ITV save 25 hours a week managing corporate banking

As a global entity, the finance and treasury team at ITV oversees thousands of payroll, supplier and talent transactions each month. Operating with speed and accuracy, the team at ITV required a corporate banking solution to support their business growth, and to better handle payments and cash management operations.

By working with AccessPay, ITV has been able to manage both international transaction processing, as well as cash visibility across several hundred subsidiaries, without scaling headcount. The AccessPay platform enables the finance and treasury team to manage cash and payments across 300 entities in 20 different countries, by connecting to more than 10 banks via the SWIFT network.

Bank integration allows ITV to seamlessly automate straight-through processing of their payments, whilst providing bank connectivity that improves cash visibility and bank reconciliation capabilities.

The finance transformation project was led by ITV’s Head of Treasury Operations, Karen Fagan. The team has fully embraced the change in technology, using AccessPay’s cash management tool ‘all day, every day.’

The catalyst for change

As ITV progressed from a traditional UK broadcaster to a global, multi-media operation, its finance function needed to scale with its growth.

In 2015, Karen recognised that to support the company’s transition, digital transformation had to be at the forefront.

This meant that the team needed significantly more flexibility than their previous solutions gave them; from the level of integration between their core finance systems and their banking estate to the degree of centralisation required to improve efficiencies across the team, which could essentially free staff from manual rekeying data processes towards delivering more value-added tasks.

With ITV’s previous supplier contract coming to an end, Karen capitalised on the opportunity to transform finance and treasury operations at ITV and began the search for a new corporate banking solution that could deliver on the functionality the team required to become more efficient, cost-effective and risk averse.

The aim was to centralise several finance functions- including global payroll processing, supplier payments, treasury payments and cash management.

“It just seemed like an ideal opportunity for us to see what else was out there and what better solutions we could find.”

Processing payments with AccessPay

By centralising the link between ITV’s ERP, TMS and HCM systems to their corporate banking estate via AccessPay, their finance and treasury teams now save 4-5 hours a day, just by cutting out repetitive manual data entry from their workload. That’s 25 hours a week.

The AccessPay platform simultaneously processes payments in over 20 countries for ITV, providing access to multiple payment schemes through one platform – including BACS, Faster Payments, SWIFT, SEPA and ACH. This replaces the need for manual entry via online bank portals, saving further time and money to ultimately give time back to the team to focus on more analytical and strategic tasks.

For a high-profile organisation like ITV, security and compliance are also paramount to maintaining their reputation. With AccessPay, the team can meet strict security requirements to mitigate risk against both fraud and error. Not only through straight-through processing capabilities, but through the bank-grade security that’s embedded into their solution; from data-masking, and encryption, to a controlled, walls-up approach to approvals. Auditing is also made easier, with a clear paper trail and further auditing capabilities available to support both teams.

“It just seemed like a really straightforward change for us.”

 

A global cash management solution

Our cash management solution also suited ITV’s new way of working, centralising all of their banks and numerous accounts across several countries.

Rather than relying on time-consuming processes, ITV now has automatic visibility of their cash position across the group, with access to both daily and intraday balances, as well as automated bank statement feeds to support onward reconciliation.

 “You log in and know exactly how much cash you have around the group. We are able to see, not just payments that have been made, but also receive confirmations back from the bank. As MT942s come in throughout the day our position is updated, so it’s a really fundamental part of managing the cash.”

Improving reconciliation

Another useful function for ITV is the improvements that this brings to their reconciliation processes, by connecting to the SWIFT network via AccessPay, reconciliation is 95% faster.

“AccessPay helps us achieve visibility across all our regions by linking in all our banks via MT940s, to all of the banks we will send daily statements. From that we can see all of the movements and then group bank accounts by banks or by currency.

We can also tag by account type so it gives us a real snapshot of where the cash is and what it’s needed for. The platform helps us to understand where the cash is and where the bottlenecks are.”

We’re proud to have such a long-lasting partnership with ITV spanning nearly a decade.

Whilst successfully providing the solutions to support the growth and transformation of their Finance and Treasury operations, ITV has reciprocated value to AccessPay; having had valuable input into our own development roadmap, alongside many other clients.