Treasury Strategy & Transformation
Published  7 MIN READ
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Digital Transformation at NH Hotel Group: Checking in to the Future of Treasury

Spanish-based hotel group, NH Hotel Group, was operating a manual, decentralised treasury structure, which was hampering cash visibility and control. Here, Luis Martínez Jurado, SVP Financing & Treasury, NH Hotel Group and Máximo Sanz, Senior Cash Management Executive, BNP Paribas, explain how they collaborated to deliver an impressive digital transformation for the group, resulting in an automated, fully centralised treasury – and one of the most global and innovative treasury management solutions in the hospitality marketplace today.

Every treasurer dreams of complete cash visibility and control, but often the nature of the legacy treasury structure makes this difficult to achieve without a significant overhaul. This was precisely the situation facing NH Hotel Group. 

“Before we implemented the digital transformation project with BNP Paribas, we were operating four treasury centres in Europe: Madrid, Amsterdam, Berlin and Milan,” notes Martinez Jurado. “We had more than 1,500 bank accounts across those treasury centres, and with no treasury management system (TMS) in place, we were using the proprietary banking platforms of every bank we had accounts with. Not only to issue payments, but also to download statements and keep track of transactions. This was a highly manual process with low cash visibility and a number of obvious process inefficiencies. Ultimately, this translated into high operational risk – which was unacceptable.”  

So, with the support of BNP Paribas, NH Hotel Group embarked on an ambitious project to manage and control the treasury needs of five European countries (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Italy) – from a single European treasury centre in Madrid. “As well as centralising treasury operations in Madrid, we wanted to achieve full automation of all of our bank transactions via a TMS and implement SWIFTNet as our main e-banking channel,” he explains.