ContourGlobal

How ContourGlobal’s Treasury Team Completed a Comprehensive Bank Connectivity Project in Under 9 Months.

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ContourGlobal is a U.K.-based asset management company that focuses on acquiring and developing wholesale power generation plants.

Their portfolio includes a broad range of different fuel types including hydro, solar, wind, gas, coal, and oil. The company was founded in 2005 by CEO Joseph Brandt and Reservoir Capital Group and has since spread to over 20 countries across four continents. Today, ContourGlobal employs more than 1,500 professional staff and has approximately 140 active power plants in operation. Having achieved 25%+ annual growth (CAGR) since inception, they reported $2.15 billion in revenue during 2021 and are listed as a FTSE 250 company on the London Stock Exchange (LON:GLO).

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ContourGlobal’s Treasury Challenges

Since their founding in 2005, ContourGlobal has experienced rapid growth across all facets of their energy and power generation business. ContourGlobal’s operations quickly expanded to include power plants across Europe and eventually North and South America, as well as Africa. However, the pace and breadth of ContourGlobal’s expansion has not come without its fair share of challenges – particularly within the financial realm. As ContourGlobal has scaled over time, they have developed a large number of bank relationships and underlying account structures. By 2021, Maarten Himpe, VP of Group Treasury at ContourGlobal, and his treasury team oversaw a global network of 60 bank partners and over 800 individual accounts. The channel used to connect with these banks was SWIFT FIN and FileAct.

Due to frequent acquisitions and new project launches, the Treasury team was attempting to maintain visibility to financial operations across nearly 140 unique entities. And given that treasury oversaw some thousands of payments each month across this web of accounts and entities while also controlling a variety of loan and debt agreements, cash pooling structures, and miscellaneous FX and risk-related functions, ContourGlobal’s disparate technology landscape posed a challenge. As a whole, few of their back-office systems or bank platforms were integrated with one another, which resulted in labor-intensive and potentially error-prone manual payments and reporting workflows. And without straight-through-processing of data or information between their systems,
treasury’s time to focus on payment processing and cash reporting was limited.

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