F IDI S E RV I C E S NET GAINS: FIDI NETTING EXPLAINED F CDRIC CASTRO, FIDI TREASURER AND CEO OF AGS GROUP IDI has always been about providing tangible values for our Affiliates. These include FASI, protecting you from financial losses through trading with FIDI agents; FAIM, providing you not only with a quality framework but also a strong sales tool to your customers; the Academy, turning your staff members into motivated and trained human assets for your company; and many others. These FIDI services represent true value for money, and it is therefore with a lot of confidence that FIDI is now proposing to implement a netting system for our membership. Netting is basically a way to 58 FF303 Sept_Nov 21 pp58-60 NettingProject.indd 58 By dramatically reducing the number of financial transactions and foreign exchange payments, FIDIs proposed netting initiative can reduce Affiliates costs by substantial amounts every year, says FIDI Treasurer and CEO of AGS Group Cdric Castro reduce your risks in financial contracts with your fellow FIDI agents, by combining and aggregating multiple financial obligations (payable invoices) to arrive at a net obligation amount. It is like an offset between agents, which you do regularly anyway, but on a FIDI scale, involving all FIDI agents and all their inter-FIDI invoices during a given month. Today, there are 600 FIDI Affiliates, trading with each other on a daily basis, involving anywhere between 50,000 and 80,000 invoices per year, all triggering money transfers from one bank account to another, in another country, and often in a different currency. The aggregate of all these invoices is hard to estimate, but it is likely to be in the vicinity of 120-200 million annually. Each financial transaction has a cost attached to it, in the form of bank charges, currency losses and admin time. If you already apply offsetting with a few loyal agents, you will know that this can often be a complex matter, with a lack of cut-off dates, resulting in a mounting mutual account. With netting, however, you can reduce this cost considerably. In fact, if you are only trading with FIDI Affiliates, the international transfer of money would be WWW. F I D I FOC U S . OR G 15/09/2021 11:03