The challenge

GoStudent sought a comprehensive cash management solution to address the company’s treasury needs. Rapid growth, often through acquisitions, meant GoStudent had inherited inefficient and highly fragmented legacy set-ups with multiple banking relationships, manual processes and redundant accounts. It resulted in key treasury challenges like inefficient liquidity management, a lack of visibility and access to local bank accounts, as well as decentralised payment and collection management through multiple connectivity platforms and providers. Supporting all local payment types in each country was crucial but also very challenging to manage from a single location.

The solution

GoStudent worked with Citi to support the company with local solutions and expertise on the ground across all jurisdictions. Treasury introduced a Global TMS ‘FIS’ that linked to all group subsidiaries for payment and reporting purposes to ensure full visibility and control over all transactions and balances.

The treasury team linked with Citi through global API and H2H connectivity, including GoStudent’s accounts in over 20 different countries to ensure a single communication channel out of Austria and standardised payment format for all the group’s subsidiaries. The solution provided confirmation of customer transaction fulfilment on over 5,000 monthly transactions in PDF format via APIs, with API connectivity for all accounts globally ensuring fast data collection.

This consolidated and granular view delivered valuable insights to help GoStudent measure demand and define its pricing strategy. The API connectivity is key to end-to-end traceability of payments and in the reconciliation process. The solution also delivered a strong receivables management platform to support specific local payment types across all key geographies. Offering flexible and convenient payment options to students and businesses improved customer acquisition and enabled GoStudent to scale up its local business operations.

The solution also centralised management of tutor compensation with Citi, replacing multiple tech providers to ensure fast and transparent processing. GoStudent also introduced a single Euro account in Dublin to pay tutors and fund local operations in multiple currencies, including Canadian and US dollars. This solution helped GoStudent significantly reduce costs and minimise FX exposure by converting funds centrally on pre-agreed FX spreads and processing these transfers as domestic.

Citi routes the funds through local clearing to avoid correspondent bank charges. Finally, a centralised group liquidity management solution has consolidated cash, reduced idle balances and improved working capital for over 15 subsidiaries. The implementation of an online liquidity investment solution has enabled GoStudent to access money market funds or term deposits to maximise compensation on surplus cash.

Best practice and innovation

GoStudent processes high volumes of transactions every year. Leveraging the latest technology is key to ensure a seamless experience for its customers and service providers. Access to real-time data is crucial for online marketplaces to extract quick and valuable insights, and GoStudent implemented API connectivity and a single H2H channel for all its subsidiaries.

Operating in the B2C space means supporting different local payment types and collections, a crucial factor in customer satisfaction and growth. Despite the high fragmentation of payment types across GoStudent’s markets, the company integrated them in a single global connectivity. GoStudent uses a single Euro account out of Dublin to make cross-border domestic payments to different countries and in different currencies which helped the company achieve significant savings on FX spreads and transaction costs.

By working with a single global bank, GoStudent can ‘lift and shift’ its banking arrangement into new markets as and when required.

Finally, GoStudent has a single point of contact at Citi out of Germany, ensuring it gets the support it needs, anywhere in the world, improving convenience and efficiency for GoStudent’s small treasury team.

“This recognition not only encapsulates our relentless pursuit of innovative education solutions and providing equitable access to learning for students globally, but also reaffirms our commitment to financial and operational excellence.”

Dominic Lynch, Head of Treasury

Key benefits

• Cost savings.

• Headcount savings.

• Process efficiencies.

• Return on investment (ROI).

• Increased automation.

• Risk mitigated.

• Improved visibility.

• Errors reduced.

• Number of banking partners/bank accounts reduced.

• Manual intervention reduced.

• Increased system connectivity.

• Future-proof solution.

• Exceptional implementation (budget/time).

• Improved key performance indicator (KPI) metrics.