The challenge:

Noble’s rapid growth presented challenges around manual processes that resulted in inefficiencies. Manual reporting and data feed and inefficient management of bank statements, meant that treasury staff were unable to make significant improvements easily.

Along with the need to improve its payments processes, Noble wanted to replace its existing US dollar banking services with a global cash solution from a single US dollar provider, so it could work with a primary provider across 36 countries.

The goals were to automate the daily cash position reporting for all cash accounts globally and to streamline and standardise treasury and cash management processes. They also wanted to build new system infrastructure that would integrate bank statement data into the TMS as well as in-house reporting tools that offered a single, high-quality repository for historical and almost real-time bank statement data.

Noble commented, “Given the global scale and rapid expansion of our business, we wanted to be well positioned to take full advantage of new trends in treasury management, rather than just reinforcing existing practices, and the ability to support the development of our in-house bank”.

The solution:

The standardised, consistent global processes implemented with the introduction of Payment Gateway enables better focus on control and efficiency through automation, and full visibility into payments, including knowing who has approved a transaction, where a payment sits in the approval workflow and whether payments have been successfully processed by the bank. A comprehensive audit trail provides full transparency, and they have been able to reduce the risk of paying the wrong beneficiary, fraud and other payment failures.

The solution enables one-touch processing in the treasury which gives staff who are out of the office the ability to review and approve payments from secured mobile devices. Real-time messaging from banks for acceptance of payment instruction, processing and payment initiation has further improved performance.

Online access and direct feeds into the TMS for statement data provides global visibility and control of its cash and liquidity, along with the capability to upload reports and data to the accounting or treasury systems. This has also resulted in a reduction of the number of staff involved in daily statement reporting, through automation. In addition, with the SWIFT Service Bureau, Noble Group can now connect to approximately 1,000 bank accounts at over 100 banks for day-to-day operations.

Best practice and innovation:

The Payment Gateway solution is live across the main platforms encompassing over 40 businesses and over 500 users, across 18 countries using the new system on a daily basis.

Noble further commented, “The size, scope, complexity and superb results of the project highlight the success we have achieved in implementing a solution that leverages a payment factory solution, SWIFT Bureau Service and global cash management solution that has put the foundations in place for the next phase of treasury transformation”.