Petrofac: From PDFs and Excel to Treasury Disruptor

Published: January 01, 2020

Petrofac: From PDFs and Excel to Treasury Disruptor

Thanks to a long-term partnership with with ION’s Treasury Reval, the treasury function at energy services company Petrofac has undergone a radical pivot – from PDFs and Excel to embracing artificial intelligence and robotic process automation. Now, the company’s treasury organisation is among the world’s elite, setting and defining new benchmarks across the industry, as well as disrupting two critical pain points for practitioners: bank account management and the trade confirmation process beyond FX. This transformation journey was a worthy winner of TMI’s 2019 Corporate Recognition Award for ‘Best TMS Solution’.

Headquartered in London, and with another 24 offices in various countries around the world, Petrofac is a leading service provider of oilfield services that designs, builds, operates, and maintains oil and gas facilities. 

In 2010, Petrofac onboarded a team of two professionals mandated to create a treasury function. During their initial discovery, the team uncovered over 600 different bank accounts across various banking partners, FX trading executed in silos, and a spider web of intercompany loans that had to be unpicked and unravelled.

Matt Norris, Petrofac’s Assistant Group Treasurer, comments: “We started to build trust with the business, but processes were very manual. So, with activity starting to ramp up, we needed a partner that we could bring on-board to build a treasury model.”

The company went to market for a treasury management system (TMS), and selected Reval, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to improve security and visibility, and eliminate redundancies. As a result, Petrofac was able to realise the following benefits and accomplishments:

    2020 and beyond

    With the treasury function up and running and driving benefits for the organisation, the Group Treasury team has kicked off two major projects that will have significant implications across the industry. First is bank reconciliation and bank account management.

    Many organisations spend hundreds of thousands, or even millions, on bank transaction service fees every year. Yet without proper oversight, fees are paid without validation, leading to potential overpayments. At Petrofac, the business manages its bank accounts separately from treasury. The treasury team wants to create a single source of truth of all banking information. To do so, they need one workflow methodology that can be implemented across the organisation.

    As such, the team has begun using ION Treasury’s Reval and Oracle Fusion for all their bank account management information across the organisation. To accomplish this, they have engaged Reval to work with Petrofac and the Oracle team to manage both systems data, account, and bank information through the ION Bank Account Management (IBAM) product.

    The second project the team has embarked on is using robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline trade confirmation processes beyond FX, such as commodities. Matching and confirmation for commodities trades can be challenging.

    Petrofac, ION and Reval experts are therefore working together to use RPA to take confirmations sent via emails or faxes from banks, and automatically read these notifications. By incorporating an RPA solution to compare trade details against Reval, Petrofac can effectively create its own matching and confirmation system.

    In addition, Petrofac will leverage the power of the ION Treasury community – comprising more than 50,000 TMS users, leaders, and practitioners – as it works to solve problems and drive change in the two major areas identified, as well as other processes. “It is the ability to reach out to that network and say, this is what we are trying to do. For example, we are looking at cloud and Reval to optimise our procure-to-pay processes. Being able to reach out to 50,000 people who are members of the ION TMS community, and to ask them if they’ve done this, and using those connections, is what we are really looking forward to,” concludes Norris. 

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    Article Last Updated: May 03, 2024

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