Created 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 Finance at Colas SA, discusses the choice of the 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 financing director is to ensure the liquidity of the company:
- In the short term, to be able to pay suppliers, collaborators or any other organization on time.
- In the medium and long term, to be able to anticipate changes in its cash flow needs. This involves setting up confirmed financing lines which will make it possible to meet an acquisition need, compensate for a deterioration in working capital requirements or face crises such as a global pandemic.
The treasury director is also responsible for the proper management of monetary flows. It must put in place the tools allowing good management of these flows both on the operational and security aspects. The increasingly present risk of fraud coupled with the digitalization of processes and the immediacy of information require great caution on these subjects.
As mentioned previously, it is essential to equip ourselves with efficient and adapted tools to respond to the security challenges generated by the digitalization of financial flows. Today, everything goes faster and everything is ever more urgent, it is therefore necessary to optimize your processes. Also, to gain speed without neglecting security (on the contrary by wishing to strengthen it) Colas has chosen to partner with companies like NEOFI and Sis ID .
NEOFI is a historical service provider for the Colas IT subsidiary, which has always been responsible for formatting our payment files before their remote transmission to the banks. NEOFI tools are now fully automated at Colas and completely integrated into our Procure-to-Pay cycle, at the end of the chain between our Accounting ERP and our Treasury Management System.
It's a little different when it comes to Sis ID. Colas wanted to replace certain outdated payment methods (notably the use of the LCR) with dematerialized transfers (SCT), however it was necessary to secure tens of thousands of bank details to embark on such a project. At the start of this project, we questioned the banks who then offered us SEPAMail DIAMOND, which did not fully meet our needs. First of all, not all banks are there and then no bank agrees to take contractual responsibility for the information it gives you in the event of fraud. We therefore thought about a broader and more solid solution and contributed to the birth of Sis ID to meet this need. Colas is not a common customer in the sense that it was not Sis ID who approached Colas but Colas who approached Sis ID by taking part in the solution's pioneering committee.
The cooperation happened quite naturally. It was firstly the pooling of customer data at Sis ID that aroused Colas' interest since it provided precision in the verification of bank details as well as an additional guarantee of security. The insurance offered by SMA BTP was also an essential element: if a score is green and it is fraud, we have the certainty that the sum will not be lost to Colas and that we will be insured. It is a guarantee of confidence to know that an insurer is ready to provide the solution.
Very concretely, Sis ID is used by Colas mainly for checks of very large files (the tool is rarely used for one-off queries). Controls are carried out at several levels:
- First of all: Regular querying of our entire supplier repository to ensure that it is always up to date. This supplier repository is only fed automatically from another platform (DOCAPOSTE) on which we ask our suppliers to register directly. No Colas employee is authorized or able to enter and/or modify an IBAN in our tools.
- Then, we secured our payment validation workflow in our accounting ERP, again without any possible modification of the payment bank details.
- Then we systematically request Sis ID one last time before sending any file to our TMS. Any possible payment with an orange or red score is excluded 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.
NEOFI having the task of formatting our payment files, it was natural to entrust it with the ultimate Sis ID query. NEOFI is a company that is agile and flexible enough to adapt to very specific needs. This factor was decisive in the success of this synergy.
The next step will be international. Our high standards in payment control have until now restricted us to the French scope only. Given a history of payments currently developing internationally at Sis ID, if we maintain this same requirement internationally (refuse any payment with an orange score) many payments will not go to the bank, it you have to think about it. We know that NEOFI and Sis ID will be at our side to propel this project and advance the international payment history database as quickly as possible.
