InfoPool solution delivers across Africa

Company profile

Established in 2011, Vivo Energy is the company that distributes and markets Shell-branded fuels and lubricants to retail and commercial customers in Africa. The Group has a network of over 1,800 service stations in 15 countries and exports lubricants to a number of other African countries.

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The Challenge

Vivo Energy operates in 17 countries in Africa, namely Morocco, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, CDI, Guinea, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Mali, Mauritius, Namibia, Tunisia, Uganda, Senegal and South Africa. In Morocco, where it has been active and growing since 1922 and where its central treasury office manages over 200 accounts held with multiple banks, it distributes and markets fuels and lubricants.

Vivo Energy had the following key objectives:

• To achieve operational efficiency and control through a centralised treasury structure.
• To ensure optimal treasury management by improving cash visibility over 17 African markets where Vivo Energy had multiple banking relationships, numerous local and foreign currency accounts and reliance on local governance over cash management.

“Given the amount of cash we move every day, it’s critical for us to have full visibility over our banking transactions across all our entities and be able to centralise it in order to optimise cash management and enhance control,” says Issam Sadiq, Regional Treasurer at Vivo Energy Africa Services. “Given that we use several banking partners it is extremely onerous to retrieve this information from each bank’s eBanking portal and input it into our ERP.”

The Solution

Vivo Energy reached out to banking partners for an electronic solution to address the challenges associated with centralised access to all their bank accounts.

Citi proposed the InfoPool solution, which would enable third-party banking information and transaction reporting across accounts to be collated and viewed centrally in one platform, CitiDirect BE^®.

Through the activation of the HTTPS Automated File and Report Delivery (AFRD) solution on CitiDirect BE®, Vivo Energy has gained access to a server that consolidates all the company’s bank statements in the BAI2 electronic bank statement file format for financial reporting, facilitating integration within its ERP system.

The solution gives Vivo Energy the power to manage all its cash flow forecasting and analytics through a single portal, without the need to log into or maintain multiple banking systems. It also improves efficiency through automation, simplifies integration with its ERP system and reduces banking fees and hardware requirements.