TRANFORMING TREASURY AND PAYMENTS

DEME Reduces Risk While Boosting Efficiency and Control

The challengeAs a world leader in specialist fields, including dredging and offshore energy market solutions, DEME faced many challenges. Its treasury team heavily relied on labor-intensive and error-prone reporting in spreadsheets. The use of e-banking for supplier payments resulted in fraud risk, and visibility over local cash balances was limited. Manual logins for dozens of bank portals impacted the team's efficiency

The solutionTo address these issues, DEME embarked on a transformational project to introduce a new treasury management solution, adopt a payment hub platform, integrate a sanction screening service and replace entities' bank accounts.

DEME began looking for a payment hub with SWIFT connectivity but quickly realized the business would benefit more from a solution that offered advanced treasury and payment functionality. FIS was able to meet both needs.

"FIS understood the treasury and payments challenges DEME was trying to solve and offered the right solution. Additionally, the FIS team brought a high level of expertise, as well as commitment to make the project a success," reflected Geert Wouters, head of structured finance and treasury, DEME.

The resultsThe new centralized treasury and payment hub solution supports 250 entities across 50 countries, with 90% of the company's payment volume handled by Payment Hub - Quantum Edition. As a result, DEME has greatly reduced the manual work involved in banking activities. It has the controls it needs and, what's more, the solution quickly meets CFO reporting requirements with readily available information.

DEME is only starting to discover the business insights it can access from the wealth of data FIS Treasury and Risk Manager - Integrity Edition and the payment hub collect. For example, the team has expanded its use of detailed reporting on hedging and debt positions.

With new, effective controls, all payments are made in a compliant way and with the correct approvals, greatly reducing the risk of errors and fraud.

Instead of processing paper bank statements, DEME can now collect digital statements automatically. Instead of logging into multiple bank portals, users work out of a single interface within the payment hub.

Reporting is based on data held within the system, eliminating the labor-intensive and error-prone manipulation of data in spreadsheets.

"DEME is confident that FIS solutions are future-proof and support business growth. They answer new needs arising from the ever-changing payment landscape, such as real-time payments, now and in the future," noted Geert Wouters, head of structured finance and treasury, DEME.

Impact

Robust controls and automated reporting have reduced risk and optimized efficiency and cost savings, positioning DEME to support future growth.