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 activity is concentrated in Africa. Based in Boulogne-Billancourt, the “subsidiary” treasury department supports the Group's 200 subsidiaries in the management of 1,600 bank accounts domiciled in 300 banks. This account management is done using a TMS accessible locally by the subsidiaries and administered centrally by our department.
Every morning, the branch treasurer's first concern is the recovery and proper integration of all account statements, which is never easy. Indeed, sometimes banks forget to send statements, sometimes they are incomplete or contain certain inconsistencies of date, balance, transaction, characters (excess or missing), CIB code, etc.
However, in Africa, the processes are more complicated than in Europe: a correction and sending a new statement require several days. These delays add to the treasurer's daily work.
Until now, we subcontracted to a publisher the control and enrichment of the statements before their integration into our TMS. This comfortable subcontracting had a major disadvantage: we did not know what corrections had been made, we did not manage the processing, we had very few statistics on the errors encountered. In short, we were too dependent on our partner.
We therefore looked for a solution that would allow us to gain autonomy . Today, the internalization of skills gives us better visibility not only in the reception, control and enrichment of our statements but also in the management of processing. The NEOFI solution offers us excellent responsiveness , responding to our constant desire to improve the KPIs of the subsidiaries and also allows us to challenge our banking partners .
During our call for tenders, we set three requirements:
NEOFI offered us a solution that met our needs without resorting to special developments. Another advantage of the NEOFI solution: its great flexibility of development at a very reasonable cost.
NEOFI is a publisher that says what it does and does what it says. The deadlines were met. Support during the preliminary project, design and implementation was regular. Today, NEOFI supports us with post-project adjustments, the anticipation of possible pitfalls and the suggestion of reports to be designed.
NEOFI has many solutions that will allow us to save time while making money. We have other ideas around account statements to make the daily life of our treasurers easier. In the future, we could use NEOFI on other themes , for example around the recovery, transformation and transport of files between our different systems or another subject such as payment.
