Go Global Travel is a B2B hotel and technology provider, established in 2000. The company offers a vast inventory of hotels and apartments, with over 1,000,000 accommodations in more than 70,000 locations worldwide. Go Global Travel's services are utilized by around 20,000 client partners, which include travel agents and tour operators.
The company operates through a network of 25 multilingual offices around the globe, providing support and services to its partners. This wide global footprint involves 50 banks, more than 290 bank accounts and 41 entities. In 2023, Go Global Travel was acquired by Yanolja, a large Korean super-App.
The Challenge
- Limited cash visibility and low data reliability
- Inefficient reporting processes and limited cash flow tracking
- M&As that add cash management complexity
- Fragmented and high-risk cash management
As a company with operations spanning multiple countries, Go Global Travel dealt with dozens of banks and PSPs across various locations, including hundreds of accounts and tens of currencies, and a high volume of transactions. The local finance teams in each region manage the local banking operations.
The wide variety of banks and large footprint of the group, made it challenging for the headquarters to control liquidity and generate an ongoing and real time visibility over the company's position. This made it hard to monitor cash needs across different companies in the group, to ensure smooth cash flow management and optimize liquidity.
Visibility of cash is lagging and not reliable
In the daily reporting process, all bank balances had to be manually updated by each local finance team on a “pull mode”. The group’s HQ was able to get access to the previous day’s cash position,only by the end of the current day. The delayed and reactive nature of this process made it difficult for the company to manage cash based on the most relevant data.
The manual nature of the reporting process also led to low data reliability. With multiple teams inputting data into a shared document, the process was prone to human error, and discrepancies were common. As a result, the group's headquarters had multiple cash-related risks and had difficulty managing liquidity effectively and with confidence.
Additionally, the complex reporting process led the company to focus solely on bank balances, without tracking cash inflows and outflows. Due to the large number of banks, in various locations, and with a high volume of transactions, the company faced a limited visibility into their cash flows, and couldn’t streamline the cash flow reporting process, making it impossible to gain insights of cash flow trends and cycles
Streamlining M&As
The company’s rapid expansion through several mergers and acquisitions in recent years made it even more challenging for the group to manage cash, with each new acquisition bringing additional banks and finance teams. The diversity in banking practices, currencies and financial procedures across the newly integrated entities increased the treasury complexity, making it more complicated to achieve a unified, streamlined cash management approach across the organization.