Powering treasury teams with smarter cash control

Go Global Travel is a B2B hotel and technology provider, established in 2000. The company offers a vast inventory of hotels and apartments, with over 1,000,000 accommodations in more than 70,000 locations worldwide. Go Global Travel's services are utilized by around 20,000 client partners, which include travel agents and tour operators.

The company operates through a network of 25 multilingual offices around the globe, providing support and services to its partners. This wide global footprint involves 45 banks, more than 250 bank accounts and 41 entities. In 2023, Go Global Travel was acquired by Yanolja, a large Korean super-App.

The Challenge

• Limited cash visibility and low data reliability
• Inefficient reporting processes and limited cash flow tracking
• M&As that add cash management complexity 
• Fragmented and high-risk cash management

As a company with operations spanning multiple countries, Go Global Travel dealt with dozens of banks and PSPs across various locations, including hundreds of accounts and tens of currencies, and a high volume of transactions. The local finance teams in each region manage the local banking operations.

The wide variety of banks and large footprint of the group, made it challenging for the headquarters to control liquidity and generate an ongoing and real time visibility over the company's position. This made it hard to monitor cash needs across different companies in the group, to ensure smooth cash flow management and optimize liquidity.

Visibility of cash is lagging and not reliable

In the daily reporting process, all bank balances had to be manually updated by each local finance team on a “pull mode”. The group’s HQ was able to get access to the previous day’s cash position,only by the end of the current day. The delayed and reactive nature of this process made it difficult for the company to manage cash based on the most relevant data.

The manual nature of the reporting process also led to low data reliability. With multiple teams inputting data into a shared document, the process was prone to human error, and discrepancies were common. As a result, the group's headquarters had multiple cash-related risks and had difficulty managing liquidity effectively and with confidence.

Additionally, the complex reporting process led the company to focus solely on bank balances, without tracking cash inflows and outflows. Due to the large number of banks, in various locations, and with a high volume of transactions, the company faced a limited visibility into their cash flows, and couldn’t streamline the cash flow reporting process, making it impossible  to  gain insights of cash flow trends and cycles

Streamlining M&As

The company’s rapid expansion through several mergers and acquisitions in recent years made it even more challenging for the group to manage cash,  with each new acquisition bringing additional banks and finance teams. The diversity in banking practices, currencies and financial procedures across the newly integrated entities increased the treasury complexity, making it more complicated to achieve a unified, streamlined cash management approach across the organization.

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The Solution

To address the significant challenges Go Global Travel faced in managing their complex treasury, Panax provided a streamlined solution that transformed their cash and management practices:

• Single pane of glass for treasury operations - Panax connected all of Go Global Travel’s numerous banks across various locations into a single, unified platform, eliminating the need of the global finance teams to log into their banks to manage cash. With Panax, it’s not only the HQ that can manage the cash “hands-on”, but also each of the entities has the access through Panax to their own banking partners, aligning the global and local finance teams on the same “source of truth”..
• ERP data pull - In addition to consolidating banking data, Panax integrated with the company’s existing ERP system by API. This facilitated the cross-referencing and matching of accounting and banking data, simplifying the process for the finance team to understand the nature of each transaction.
• Streamlined and automated reporting processes - Panax streamlined and automated the reporting processes, allowing the company to gain real-time visibility into the entire group’s liquidity position. The solution enabled the company to monitor the split of funds between different banks, entities and currencies.
• Proactive Alerts - Panax enabled the company to implement a set of smart proactive alerts designed to manage cash in a "push mode." These alerts provided real-time liquidity orchestration, effectively reducing the buffers the team needs to keep in each account, ensuring that the finance team has full control and confidence managing cash in a much more capital efficient way 

The Results

Real-Time visibility and control

The company’s ongoing, real-time visibility into the entire group’s liquidity and cash position allowed the company to make more informed and timely financial decisions. The HQ was able to maintain centralized control over their decentralized financial operations and the dynamic changes introduced by M&As, mitigating the risks associated with fragmented cash management.

Improved data accuracy and freshness

Panax automated the reporting processes, significantly reducing the manual effort required by the finance teams and ensuring data was up-to-date. In addition, the ERP integration enabled  the cross-referencing and matching of accounting and banking data. This improved the accuracy and reliability of financial data, and also freed up teams for other tasks.

Increased capital efficiency

The implementation of proactive alerts allowed Go Global Travel to manage liquidity in a “push mode,” ensuring real-time notifications, reducing the buffers they need and enabling them to allocate cash more efficiently. Coupled with accurate insights, the finance team could orchestrate liquidity management with full control and confidence and optimize on opportunities.

Background

A global leader and a rapidly growing star in consumer tech, Oddity (NASDAQ: ODD) is revolutionizing the wellness and beauty industry by offering an AI-driven, digital-first platform to their customers.

The consumer tech industry is transaction-heavy and therefore comes with substantial volumes of inflows and outflows. Coupling this with globalization and the fact the world is gravitating more and more towards borderless eCommerce – presents a unique set of challenges, particularly in the hectic realm of eCommerce.
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The Challenges

Positioning themselves as one of the fastest-growing eCommerce beauty platforms, Oddity experienced a hyper-growth phase. This meant that in a relatively short period of time, the company has opened dozens of new bank accounts, payment gateways, and wallets, which translated into more cash moving around and new currencies to keep up with.

Despite exceeding the company’s already ambitious financial targets, this exponential growth phase also brought about an overwhelming amount of manual, labor-intensive work that left little time for more strategic tasks.

What made things more complicated, was the growing challenge to maintain visibility into their cash flow management. Oddity’s finance team needed to invest more and more man-hours to manage their cash effectively across accounts, which in turn, made it challenging for Oddity to optimize liquidity in real time.‍

‍The Solution

After implementing Panax’s treasury platform, Oddity has completely transformed the effectiveness of their liquidity investment processes. Gaining much-needed visibility, the team managed to track all of their cash pockets in real-time.

Once the cash visibility element was checked off – Oddity could focus on cash optimization. They leveraged smart alerts and proactive notifications to identify future cash needs, and then optimized their cash flow and liquidity reserves accordingly.

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The Results

Being able to allocate idle cash pockets by connecting their entire account base to Panax has allowed Oddity to:

• Maintain over 95% of their cash in interest-bearing investment accounts – A massive financial win for everyone, especially considering the current interest rate.
• Maintain full, real-time control over their financial assets – The Oddity team could spare the long hours invested in manual data collection and analysis and focus their time on more strategic, value-add tasks.

Panax's 360 connectivity and proactive insights have enhanced Oddity’s ability to keep a constant finger on the pulse of their rapidly expanding brands.

Oddity’s new cash management process is now well positioned to support their bold growth plans and rising complexity, becoming a source of value that rather than hindering growth, now actually contributes to the bottom line of the entire business.

About Optimove

Optimove is a customer led- marketing platform that helps brands use data to drive personalized, customer-centric marketing campaigns. By combining customer data, analytics, and automation, Optimove enables businesses to create targeted, personalized communications across multiple channels like email, SMS, and social media. The platform is known for its predictive modeling capabilities, which help brands understand customer behavior patterns, segment audiences, and optimize marketing efforts to improve customer retention, engagement, and lifetime value.

After massive company growth in the past two years, Optimove had challenges around global cash management. These included:

• Managing distributed cash flow within multiple banks and currencies. 
• They had excess cash, and wanted to optimize liquidity.
• Optimove had cash in both banks and payment wallets. They needed full visibility into this data as well, so that it would be included in their full cash position. 

Optimove & Panax (After only one month)

• Easy and smooth onboarding process: Over 40 accounts connected in the first 3 weeks of onboarding. 
• No expensive and drawn out onboarding process and no IT implementation needed. 
• Full visibility into the cash situation via alerts and reports means the team can be proactive.

The Challenge

Over the past two years, Optimove has experienced substantial growth, expanding its platform’s capabilities . This momentum includes strategic investments, such as the acquisition of Kumulos and Graphyte, which added mobile marketing and AI personalization tools, enhancing Optimove’s ability to deliver personalized, cross-channel customer experiences. Managing cash flow manually, across multiple accounts and currencies in Excel was a challenge for the lean, distributed finance team. 

As well as over 40 bank accounts, Optimove also uses payment wallets. They struggled to have visibility into this data as well, so that it would be included in their full cash position. 

As a hyper-growth company, Optimove was dealing with a lot of cash. It needed to not only be able to see where its cash was, but also to optimize it for continued growth. Optimizing liquidity after acquisitions was particularly important for financial growth. 

In addition to optimizing liquidity, Optimove wanted to centralize all the banking data into a one insightful cash flow report, to be their source of truth, and understand trends and anomalies of their cash flows.

The team wanted a solution that could be implemented quickly, because they didn’t have the time available for a lengthy implementation process, or the resources available for running a complex solution. 

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The Solution

Optimove’s Panax account, with over 7 banks and 40 accounts was set up and running in less than a month. The Optimove team configured 2 banks themselves within the system, and all other accounts were set up by the Panax onboarding team. 

Because the accounts were set up and configured so quickly, the Optimove finance team had access to all their cash flow data in one platform, and could immediately begin to optimize liquidity. Connecting the ERP system of Optimove, enabled the team to quickly generate an insightful cash flow reports, with Panax auto-categorizing all of their banking data

The quick configuration time, responsive support and the automation built into Panax helped the Optimove Finance team to work more efficiently, and to get full visibility over their global cash flow.

The Results

The quick onboarding time gave Optimove immediate value; Optimove were impressed with how quickly they were onboarded to Panax, without investing in IT or the finance team’s resources, and how simple the platform is to use.

‍Full visibility into global cash management gives the ability to make informed decisions and streamline cash management processes effectively. The team now is able to fine-tune the cash resources in each region, resulting in increased efficiency, better financial control and optimized liquidity.