services. Whether you access via the secure Fides ONEHub or leverage our seamless integration with third-party ERP, TMS and other backend systems, Fides is the only platform you need.