How Panax gave Go Global Travel real-time cash visibility

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.

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.