How Royal Cosun automated global treasury with Cobase

Royal Cosun, drawing on the strengths of five business groups – Aviko, Duynie, Sensus, Cosun Beet Company and SVZ, offers a wide range of distinct products and services. The products of Cosun can be found everywhere today. Their product range extends from potato fries and sugar syrup to other foodstuffs such as ingredients for cakes, ice cream, meat substitutes and fruit juices. It also includes animal feed, detergents, wallpaper paste and cosmetics. The group employs 4,000 FTEs and operates with 9,000 cooperative members at twenty-six facilities in nine countries, with a turnover of approximately two billion euros a year.

Royal Cosun’s challenges were that its various business groups were becoming increasingly global. Marc Rutten, Treasurer at Royal Cosun states:

“Cash management in each country was shifted to our main relationship banks, looking at which country a bank had a strong representation”.

Because of this shift, a situation had been reached in which each business group had a cash management relationship with at least two to three banking groups. This widespread banking landscape increased user management and security pressures considerably. Royal Cosun also had to manually upload most of their bank statements into their Treasury Management System on a daily basis.

Logging into the various electronic banking systems with the variety of tokens for these systems led to frustrations and a lack of efficiency within the teams.

In the search for a solution to reduce the number of electronic banking systems, Cobase was the optimal candidate for Royal Cosun. There was a strong desire for a centralised system with only one security token and central user management and these aspects were fully covered by the Cobase platform.

Additionally, for Royal Cosun, the direct link from the various banks to their Treasury Management System and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system proved to be an excellent way to decrease manual labour and support the team in their daily activities. Uploading and downloading statements had been largely manual labour which occupied several employees at the start of the day.

According to Marc, the straight-through processing saves Royal Cosun a great deal of time. The day for Marc and his team starts immediately with the aspects that they consider important as all the bank statements are already uploaded to their various systems via Cobase.

Marc elaborates, stating that one of the Cobase advantages is the single sign-on option. Cybersecurity is a high priority at Royal Cosun. It is easy to deactivate an employee for all applications within the company through single sign-on. Marc indicates that their struggle has been solved with the Cobase user management, Microsoft Azure AD-based, single sign-on, thus decreasing the workload and enhancing the security. The advantage of the Cobase central user management is that Royal Cosun does not have to log into the different banks and bank portals to manage its users in multiple places.

Marc states, “Cobase listens to the wishes of its customers and always develops with the customer in mind.”

The enhanced user-friendliness of the Cobase platform , compared to the existing electronic banking systems, together with the look and feel made the decision final for Royal Cosun.