Founded in 1828, Bureau Veritas is a world leader in testing, inspection and certification.
The group's activity is spread across 550 subsidiaries in 140 countries and covers the building, agri-food, marine, industrial and consumer goods sectors, serving some 400,000 customers.
In 2019, the company employed 75,000 people and had an estimated turnover of 5.1 billion euros.
The Group Treasury Director of Bureau Veritas SA (BVSA) explains why the company chose NEOFI Solutions. She also discusses the deployment of the solution and its advantages.
Until 2015, the treasury department of Bureau Veritas SA (BVSA) used SaaS software integrating a treasury management module and a bank communication module. This type of software, which combines numerous functionalities, offers many advantages, but its limitations became apparent as soon as response times began to deteriorate .
At Bureau Veritas, the treasurer's role revolves around two main activities: (a) retrieving banking information (flows and balances) and (b) managing day-to-day treasury operations (domestic and international). Therefore, the best way to mitigate the risk associated with degraded response times is to dedicate separate software to each of these two activities.
That is why, when we decided to use the Swift channel to reach all our banks, we took the opportunity to deploy an independent banking communication platform .
To connect our 500 legal entities, we sought a management solution that would be accessible both to local teams, so they could make payments and retrieve their bank statements, and to the central treasury to manage flows and analyze data.
Our ambition was to have the greatest possible autonomy to manage and connect all our banks.
We were therefore looking for an extremely flexible cash flow management platform , equipped with bank communication features, capable of seamless integration without disrupting existing systems, and interfacing with both the Finance department's software and the accounting and treasury departments.
NEOFI Payment was the obvious choice.
It went extremely well, as just four months after the launch of the "kick offmeeting" project, we connected BVSA's main business data banks. The teams adopted the solution in a truly intuitive way. We encountered no psychological barriers during the change management process. Finally, despite our sometimes rather unique environment, we never experienced any delays, bugs, rejections, or broken promises from NEOFI. The relationship is very healthy .
At NEOFI, the human element is very prominent, throughout the project and now in the operational phase: whether on the hotline or for advice, the consultants are highly responsive, readily available, and deeply committed . Their close relationship with us and their understanding of our challenges are a real asset and a significant strength.
We want to deploy the NEOFI platform in our foreign subsidiaries to give them access to banking information and then we will consider how to extend the functional scope, in particular by promoting payment functions.
Publication taken from the treasurer's letter of November 2019
