Global Payments Europe
Global Payments Europe (GPE) is part of a multinational group that is a global leader in payment card acceptance services. GPE provides payment card issuance and acceptance technology and related operational services to clients across Europe and Asia.

Client’s requirements
GPE’s finance and controlling department requested assistance to update its financial reporting, which it had been handling manually to date based on data export from multiple accounting systems. The main requirements were to prepare data for financial reporting, create key financial reports and prepare data for later self-service reporting.
The main data-related tasks were creating a suitable data model, consolidating data from multiple accounting systems (countries/markets), cleaning the data, converting the data to a single currency and linking it to GPE’s own master data, financial plans (budgets), estimated values (forecasts) and other manual inputs. One of the manual inputs requirements was to create an option so that several plan versions could be inserted for a specific accounting period and compared within reports. The client also required dynamic security configuration in relation to the logged-in user, their role and responsibility for particular cost centres. A specific GPE requirement was near-to-real-time data availability so that posted changes would be immediately projected into the resultant reports, especially during financial statements periods.
The main reporting task was to create various profit and loss statement versions with a number of additional views and filters. Key purposes of these reports included enabling comparison of a plan with actual results, comparison of multiple versions of a plan and provision of early visual alerts of major deviations. The reports required drill-down functionality – i.e., the capability to break down aggregated income statement data all the way to individual transactions. The solution also needed to enable commenting on both aggregated and detailed rows in the resultant reports and uploading of the manual inputs mentioned above. The client also wanted the entire project to be addressed in collaboration with its internal team.
Solution
The solution was carried out in several successive steps:
- Detailed analysis of source accounting systems in collaboration with the accounting system supplier;
- Design of the solution architecture;
- Presentation and discussion of the solution architecture design with the internal architecture and IT security team;
- Development of a financial data mart;
- Development of processes for data processing;
- Development of process orchestration;
- Development of a data access layer;
- Connection of data to reporting layers;
- Development of reports;
- Tailoring of reports per client requirements;
- Training users in the basic functionalities of the tool;
- Handover of the work.
Benefits
The main benefits are significant time savings for the finance department related to report creation and considerable simplification of the financial statements situation. The solution also enabled secure sharing of reports to a broader range of users and made the entire area much clearer. In addition, the solution served as motivation for other areas to be handled in a similar way. A monitoring report was also provided to give the client a complete overview of database processes, which significantly aids maintenance and administration of the entire solution.