Founded in 1929, the Colas Group is the world leader in the construction, upkeep and maintenance of transport infrastructure.
Colas is now present in around fifty countries and carries out an average of 85,000 projects per year.
Anthony Udin, Director of Treasury and Corporate Financing at Colas SA, discusses the choice of NEOFI and Sis ID solutions and the synergy between the two solutions in the fight against fraud.
One of the main roles of a treasury and finance director is to ensure the company's liquidity:
- In the short term, to be able to pay its suppliers, employees or any other organization on time.
- In the medium and long term, to be able to anticipate changes in cash flow needs. This involves setting up confirmed financing lines that will allow the company to meet acquisition needs, mitigate a deterioration in working capital requirements, or cope with crises such as a global pandemic.
The treasury director is also responsible for the proper management of cash flow. They must implement the tools necessary for effective management of these flows, both operationally and in terms of security. The increasing risk of fraud, coupled with the digitalization of processes and the instantaneous nature of information, necessitates extreme caution in these matters.
As mentioned previously, it is essential to equip oneself with high-performance and appropriate tools to meet the security challenges arising from the digitalization of financial flows. Today, everything is faster and more urgent, making it necessary to optimize processes. Therefore, to gain speed without compromising security (on the contrary, aiming to strengthen it), Colas has chosen to partner with companies like NEOFI and Sis ID .
NEOFI is a long-standing service provider for Colas' IT subsidiary, and has always been responsible for formatting our payment files before they are transmitted electronically to the banks. NEOFI's tools are now fully automated at Colas and completely integrated into our Procure-to-Pay cycle, at the end of the process between our Accounting ERP and our Treasury Management System.
The situation is slightly different with Sis ID. Colas wanted to replace some outdated payment methods (particularly the use of promissory notes) with electronic bank transfers (SCT). However, securing tens of thousands of bank details to launch such a project. At the start of this project, we contacted banks, which offered SEPAMail DIAMOND, but it didn't fully meet our needs. Firstly, not all banks offer it, and secondly, no bank is willing to assume contractual responsibility for the information it provides in the event of fraud. We therefore considered a broader and more robust solution and contributed to the creation of Sis ID to address this need. Colas isn't a typical client in the sense that Sis ID approached Colas; rather, Colas approached Sis ID by participating in the solution's pilot committee.
The cooperation came about quite naturally. Colas was initially interested in the pooling of customer data at Sis ID, as this provided greater accuracy in verifying bank details and an additional layer of security. The insurance offered by SMA BTP was also a key factor: if a score is green and it turns out to be fraud, we have the assurance that the funds will not be lost to Colas and that we will be insured. Knowing that an insurer is willing to cover the solution is a real confidence booster.
In practical terms, Sis ID is used by Colas primarily for checking very large files (the tool is rarely used for ad-hoc queries). The checks are performed at several levels:
- First: We regularly query our entire supplier database to ensure it is always up to date. This supplier database is automatically updated from another platform (DOCAPOSTE), where we require our suppliers to register directly. No Colas employee is authorized to enter or modify an IBAN in our systems.
- Next, we secured our payment validation workflow in our accounting ERP, again without any possibility of modifying the payment bank details.
- Then we systematically request Sis ID one last time before sending any file to our TMS. Any payment with an orange or red score is rejected and not transmitted to our TMS.
- Finally, the payment file passes through our TMS automatically and without any possible modification; it is from our TMS that the payment file is transmitted directly to our banks.
Since NEOFI was responsible for formatting our payment files, it was a natural fit to entrust them with the final Sis ID query. NEOFI is a company agile and flexible enough to adapt to very specific needs. This factor was crucial to the success of this collaboration.
The next step will focus on international expansion. Our stringent payment control requirements have thus far limited us to the French market. Given the payment history currently being developed internationally at Sis ID, if we maintain this same requirement internationally (rejecting any payment with an orange score), many payments will not be processed by the bank; this is something we need to consider. We know that NEOFI and Sis ID will be there to support us in driving this project forward and rapidly expanding the international payment history database.
