September 2019
Business software provider SAP leads a consistent programme of innovation, the latest being its digital boardroom. Head of Global Treasury Steffen Diel demonstrates why leaving one’s comfort zone and being permanently curious can work miracles
Shortly before the reunification of Germany in 1989, one young Deutsche Bank vocational trainee at the Mannheim office found himself in East Germany when Berlin-based Deutsche Kreditbank sold the corporate and private banking deposit-taking business to Germany’s largest bank as part of the currency union.
“It was an exciting time and an absolute highlight of my training,” says Steffen Diel, now Head of Global Treasury at enterprise application software provider SAP. “Our counters were open for 10 hours a day and there was a constant flow of people wanting to invest their money in savings plans and other products,” he recalls. This was the first time savers had encountered a Western bank and it was a round-the-clock operation to collect the East German marks and write the savings plans.
In the H1 2019 issue of flow, we talked to Stefan Gruber about the investor relations element of SAP, who provided the background to how SAP was founded and its growth trajectory.1 This second part of the story goes into the engine room – or digital boardroom – with Diel, sharing the corporate treasury perspective and revealing how SAP quite literally “drinks its own champagne” (as the company puts it) when designing winning treasury solutions.
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