Based on Zalando’s Winning Submission for SAP’s 2025 Treasury Innovation Award
Authored By: Roderick Mackenzie, Tradeweb Corporate Treasury, Europe
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.
See how Zalando 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.
How Zalando Uses SAP & Tradeweb ICD Portal for Cash & Investment Automation
In just a few weeks, the integrated solution was up and running with no issues. Because ICD Portal and SAP were already managing integrations for dozens of other treasury groups, the two teams had a great working synergy and understanding of each other’s workflows from the start. This alignment significantly boosted the efficacy of Zalando’s liquidity management and investment processes and created a streamlined, end-to-end workflow – from trade initiation and execution, through to reporting. Data now flows seamlessly between the two systems, eliminating the errors associated with repetitive data input. Transaction data automatically updates Zalando’s cash position, populates their cash forecasts, and flows through several report types, including consolidated reporting. This information is also visible in the dashboards Zalando configured on ICD Portal to aid in their cash and investment decisions.
“With ICD Portal, the integration with SAP ran flawlessly because the communication on all requirements was clear between our dedicated internal business units, SAP’s technology resources, and the ICD Portal team.”
-Tinatin Biganashvili, Team Lead Corporate Solutions, Zalando
Having the right partner was a priority for the team to execute a best-in-class implementation strategy for cash and investments. “With Tradeweb ICD Portal, the integration ran flawlessly because the communication on all requirements was clear between our dedicated internal business and technology resources and the ICD Portal teams,” said Tinatin Biganashvili, Team Lead Corporate Solutions at Zalando. And since Tradeweb does not charge to leverage ICD Portal or its dedicated technology integration team, providing all services at no charge, costs were able to be kept to a minimum as well.
The Results of Treasury Transformation
With ICD Portal, Zalando Treasury now has all of their investments in one place and can access more investment options than they had through each individual bank portal, making investing an easy and convenient process. To date, ICD Portal enables Zalando to invest across hundreds of money market funds with dozens of unique fund providers, and also provides direct access to T-Bills, Time Deposits, and a host of other short-term investment products.
Trading multiple funds on a single ticket and settling multiple funds with a single wire saves time and reduces cost. Increased visibility into the underlying fund holdings also gives Zalando’s team greater control in managing exposures to individual counterparties, countries, security types, and credit quality. The ICD Portal / SAP Treasury integration not only yields benefits for the centralised treasury organisation, but also for the accounting department, which now receives accurate, consolidated data in SAP through the interface between the systems for streamlined financial reporting.
The seamless process between Tradeweb ICD Portal and SAP Treasury saves Zalando Treasury the equivalent of one FTE (40+ hours weekly) for the time previously spent on manual work, including four-eye checks and posting in accounting. “The integration frees up staff to work on more strategic activities,” says Biganashvili. “Automation really pays off for significant time savings, risk mitigation, and reallocation of resources.”
To learn more about Tradeweb ICD Portal and our SAP integration capabilities for cash and investment automation, schedule a demo with one of our experts!
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