How Panax enabled Mentfield to save $100K in interest payments

About Mentfield Group

Mentfield Group, a growing logistics company that provides various freight and logistics services to its customers around the world. Global expansion has brought new challenges to Mentfield's business:

• Multiple banking relationships with various financial institutions.
• Daily manual processes to track cash position, understand trends, and make cash operating decisions.
• Difficulty in creating a standardized, holistic picture of the group’s liquidity across regions.

Mentfield Group & Panax

• Automated, real-time view of the group’s liquidity - Saving 12-20 hours of manual work per week!
• Proactive management of credit lines and optimization of cost of credit - Saving of >$100K in interest payments per year!
• Identification of important inflows and outflows trends in real-time.
• Confidence in short-term liquidity position and control over cash operating decisions.

The Challenges

The vast footprint of the Mentfield Group includes a multitude of banking relationships with various financial institutions. This, combined with the thin margins that characterize the logistics industry, and the usage of various credit lines for financing the group’s significant working capital, created a huge challenge for the finance team.
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The team had to perform daily manual processes to track cash position, understand trends, and make daily cash operating decisions. With the group’s growth, it became increasingly challenging for the lean finance team to cover the full global activity, making it impossible to create a standardized, holistic picture of the group’s liquidity across regions.
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Other than wasting the team’s precious time on manual, error-prone tasks, there was a constant feeling of “chasing our own tails'' – by the time the team finished collecting and analyzing the data, it was already stale, and the result was backward-looking, reactive decisions, that were suboptimal and wasteful.
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The Solution

Once Mentfield connected all its bank accounts and credit lines to Panax, the team had access to an automated, real-time view of the group’s liquidity. Knowing how much cash is in operating accounts, the utilization of credit lines, and recent changes and trends in liquidity, enabled the finance team to, first and foremost, be in control and have confidence in their short term liquidity position and guardrails.

In addition, Panax’s automatic transactions categorization empowered Mentfield to identify important inflows and outflows trends in real time, independently of ongoing accounting processes and banks’ reconciliation, and focus the team on key levers for improving cash flows.

Finally, the smart alerts helped Mentfield proactively manage the group’s credit lines, respond quickly to cash movements, and better control and optimize its cost of credit.

The Results

Leveraging Panax’s cash flow management platform created immense value for Mentfield in several key areas:

• Reduce average credit lines utilization by >5% – Given current interest rates, this reflects a massive saving of >$100K in interest payments per year.
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• Save 12-20 hours of manual work per week, and maintain full, real-time control over their liquidity – The Mentfiled team is now free to invest its time in more strategic, value-add tasks and make informed cash decisions with ease.
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• ‍Obtained full visibility on global cash management on a daily basis gives the ability to make informed decisions and streamline cash management processes effectively, and enables to fine-tune the cash resources in each region, resulting in increased efficiency and better financial control.

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