Delivering treasury centralisation and liquidity optimisation

Acteon supports marine projects for the offshore renewable energy, nearshore construction and oil and gas industries and aims to be the preferred engineering services and technology partner for their customers with a presence across the globe.

Developing and adopting innovative services that create commercial advantages is an area of key focus for Acteon. Transforming to a centralised treasury had become a key initiative for the business. Acteon required an innovative banking partner with a global presence to deliver an automated and centralised treasury to help optimise their excess cash.

Decentralised treasury – manual processes

Acteon had a decentralised treasury structure with cash across a number of banks on account of inorganic acquisitions overlaid with disparate banking structures and platforms. With a lack of visibility and control over their banking positions, Acteon’s treasury team were spending an increasing amount of time reviewing balances and manually funding and defunding their accounts. The inefficient manual processes were hindering the business, and it was clear that a consolidated and automated treasury was of paramount importance.

Centralised treasury – automated liquidity

HSBC have delivered a Cash Concentration solution for Acteon across 26 entities, releasing a significant amount of excess cash back to the business. Automated sweeps consolidate cash into header accounts within the UK, creating a centralised treasury which has complete visibility and control.

HSBC’s Liquidity Management Portal provides Acteon with access to powerful dashboards containing customisable reports, flexible data analytics tools and an intuitive view of liquidity KPIs. The Global Liquidity Solutions Self-Service function allows Acteon to visualise and self-manage key parameters of the Cash Concentration structure to suit their dynamic business requirements.

Acteon’s new treasury structure is scalable and will support the future growth of the business into new countries and territories. Consolidating banking to HSBC has provided Acteon with a centralised and automated treasury resulting in optimised cash, increased visibility, and valuable time saved for their treasury team.

The success

“The Acteon Group is made up of a large number of different entities in various locations around the globe with over 180 bank accounts of which over 120 are with HSBC, as our main cash management banking partner. It was a very time-consuming manual process to both ensure cash was where it was needed to cover payment obligations as well as to concentrate surplus cash with head office for efficient usage of those funds. The lack of certainty in being able to concentrate the majority of funds timely in the right place meant that we had to hold excess liquidity in the group as a buffer rather than put it to good use.

The cash pooling structure has taken away over 80% of the manual cash transfers, creating real time savings for Treasury on a daily basis that can now be focused elsewhere. In addition, the fact that we have daily zero balance sweeping to efficiently concentrate cash at head office, and also ensure all payment obligations in those accounts are automatically funded, means that we have been able to reduce the excess liquidity we hold by over 50%, thereby allowing us to invest that cash back into the business for optimum use.”

Adam Priest, Treasury Manager, Acteon Group