iBanFirst, a leading global financial services company, revolutionized their financial operations

iBanFirst is a leading global financial services company specializing in international payment solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, iBanFirst offers a comprehensive yet user-friendly suite of services that allow executives and finance teams to have direct access to currency markets. They can hold, collect and send funds in over 30 currencies, as well as being able to develop custom hedging strategies.

Founded only in 2016, iBanFirst has 350 employees across 10 countries in Europe today. Being a regulated payment institution by itself, iBanFirst is authorised to operate throughout the European Union and processes more than 1.4 billion euros worth of transactions monthly.

The reason for change

In less than 10 years time, iBanFirst has grown exponentially, both organically and through acquisitions. At the very beginning, an accounting solution Sage Bob 50 was used to record the basic financial flows.

But 5 years further and operating from several legal entities spread across multiple countries, iBanFirst was in desperate need for a more robust ERP environment. One that could consolidate the local figures automatically to provide group level profitability insights. One that could support the geographic expansion of IbanFirst, providing out-of-the box functionality for local Tax and GAAP requirements in most European countries. iBanFirst selected NetSuite as their ERP backbone, because of its scalability, its flexibility to cope with the dynamic business processes at iBanFirst and its affordable implementation budget, being a true cloud solution. The main processes to implement on NetSuite were: Record to Report including Multi Book Accounting and Fixed Assets Management; Order to Cash including Billing Schedules; and Procure to Pay including Vendor Bills Approvals.

Why NetSuite and with Novutech as implementation partner?

The main reasons why iBanFirst chose NetSuite as their new ERP solution, were:

• A cloud-based ERP system implemented fast and deployed globally across all entities
• A full suite of financial and accounting modules including multi-tax, multi-GAAP and multi-currency
• Fully automated intercompany management and financial consolidation
• Unlimited scalability to support the projected exponential growth of the business

Novutech was selected as their NetSuite implementation partner because of its pragmatic and hands-on approach and its local presence with teams in France and Belgium, the two main countries in scope for the first phase of the roll-out.

About the NetSuite implementation

The Novutech team guided iBanFirst through the different phases of the implementation project, from the initial design through the data transfer and sandbox prototyping on to the testing and end user training, to finally end up with a well prepared go live. The project proved to be quite challenging, because of the time constraints - iBanFirst demanded to be live in only 4 months time - combined with the complexity of redesigning their business processes to take full advantage of the best practices built into NetSuite.

Today, NetSuite is fully operational in all countries where iBanFirst is active. The system works according to expectations and any questions or issues are quickly solved by the Novutech support team. IBanFirst’s internal administrators are particularly happy about the efficiency of Novutech’s support ticketing system and the competency of the support reps.

As next steps in the further expansion of their NetSuite ERP, iBanFirst wants to automate their Accounts Payable through the introduction of an OCR solution like ZoneCapture and roll out the solution into the recently acquired UK business, with the help of Novutech.

“The Novutech team has been supporting us on a daily basis since the go live of NetSuite. We really appreciate their flexibility, the knowledge and competency of the support reps and the efficiency of the ticketing system they provided. It almost feels like communicating with a team of our own, in real time.”

Nicolas Perrin, Accounting & Financial Control Manager

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