Post-Merger Integrations: Streamlining Global Banking Operations in NetSuite
Our client, a leading AI-powered data security company, recently merged with another prominent data protection enterprise. Following the merger, the newly formed organization faced the critical challenge of rapidly onboarding and migrating international bank accounts into NetSuite. With our client serving over 13,600 enterprise customers, including 85% of the Fortune 100 and nearly 70% of the Global 500, these bank integrations were essential to ensure seamless operations for their AR/AP teams to timely and accurately make payments to vendors and employees worldwide. Our client was persistent in ensuring that their teams could start processing bulk payments as soon as possible and prior to their fiscal accounting year end close.
The Challenge
Such transformations are inherently complex, requiring coordination across multiple entities, systems, regions worldwide, and stakeholders. With limited internal resources and high risk to financial operations, our client turned to G1 to lead and execute these initiatives with precision.
Timely Turnaround: Our client had over 100 accounts in scope but needed a priority set of accounts integrated with NetSuite by the end of their fiscal accounting period. This caused a considerable challenge to prioritize and determine an appropriate plan to deliver on time. Coming fresh out of a merger, resources were difficult to come by that had functional and technical knowledge of NetSuite systems in order to meet the business deadlines.
Large-Scale Payments Environment: Our client oversees a substantial payments landscape with 100+ bank accounts spanning multiple legal entities and regions—each governed by distinct compliance requirements such as ISO 20022 standards for payment messaging and region-specific KYC regulations. Post-merger consolidation introduced additional complexity due to overlapping and duplicate accounts in several regions, impacting payment efficiency, standardization, and control.
Data Integrity: Accurate supplier, vendor, and employee banking data is critical to prevent failed payments, fraud, and disruptions to automated workflows. Inaccurate data can increase payment failure rates significantly, leading to reconciliation issues and impaired cash flow forecasting. Post merger, our client found themselves in a position to quickly and accurately combine bank data into a single source of truth for cash controls but had issues with the cleanliness of their data as it was migrated off their old systems. This caused a significant challenge to ensure that the data was validated prior to moving anything into production for use by the business.
Testing & Compliance: Banks require rigorous testing—in some cases hundreds of test submissions—to validate templates and meet pre-go-live requirements. Aligning bank requirements with business needs requires structured test case management and PMO support. We ensured that all testing and production validation transactions were captured for audit reasons, providing in-depth details of the account statuses and requirements.
Our Solution
Strategic Prioritization & Coordinated Execution: We partnered with the client’s senior leadership to strategically prioritize bank accounts based on transaction volume, business impact, and regional risk. Our tailored, phased approach ensured controlled execution while optimizing internal resources. By adopting an agile methodology, our Technical and Functional teams worked around the clock to develop banking templates and conduct internal validations concurrently. The streamlined strategy allocated two weeks for development, two weeks for testing, and one week for production migration per account. By staggering implementation based on developer and functional availability, we achieved a throughput of up to five accounts per week across 4 different Interntional banks, ensuring efficiency and scalability.
Stakeholder Alignment & Visioning: We led collaborative sessions with leadership, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and regional teams to align on the desired future state, integration goals, and automation opportunities—ensuring strategic buy-in from the start. We reviewed and optimized workflows through targeted interviews and scope analysis from day 1, creating a streamlined execution plan to help reduce transaction costs and simplify operations for accounting and cash teams. For example, we provided the Accounts Payable team the feature to bulk pay vendors across multiple countries via NetSuite rather than manually paying through the banking portals.
Testing Strategy & Compliance Readiness: We developed centralized test case repositories to meet bank mandates and our client's internal validation requirements ahead of production migrations. Our test plans captured all the critical details and audit measurements to ensure no account was left unvalidated for our client. We captured every transaction detail (i.e., account, country, amount, file name, beneficiary receipts) throughout testing and production validations. By integrating with client Project Management Offices (PMOs), we were positioned to ensure audit-readiness, manage timelines, and address cybersecurity concerns, such as securing data transmission via encrypted APIs with the Banks.
The Results
Our in-depth and structured approach has delivered consistent, high-impact results across various industries and transformation scenarios:
Accelerated Delivery & Process Automation: We completed integrations for 70+ global entities, reducing project integration timelines for our clients and enabling their Accounts Payable teams to process custom batch payments as needed. Enabling bulk vendor payment automation cut manual processing time by 40% and reduced failed payments/processing errors.
Operational Visibility: We integrated banking data with ERP systems, providing real-time cash flow visibility and improving forecasting for senior leadership and AR/AP teams.
Audit & Compliance Controls: We supported the client in establishing audit guidelines and controls, ensuring 100% compliance with SWIFT, ISO 20022, and regional regulations for international company entities.
Cost Savings: We reduced our client's transaction and manual processing by 20% through system automation and optimized internal controls, enabling our clients to process bulk payments seamlessly for suppliers, vendors, and employees on time with reduced fees.