For those who may be unfamiliar, Zalando is Europe’s leading online multi-brand fashion destination, currently serving over 61 million users across 29 markets in Europe. What started as a Berlin-based online shoe store in 2008 has transformed into a leading pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce. Since its IPO, the company has more than quadrupled its business from 2014 to 2024 with 15.3 billion Euros in Gross Merchandise Volume.
Today, Zalando knows firsthand how technology can help corporate teams do more with less. To ensure they have the cash needed to run their booming online business, their treasury team leverages Tradeweb ICD Portal and SAP Treasury to digitise an end-to-end cash and investments workflow, creating a single source of truth for their entire portfolio.
Zalando now saves 40+ FTE hours each week through enhanced automation and STP across their investment workflows via SAP and Tradeweb ICD Portal.
Zalando Treasury’s Key Cash & Investment Challenges
For Zalando’s centralised treasury organisation, researching, trading and reporting on short-term investments was a complex, highly manual, and time-consuming process. This was because the team had to consolidate information across the many money market funds (MMFs) it traded through their respective bank portals. This created unnecessary friction, since the data and reporting delivered by each bank was not standardized.
For instance, some funds provided SWIFT MT535 messages, which the team had to manually convert with its custom solutions into MT940s in order to process them in SAP and have balances posted. Other funds could only provide information via email or as downloads from their online platforms. By the end of the day, several staff across both treasury and accounting were involved in numerous manual postings and bookings as teams checked, corrected, and rechecked data. As a result, both treasury and accounting had to dedicate significant time to managing this process on a recurring basis.
Key Challenges for Treasury:
- Time consuming investment and reporting processes
- Multiple team members and stakeholders involved in each step
- Lack of aggregated reporting on entire portfolio
- Manual handling of money market fund (MMF) balances in SAP
- Limited reporting details available in SAP
- Counterparty visibility was minimal
- Manual compliance processes created risk of error
Key Challenges for Accounting:
- Manual processing of money market funds
- Manual work and postings in most cases
- Manual balance control
Identifying & Implementing a Solution
In order to rectify all the manual, time-consuming processes they faced, Zalando’s treasury group underwent a largescale transformation of its entire technology structure with a greenfield project approach, scrapping its mix of custom solutions and making S4/HANA the centre of its new, best-in-class architecture. To optimise liquidity and investments, the online retail platform decided to leverage Tradeweb ICD Portal as their primary solution for investment and liquidity management, thanks to the platform’s deep integration with SAP Treasury. This allowed the team to configure a single sign-on to allow its treasury group to easily initiate their trade process and manage investment workflows directly from SAP.
Zalando’s New Architecture for Cash & Investment Automation
