How Orange Capital Partners simplified bank account management

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Orange Capital Partners (OCP) is a European real estate investment and asset management company with a portfolio of around €5 billion. The company has grown rapidly and is managing over 100 entities and over 300 bank accounts.

When Finance Director Niek Lemke joined OCP, he was responsible for managing the firm’s most significant mandate, 98% of which is held in residential real estate in the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, and Ireland. This mandate required multiple banks, and it soon became apparent that accessing so many bank accounts across different countries, each with individual logins, presented a significant challenge.

For Lemke, gaining visibility into cash balances in dozens of accounts and initiating payments internally was time-consuming and largely manual. To add to the complexity, several external service providers also needed to access certain bank accounts, leaving room for improvement in security and controls.

Lemke was keen to implement a more robust solution to strengthen access rights and streamline manual processes while improving security. “I have a background in audit,” he recalls. “I reached out to one of my former colleagues, who said, ‘You have a lot of corporates in your portfolio – what do they use?’ And that’s how I heard about Cobase.”

While Lemke’s original plan was to use Cobase for a specific fund, this quickly expanded to include the firm’s internal environment. “And then more and more business cases popped up – such as a external service provider who needs access to a Dutch bank. So I suggested onboarding these bank accounts into Cobase so we could use it to manage access and payment rights.”

In addition to using Cobase to give external service provirders access to the relevant bank accounts, OCP also uses the system for internal payments and account funding. “This used to take a lot of time because one of  my colleagues needed to log into four different banks,  figure out the balances and add them to an Excel  spreadsheet,” says Lemke. “Then different kinds of  payments had to be initiated from those different bank  environments.

How Orange Capital Partners simplified bank account management funding. “This used to take a lot of time because one of my colleagues needed to log into four different banks, figure out the balances and add them to an Excel spreadsheet,” says Lemke. “Then different kinds of payments had to be initiated from those different bank environments.

“Now, we simply download the balances of a specific group of accounts and put them in a spreadsheet, and it produces a payment file, which we upload to Cobase. So that task went from taking a couple of hours a week to just 10 minutes.” Furthermore, OCP also uses Cobase to execute direct debits for tenants who pay directly to the managed real estate fund. The firm is working on updating the IT environment. As part of this exercise, OCP is making frequent changes to the bank access rights for internal and external parties.

“It’s easy for us to just click on ‘read-only’ or delete the user,” says Lemke. “With the banks, it would have taken hours, or sometimes weeks, for these changes to effect.” Lemke is effusive about the flexibility enabled by using Cobase. This includes controlling different users’ access levels and a higher degree of traceability over system activity. He also speaks highly of OCP’s relationship with the vendor.

“Cobase has an extremely positive approach, which is a huge game changer for us,” Lemke concludes. “Banks often say things are difficult to achieve, but Cobase has a can-do attitude that makes everything straightforward.”