Success Story · Diversified Consumer Goods Group

From Manual Reconciliation to Money That Posts Itself

A multi-business consumer goods group re-engineered how customer payments reach its books, taking a collections process that depended on manual finance-team intervention and making it straight-through, auto-posted, and bank-grade fast.

The Challenge

Picture the finance function of a company running six distinct businesses, collecting payments from thousands of customers through a payments book worth over ₦130 billion a year, and picture nearly all of it requiring a person to manually confirm and post before that cash was usable. Every naira collected sat behind a queue of manual verification before it counted. That is not a small operational inconvenience; it is working capital sitting in limbo, on a payments book that size.

Leadership framed the ambition precisely: zero friction between a customer paying and that payment landing, confirmed, in their SAP account. No easy task across six businesses, dozens of banking relationships, and a customer base ranging from large distributors to informal-trade buyers paying through mobile channels.

How Newen Helped

Newen ran a structured, evidence-based selection of digital payment partners, scoring providers on customer experience, technology effectiveness and total cost of collection, rather than defaulting to whichever bank shouted loudest. Two fintech payment gateways were selected and integrated directly into SAP: every customer payment, from whichever channel the customer actually prefers, now posts straight to their SAP account automatically, with no manual intervention required for the majority of transactions.

Rollout was sequenced business unit by business unit, each with its own cost-of-collection analysis and treasury sign-off, and dedicated change management for finance teams used to the old manual process. Where onboarding lagged in any single business unit, Newen escalated visibly to group finance leadership rather than letting adoption quietly stall.

The Results

Within the first six months of go-live, three business units alone processed more than ₦35 billion in customer collections through the new straight-through channels, at a transaction success rate above 99%. One business unit's digital share of collections moved from under one percent of transaction volume to more than 80% inside six months, evidence not just that the technology worked, but that the business genuinely adopted it. Collection cost across the programme has stayed below one hundredth of one percent of value processed, a rounding error against the working capital now moving in real time instead of sitting in a reconciliation queue.