Founded in 1852, CFAO is now present in 46 of the 54 countries on the African continent, where it is a major player in the fields of mobility, healthcare, consumer goods, infrastructure, and energy. With 22,600 employees, CFAO generated revenues of over €8.4 billion in 2024.
The group makes a significant contribution to the growth and industrialization of the African continent and the emergence of its middle class.
Mathieu Chappey, Director of Treasury for Subsidiaries and Holding, explains the reasons that led him to choose the NEOFI solution to process his statements.
90% of the CFAO Group's business is concentrated in Africa. Based in Boulogne-Billancourt, the "subsidiaries" treasury department supports the Group's 200 subsidiaries in managing 1,600 bank accounts held in 300 banks. This account management is carried out using a TMS (Treasury Management System) accessible locally by the subsidiaries and centrally administered by our department.
Every morning, the first concern of the branch treasurer is collecting and properly integrating all account statements, which is never easy. Indeed, sometimes banks forget to send the statements, sometimes they are incomplete or contain inconsistencies in dates, balances, transactions, characters (extra or missing), CIB codes, etc.
However, in Africa, the processes are more complicated than in Europe: a correction and the sending of a new statement can take several days. These delays increase the treasurer's daily workload.
Until now, we outsourced the checking and enrichment of the statements to a software publisher before their integration into our TMS. This convenient outsourcing had a major drawback: we didn't know what corrections had been made, we didn't control the processing, and we had very few statistics on the errors encountered. In short, we were too dependent on our partner.
We therefore sought a solution that would allow us to gain greater autonomy . Today, internalizing this expertise gives us better visibility not only into the receipt, verification, and enrichment of our statements but also into the management of processing. The NEOFI solution offers us excellent responsiveness , meeting our ongoing desire to improve the KPIs of our subsidiaries and also allowing us to challenge our banking partners .
During our tender process, we set out three requirements:
NEOFI offered us a solution that met our needs without requiring any custom development. Another advantage of the NEOFI solution is its great flexibility for future expansion at a very reasonable cost.
NEOFI is a software publisher that says what it does and does what it says. Deadlines were met. Support during the pre-project phase, design, and implementation was consistent. Today, NEOFI is assisting us with post-project adjustments, anticipating potential pitfalls, and suggesting reports to be developed.
NEOFI offers numerous solutions that will save us time and money. We have other ideas for bank statements to simplify the daily tasks of our treasurers. In the future, we could use NEOFI for other areas , such as retrieving , transforming, and transferring files between our different systems, or for other topics like payments.
