Ebury: Simplifying Multi-Market P&L Consolidation

Discover how Ebury used Abacum’s FP&A software to automate multi-market P&L consolidation and saved 6 days of manual work in the process.

Ebury is a foreign exchange solutions provider that has grown to become one of the largest fintechs worldwide. They have helped countless businesses expand internationally by easing the barriers in foreign exchange. Since its founding in 2009, it has opened offices in 24 markets across North America, LATAM, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. In 2019, Ebury acquired Frontierpay, a payroll payments provider that automated international payments for SMEs. What was already a complex fintech business, regulated in 20+ markets, became even more complicated with the acquisition.

Manual adjustments & complex consolidations

Ana Muñoz, Head of Corporate Finance, and Maria Lapucci, Corporate Finance Manager, were responsible for preparing monthly financial models and consolidating P&Ls of each market. The process started with the extraction of data from Netsuite and Looker, which then had to be manually classified by market. One problem they ran into was data being classified differently depending on market regulations. Adjustments had to be made so that data entries could be consolidated and reported cleanly.

The acquisition of Frontierpay made the consolidation even more complicated as its P&L did not exactly match Ebury’s. This meant additional time to clean and transform the data before it could be integrated into the mother company’s financial statements. In total, the data preparation and report building process took close to 10 days, on average, monthly.

Automated data mapping & creation of spaces  by market

Abacum’s robust system integrations made it easy to link Ebury’s Netsuite and Looker accounts, extract the data and store it in the platform. With the assistance of Abacum’s FP&A Operations team, the data transformation process was mapped so that the division by market, data cleaning, and manual adjustments were completely automated. Tagging and mapping capabilities made it easy to prepare data for analysis at the most granular level, whether by region, country, cost center, or even growth initiative.

In addition, with the migration of financial models to Abacum, they began managing data all in one platform. Maria build a dedicated space for each Country Manager and relevant business leaders to prompt discussions about Corporate Performance and Planning, done through comments and narratives inside the space. Ana and Maria’s objective was to drive each Country Manager to work on the actuals vs. budgets directly in the Abacum platform.

With Frontierpay, corresponding transactions were mapped to Ebury’s P&L to automate the consolidation of financials. Once Frontierpay’s P&L was uploaded into Abacum’s platform, Maria was able to integrate it into Ebury’s instantly without having to manually attribute line items individually.

“Having a platform that eases the work and collaboration with business partners is not something I thought of, but it makes a lot of sense. By speeding up our conversations and updates of actuals, we can really optimize the work Ana and I do.”

Maria Lapucci, Corporate Finance Manager

Less spreadsheets, more collaboration, better decisions

With the end-to-end automation of manual tasks, Ebury eliminated consolidation work done across 30+ error-prone spreadsheets. In Abacum, Ana and Maria were able to update their data mappings and use the flexible modelling to ensure that reported figures were 100% correct. Discussions with Country Managers also became more agile with everyone working within the same platform. Above all, the time it took for them to have analysis-ready financials went from 10 days to 3. Time saved that they used to focus on value-driving insights for top management.