How Ten Brinke simplified cash visibility and payments with Cobase

Ten Brinke is a leading international construction and real estate company with a history dating back more than 120 years. Headquartered in Varsseveld in the Netherlands, the company also has branches in Germany, Spain, Portugal and Greece, and employs around 1,300 people.

What’s more, it is a business that has expanded rapidly in recent years. Following annual growth of around 10 - 20% for the last decade, today Ten Brinke has an annual turnover of about €1 billion.

As a result, the group now has over 500 companies and works with 30 different banks, including several smaller German banks that will only communicate with a named individual within the company. New banks are added to the structure whenever the company embarks on a new joint venture or acquires a company for a new project.

All this meant that by 2023, managing cash had become a complex and time-consuming activity. Obtaining the daily cash position involved logging into multiple bank systems, manually downloading statements and uploading them into the company’s Unit4 system – all of which took around two hours to complete.

Given the different functionalities of each bank system, staff training was also a sizeable challenge. Each bank had different functionalities, and when a new person joined, it took a lot of time to train them on every system. Authorising and managing settings for all the banking systems also required a lot of time and effort.

To address these issues, CFO Peter Zents began looking for a treasury management system that could provide more efficient visibility over cash, while giving users access to the company’s bank accounts via a single portal.

After investigating the system further, Zents’s team decided to implement Cobase, which involved setting up a direct connection between the treasury system and Ten Brinke’s ERP system. The implementation began in April 2023 and first went live in October 2023, followed by a ‘big bang’ effort in February 2024 to bring most of the company onto the platform.

According to Zents, the implementation has driven significant improvements to the company’s internal processes, reducing manual effort and improving security controls. One example is that fewer colleagues need access to Ten Brinke’s banking system, with Cobase the firm automatically uploads payment from its Unit4 ERP to Cobase for approval to be sent out fully signed for execution to the bank.

Using Cobase, account balances can now be accessed in a single location, with authorisations and settings likewise managed centrally. And while Ten Brinke doesn’t yet use all of Cobase’s in-house banking functionality, it does use the system to calculate interest rates and upload transactions for certain types of intercompany payments, such as cash pooling interest payments.

Training people on how to use Cobase takes as little as one hour – the new system is future-proof and able to meet the company’s needs for the next 10 years. As a valued customer, Zents has also found that Ten Brinke is well supported where relationship management is concerned: “We like the personal contact that we have from Cobase – they take our questions seriously, and we feel that we are an important customer for them.”

Looking forward, the team plans to expand Cobase into some additional branches, particularly in Greece, and expects to explore the option of adopting more functionalities in the future.