How SPEYZER Group rebuilt Treasury with Cobase

When Bart Hendriks joined SPEYZER Group as Group Treasurer, he stepped into a business that had grown quickly, but without the treasury infrastructure to match. The group, a European wholesaler of low-value, high-volume non-food consumer goods, had expanded through multiple acquisitions. Each operating company ran its own banking relationships, payment processes and foreign exchange activity. What was missing was a central view of cash, risk and control.

SPEYZER Group generates around €700 million in annual revenues, employs approximately 1,000 people and sources most of its products from China, selling primarily into European retail markets. With thousands of SKUs and thin margins, cash discipline matters. Yet by late 2024, the group had no treasury management system, no cash pooling, and no consolidated visibility of its liquidity position.

‘There were around 120 bank accounts across 8 to 10 banks,’ Hendriks recalls. ‘Multiple online banking systems, payments being made locally whenever people felt it was necessary, and no daily visibility of where cash actually sat.’ The absence of structure forced the group to keep large precautionary balances on operating accounts, funded by debt, simply to ensure payments could be made.

Before Hendriks formally joined, SPEYZER had already recognised that this situation was unsustainable. Interim treasury resources were brought in to stabilise cash flow forecasting and begin the search for a system that could impose order and transparency. That work laid the foundations for the decision to implement Cobase as a central treasury platform.

By the time Hendriks arrived in September, the direction was clear. His task was to complete the transformation: centralise visibility, regain control of payments, reduce funding inefficiencies and professionalise treasury governance.

The first priority was connectivity. Within months, nearly all bank accounts were connected to the Cobase system, giving SPEYZER intraday and end-of-day balance visibility across the group. For the first time, treasury could see total liquidity on a daily basis, rather than relying on spreadsheets and estimates.

Payments were the next lever. All outgoing payments—whether batch files or manual transactions - were routed through the Cobase Payment Hub. This enabled SPEYZER to enforce consistent authorisation rules, implement four-eye controls, and centralise payment timing. Instead of ad hoc daily payments across subsidiaries, the group moved to a structured weekly payment run, improving predictability and control.

Crucially, this was not just about efficiency, but governance. Through Cobase, user access could be managed centrally, leavers removed immediately, and audit risks associated with multiple local e-banking systems eliminated. ‘I don’t need to rely on banks to change mandates anymore,’ Hendriks says. ‘I control it myself.’

However, visibility and payment control alone did not solve the underlying funding problem. SPEYZER was still borrowing, yet had excess cash balances scattered across accounts. The breakthrough came with the implementation of Cobase’s bank-agnostic cash pooling and balance optimisation structure.