Leading-edge payments technology helps Adecco further unleash business potential
The challenge
Adecco Group’s biggest and most important customer is its associates, the people that work across its global base. It is the responsibility of the treasury to ensure every associate is paid on time with the due amount. To this end the company holds more than 1,000 bank accounts in over 100 banks worldwide, supporting more than 700,000 permanent and temporary employees every day.
The downside of this choice, however, was hugely decentralised and fragmented treasury operations, with numerous legacy banking and payment systems. As a result, there was a lack of visibility due to countless separately managed bank interfaces and lack of a central repository of bank statements.
Across the 60+ countries where Adecco has branches and employees, a uniform payment approval process was clearly absent. For some countries with multiple legal entities there could be up to five different approval processes. This did not foster a positively controlled environment from a group perspective and in the era of increased cyber and fraud attacks, such vulnerability in the process could easily be exploited and as such presented another challenge that needed addressing.
The solution
Adecco first implemented a treasury management system (TMS). However, it quickly realised a TMS is not the right solution to tackle the challenge of global payment management. A specialised solution for payments was needed that would enable one standard approval process for all payment types; one global channel between all Adecco countries and the outside banking world; and one centralised database for all bank accounts.
Additionally, the solution needed to provide business intelligence functionality to perform advanced analytics around cash flow forecasting and allow collaboration on building an algorithm to perform sanctions screening on all payments at a global scale.
The Adecco treasury team selected Treasury Intelligence Solutions GmbH (TIS), a German company specialising in global payment management.
Best practice and innovation
In a company like Adecco that relies on global scale and operational efficiency, the challenge of cost-effective global payment and cash management goes way beyond a financial one.
Because of the decentralised nature of the business, with hundreds of thousands of workers being paid daily or weekly around the world, the task of paying wages and salaries takes on a new meaning.
By having a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider like TIS, Adecco Group has the opportunity to have one always-on, always up-to-date global platform for payments without the need to burden its own limited IT resources. It is a perfect example where business potential is further unleashed by the power of technology.
Key benefits
With years of experience serving customers all over the world, TIS is able to provide a substantially rich library of bank-connectors and payment formats. By choosing it, Adecco has secured many benefits from a reliable partnership with a strategic focus on corporate payments for its treasury journey.
These benefits include:
- A massive increase in cash visibility. Over 900 bank accounts from over 25 banks have been connected through TIS.
- Real-time cash flow status is now visible for Adecco decision makers.
- Substantial reduction of local idle cash, with local balances in some countries reduced by 20%.
Banking relationships are leaner; there is better payment control through a streamlined payment approval process globally; and process harmonisation has led to higher efficiency. One central repository enables scalability in the roll-out of bank statement data into the broad ERP landscape and daily and month-end closing operations are faster. Automatic payment matching for cash allocation in some countries is as high as 49%.
