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Following a competitive tender, Grupo Carvajal, the multinational printing and publishing group based in Colombia, has mandated ABN Amro as one of its two regional banks for Latin America. The bank will centralise Carvajal’s cash management into a regional shared service centre in Cali, Colombia.

Alfredo Carvajal Sinisterra, president of Grupo Carvajal, says: “We awarded the mandate to ABN Amro for a number of reasons, however, key amongst those was our long standing relationship, during which the bank has demonstrated a high level of commitment and service. They also work closely with us locally, which is very important.”

The implementation of Carvajal’s centralised approach to cash management will be phased over three years. Initially the cash management interface will be standardised across the group using ABN Amro’s BankStation product, which provides transaction initiation and information for cash management, trade and custody services. This will enable the group’s subsidiaries across 16 geographies to share information through the service centre in Cali, before moving to operational centralisation in the final phase.

ABN Amro will be closely involved in the implementation of Carvajal’s new ERP system, preparing the interfaces for migration to GlobalGateway, the bank’s worldwide payment service. GlobalGateway will enable Carvajal to initiate local payments in real time from the shared service centre and benefit from with synchronised reporting for all of its bank accounts.

John Gibbons, global head of cash and payments sales at ABN Amro, says: “Large organisations such as Carvajal can realise substantial cost savings and economies of scale by consolidating their cash management activities. Once a centralised approach is in place, however, even greater business benefits can be reaped in terms of liquidity management and straight through processing.