How Panax enabled Optimove to invest an additional $5.5M more cash

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.

About the company

A growing logistics company that provides various freight and logistics services to its customers around the world. Global expansion has brought new challenges to the 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.

Growing logistics 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 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 the company 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 the company 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 them to 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 the company 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 finance 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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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.