How Freightos moves faster on decisions with real-time cash data and insights
This article is written by Nilus About Freightos The $500 billion global freight market that transports nearly everything we eat, wear, and use around the world remains almost completely offline. Which means that our everyday products cost more than they should. Freightos® (NASDAQ: CRGO) makes international shipments faster, more cost-effective, and reliable, expanding global trade between the people of the world with the largest global digital freight booking platform. Using a combination of breakthrough technology, data, and a platform that spans multiple global logistics providers, importers, airlines, ocean liners, and leading tech players, Freightos Group companies—Freightos.com, WebCargo, and Freightos Data—are making global trade smoother. The challenges 1. Cash management had limited cash visibility and optimization. With five business entities and 15 banks across the globe, Freightos was scaling fast but needed help understanding its cash status across the organization. Creating weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports required a massive team effort. The manual efforts of pulling, parsing, and splitting data from dozens of accounts and payment providers across many Excel spreadsheets took time to produce. As a result, they could not create these reports more frequently, limiting their cash optimization capabilities. 2. Manual preparation of financial reports delayed decision-making. After the cash consolidation process, the Freightos finance team would analyze their cash inflows and outflows and compare their cash to their budget. They usually completed their cash flow analysis and could view their finalized data toward mid-month after closing their books. “This delayed our ability to make key decisions that would impact our cash flow,” said Freightos CFO Ran Shalev. They needed to close this gap to keep up with business decisions and visibility. 3. Siloed work for different business entities delayed daily work. Consolidating all cash data on the corporate level and then distributing the data to each stakeholder was a challenge without a single platform with one source of cash data. With the Freightos finance team distributed by entity and geographical location, a bank holiday in one location could delay one step in the information chain. A local finance manager might have to wait for others to pull their bank information before continuing their daily work. The solution As a global company with extensive coverage of banks and payment processors, Freightos highly values cash flow visibility and management. Partnering with Nilus gives the finance team better tools to deliver this value. Ran Shalev, CFO of Freightos, emphasizes the value of seeing up-to-date cash data in one place, “We can move faster and take key cash management decisions today instead of waiting for hours of manual work from my team. We’re also one step ahead towards closing the books.” The Nilus integrations connect Freightos to dozens of bank accounts and payment providers, saving dozens of hours per month. Unlike traditional software that can take months to implement, Nilus users can start connecting their banks directly on the platform. Shalev highlights, “Suddenly, you have a super easy UI to view cash balances in one place.” Automated alerts update the finance team on cash flow and liquidity. Cash visibility and anomaly detection enable the team to see real-time trends and enhance their financial planning capabilities. The finance team manages multiple entities within the Freightos Group. With Nilus, they can automate their cash management across all their entities, enabling the finance team to see the bigger picture. Yaniv Kalo, Sr. Director of Product at Freightos, describes the solution, “Nilus continuously maps historical inflows and outflows, uses AI to learn the patterns, and recommends required cash movements for employees to take forward.” Kalo continues, “Together with Nilus, we’re automating significant parts of our Treasury management. We can now access one UI with near real-time data and a recommendation engine, leading to more frequent, accurate, data-driven decision-making by the Treasury team and country finance managers.” The tighter control over Treasury operations puts the Freightos Treasury team in the driver’s seat as they scale. “But visibility is the mean and not the end goal,” notes Kalo. He explains, “As a global B2B marketplace, having the right amount, in the right currency, in the right account, at the right time is crucial when you scale, and it is not an easy task. Nilus makes it much easier for our team to collaborate and ensure all accounts are accurately funded and balanced. It saves us time and money on FX, internal yet international bank transfers, late payment fees, and interest-based deposits while maintaining a high standard of full, accurate, and on-time payments to our Sellers.” With Nilus at work, the Freightos team can better support the business as it grows in complexity with real-time data in hand. Working with Nilus benefits Freightos by providing the following: What’s next for Freightos As Freightos continues to scale, it aims to automate more and more of its financial operations. Next, they plan to reduce DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) by leveraging additional Nilus automation to apply payments to multiple invoices in their B2B workflow, including implementing a direct integration between Nilus and Netsuite. Stay tuned as we partner in Freightos’ journey of better managing, automating, reconciling, and forecasting their financials. Join our Treasury Community Treasury Masterminds is a community of professionals working in treasury management or those interested in learning more about various topics related to treasury management, including cash management, foreign exchange management, and payments. To register and connect with Treasury professionals, click [HERE] or fill out the form below. Notice: JavaScript is required for this content.