Cooke Seafood's Internal Bank Project wins recognition at the Treasury Today’s Adam Smith Awards

The Cooke Bank project received international recognition as “highly commendable” global cash management solution during the 2021 Adam Smith Awards.

Cooke Bank project

The Cooke Bank project is unique in the sense that it delivers a highly advanced in-house bank and payment factory solution by leveraging the standard functionality within Kyriba to the next level. Elements of the solution include:

• Full integration between Kyriba and multiple ERP systems and banking partners for payment processing;
• Standardization of internal payment processing across normal external payments, Payments on Behalf of (POBO) and intercompany payments.
• Enrichment of external collections such that ever more receivables can be posted automatically into the client subledgers and will no longer require post processing;
• Multi tiered, tax compliant In-house bank structure;
• The internal bank account is single source of liquidity for affiliates and denominated in functional currency only;
• All liquidity related exposure automatically centralized in central treasury (main branch of Cooke Bank), whereas other Cooke bank branches are currency neutral by design;
• Adaptation to new or updated fiscal structuring of the group or extension of the solution to other (ringfenced) businesses within the same Kyriba environment is a matter of master data modification rather than reconfiguration of the system.

The solution does not make use of hard coded routing rules for payment processing at all which implies that for instance a POBO routing for one entity can be make use of bank account A whereas a similar POBO for another entity can make use of bank account B. Also routing can be redirected without the need for support by IT or outside consultants.

The COVID pandemic added an extra degree of complexity because both Cooke team members as well as the external consultants had not met before and had to work remotely. It required an special effort and dedication of all involved understanding each other and meeting deadlines.

Key Project Timelines

March – May 2020                              Building the Treasury Target Operating Model (T-TOM), business benefit case and implementation roadmap

October 2020 – March 2021             Building and testing the Kyriba solution and integration

15 April 2021                                         Go-live (on schedule)

April 2020 – current                          Roll out across the company

Project Backgroud

Cooke Seafood is a fast growing family company -based New Brunswick, Canada providing quality seafood products to markets across the globe. In response to rapid international expansion the board decided to build a professional treasury function. The 2019 RCF refinancing and restructuring of bank account infrastructure kicked of the transformation of the treasury function into a true in-house bank operation.

I worked closely together with Marije Siebenga and Actualize Consulting on this implementation of this in-house bank solution for Cooke Seafood

The technology underlying the Cooke Bank solution is Kyriba.