Photo of Marco Marchi, BNP Paribas, Bertrand Minard, Mark-Corentin Cot-Magnas and Cédric Cadic, Amaris.

To meet their expectations in delivering an efficient cash management structure in 30+ countries and providing a working capital optimisation solution, BNP Paribas was selected as the global banking partner for the 35 countries in scope.

Watch video

Banking partner selection was key to success in this 35 country project

The challenge

The fast-paced expansion at Amaris meant having to face a set of challenges in order to optimise their treasury operations:

• Minimise bank relationships and build a well-designed liquidity management strategy to improve control and visibility.
• Improve working capital metrics and cash conversion cycle through an effective management of receivables and payables programme.
• Face the hurdles, in the various countries of business, of having different technical platforms and lack of standardised formats.
• From a cost perspective, improve their negotiating power with full transparency on banking fees.
• Establish an efficient communication channel with their banking partners as a protection against unanticipated problems.
• Automate invoicing and client collection for the group, with an application directly linked to their CRM and business software in order to give more visibility over their receivables, improve their cash-in control and forecast and automatically generate their factor invoicing file.

• Develop a unique cash management tool connected to all of their banking partners: only one harmonised payment factory for the entire group using SFTP and SWIFT connection.

The solution

To meet their expectations in delivering an efficient cash management structure in 35 countries and providing a working capital optimisation solution, BNP Paribas was selected as the global banking partner for the 35 countries in scope.

Phase 1

• Deployment in 35 countries of payments/collections accounts managed through a single connection link from their ERP with standardised and uniform domestic/cross border XML payment/reporting formats.
• Factor collection accounts opened in nine countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland) connected to a cash pool for liquidity centralisation.
• Harmonised pricing structure applied to all countries in scope with full transparency of banking fees and streamlined communication process with the banking partner with a single point of contact.

Phase 2

• Implementation of an in-house bank.
• Centralisation through POBO/COBO in Europe.

Mark-Corentin Cot-Magnas, Group CFO explains, “Finding a banking partner which could deliver the same service in Europe, Asia and the Americas was a key factor in our decision process and instrumental to our success.”

Best practice and innovation

Amaris Group selected BNP Paribas due to their geographical match and tailor-made products.

Mark-Corentin comments, “We decided to work with our internal teams on that project in order to fulfil all the requirements of our company. Working in an international environment, covering 50 countries and supporting a 40% sustainable growth; in our view, this was the best way of managing this project and reaping the desirable results.”

“Being able to select one banking partner in over 35 countries on five continents is unique and provides undeniable added-value in terms of technical efficiency, bank communication, solution implementation and cost reduction. For a “young” group such as Amaris, being capable of setting up a well-organised and effective treasury framework at a very early stage coupled with working capital optimisation, resolutely demonstrates an unrivalled level of maturity,” says Mark-Corentin.

Key benefits

Qualitative

• Improved treasury forecast and planning with full visibility on idle cash.
• Improved tracking of payment and collections.
• Harmonised reporting with enhanced integration and reconciliation in SAGE.
• Efficient communication with banking partner.

Quantitative

• Drastically minimised banking partners.
• Significant bank fees’ cost reduction through globally harmonised pricing.
• Technical infrastructure optimised costs with standardised format processing.
• Reduction of days sales outstanding with positive impact on liquidity and financial ratios.