Building on the success of the BKO implementation by Kartesia’s management company, Kartesia Funds has decided to also use the Finologee platform for banks and accounts management. As a leading European leveraged loan investor managing more than EUR 5 billion in assets, Kartesia focuses on small and medium-sized companies and has a proven track record of investing in over 230 European firms.

Boosting Payments Efficiency in Fund Management Kartesia Funds implements Finologee BKO to optimise payment processing, reporting & reconciliation across bank accounts
The context

The Kartesia Funds finance team has partnered with Alter Domus and Yooz to process payments and invoices for eight banks. Yooz is used for settling invoices with suppliers, while Alter Domus is responsible for preparing various business-related transactions such as investments and distributions to partners. These transactions are processed through several banking interfaces, including both multiline and online banking systems of banks that d o not have Multiline.

Alter Domus

Alter Domus is a leading provider of fund administration and corporate services to the alternative investment industry. It is one of the largest private asset servicers in the world, with more than US$1.3 trillion in assets under management.

Yooz

Yooz i s a cloud-based Purchase-to-Pay automation solution. Its solution incorporates Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation technologies for creating and storing invoices.

Alter Domus serves as the transfer agent for internal payments, most of which are prepared by its team. It also validates created transactions against what is agreed in the contract and, after verification, sends them to Kartesia for signature. Alter Domus has no signature authority for the payments it prepares.

Each month, Kartesia’s Funds team processes up to 100 settlements, with a maximum of 200 payments and is notified of payment schedules 5-10 days in advance. Yooz manages the invoices for each company through a dedicated account and is used in particular for storing, approving and searching invoices.

The challenge

The biggest challenge in Kartesia’s daily payment processes is in the area of incoming payments and their reporting and reconciliation. The reconciliation process is performed daily by Kartesia’s fund team, but currently requires an inordinate amount of time as partner banks provide payment information in different ways and in some cases only upon request.

“Extracting all transactions from all bank accounts and reconciling them with internal tools and reports should be simple and straightforward.”

Marc Housieaux, Finance & Administration Director at Kartesia

Approving payments and sharing supporting information with banks are also currently a rather tedious and time- consuming process. This is mainly due to the fact that communication is mainly done via email, which leads to a high volume of messages that need to be managed.

The solution

After analysing Kartesia Funds’ requirements in joint discussions with Yooz and Alter Domus, Finologee is well positioned to solve the team’s payment issues through BKO. As a single bank gateway, it will enable them to significantly ease and streamline payment releases, accurately define signature rules between teams to maintain control and ultimately provide a simpler bank and account-wide reconciliation process leading to seamless reporting.

The customised extraction of reports played a central role in meeting the specific requirements of Kartesia Funds. One notable example was the need for a report o n account balances, provided as an Excel file with daily opening and closing balances. Although this information is readily available in the standard BKO transaction report, Finologee created an additional step to improve the customer experience. It is now delivered as a separate file containing not only the essential data, but also additional specialised features to meet the client’s needs.

“What we’re looking for is a platform that provides an 
overview of all payments and the ability to download 
documents per payment.”

Marc Housieaux, Finance & Administration Director at Kartesia

Learn more

“We are pleased to be able to support Kartesia Funds in tackling their payments issues with the help of BKO. Once implemented, the platform will free them from some tedious and unnecessary tasks and also optimise their collaboration with partners such as Alter Domus.”

Carlo Maragliano, Head of Delivery Management & Customer Success at Finologee

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