Heiko Nix, Global Head of Cash Management and Payments at Siemens, discusses the shift to programmable, 24/7 payment systems, bets on tokenized money for corporate use, and explains how a lack of standardization turned a six-month API integration project into a three-year challenge.
Global Finance: Tell us about your background and current role at Siemens?
Heiko Nix: I have been at Siemens for 41 years. Having worked in IT, sales, and marketing, I moved to Treasury six years ago to take global responsibility for cash management and payments. My boss recognized that IT drives cash management, a trend I see accelerating as technology professionals enter banking. Technologies like stablecoins and CBDCs illustrate this, as they represent a technological upgrade of money.
GF: Are CBDCs or stablecoins currently viable for 24/7 cross-border corporate liquidity?
Nix: I would distinguish between CBDCs and stablecoins. From my perspective, they are two different animals and shouldn’t be put in the same basket.
The issue is, who is the issuer? On the stablecoin side, it’s a private bank or a fintech, whereas you have the central bank on the other side for the issuance. But also, trust base and network are important. On the CBDC side, you have a network like the Euro. So, it’s a natural transition.
The stablecoin challenge is a network problem. We partner with J.P. Morgan, utilizing their coin system as a technical backbone—not a stablecoin—for internal 24/7 Euro and USD treasury funding and connecting with external counterparties.
Integration is a key issue. Unlike our completely automated, electronic payments, stablecoins and even CBDCs are not easily integrated, especially for corporations.
The main benefits we see for CBDCs are: 1) Trust and regulation (like MiCA in Europe or the GENIUS Act in the U.S.) driving market adoption; 2) A stronger network effect compared to stablecoins; and 3) The potential to substitute expensive credit card payments with a cheaper, global electronic payment capability.
GF: If you had to place a bet, which form of digital money—from a corporate treasury perspective—do you think will become the preferred option: tokenization or something else?
Nix: JPM Coin represents a technical upgrade with 24/7 global reach and programmability; the innovation is in the technology, not the money itself. I would bet on tokenized money. It’s already working, provides programmability, and can be combined with asset transactions and other features.
GF: What are the primary hurdles to achieving a “true” global real-time cash position—technology, regulation, or banking partners?
Nix: The core issue is not just real-time visibility of balances, but making that visibility actionable. This means the ability to move or mobilize cash globally in real time.
Achieving this requires a technology upgrade from the current file-based communication, which is insufficient even with intraday statements. The clear solution is to transition to API connectivity for real-time data.
This shift impacts both the company’s internal systems (which require maturity to implement API connectivity) and its banking partners. Banks, especially global ones, need to mature their IT landscape—often complicated by different payment systems—to provide real-time information and access globally.
For Siemens, this technological maturity of banking partners has become a key factor in our relationship and selection process.
GF: Are you seeing a standard emerge among your banking partners, or is a lack of API uniformity causing bottlenecks?
Nix: The integration of APIs for corporate use remains challenging due to a lack of corporate-tailored open banking standards and slight variations in implementation, even among core banks. We use a middleware layer to manage the complexity and lack of standardization across bank core systems. This integration, which connects to the very heart of a bank, forced us to limit our focus to fewer than 10 banking partners (currently six plus one). What we estimated as a six-to-nine-month project ultimately took three years.
GF: What are the key drivers, operational benefits, and system integrations of your shift towards real-time payments?
Nix: The shift to real-time payments is driven by operational benefits, as well as financial optimization like interest rates.
The system is programmable and operates 24/7. It enables real-time reconciliation. For instance, what traditionally took three days for cash application (closing an open item in SAP after an incoming payment) can now be done intraday via API integration with banking partners. This reduces transactional work and focuses on implementing rules.
Regarding cash management, automation simplifies our processes by allowing rules to decide whether to leave cash in the bank account for interest or move it.
Additionally, payment requests are scored in our cash management system for patterns that might indicate fraud.
