Arxada

Arxada is on a mission to enhance sustainability and solve the world’s toughest preservation challenges through a science-based approach. With customers in more than 100 countries and operations spanning 24 production sites and 14 R&D centers, the company’s treasury operations are every bit as complex and global as its business footprint.

When Arxada embarked on a journey to transform its treasury processes, it wasn’t just about streamlining operations — it was about enabling a centralized, scalable, and future-ready treasury infrastructure.

Historically, Arxada’s treasury model was decentralized. Various systems and numerous banking relationships were in place across different regions, leading to inconsistencies in processes and inefficiencies in managing payments and bank communications.

To support its growing international footprint and ensure long-term agility, Arxada’s treasury team recognized the need to move away from isolated local solutions and adopt a centralized, standardized approach with a best-in-class solution. The goals were to:

• Establish a single hub for electronic bank statements across Arxada Group
• Standardize payment processes and reduce fragmentation
• Consolidate and reduce payment platforms to lower administrative burdens and boost efficiency

• Standardized payment and reporting processes
• Reduced complexity, administrative workload, and costs
• Improved operational efficiency
• Increased fraud prevention and compliance

Arxada is a global science-based specialty chemicals business, headquartered in Visp and Basel, Switzerland. With customers in more than 100 countries, Arxada aims to solve the world’s toughest preservation challenges by striving to enhance sustainability with cleaner, greener chemistries and solutions. Its broad portfolio of solutions for microbial control and differentiated specialty chemicals are rounded off by exceptional regulatory capabilities and operational excellence in both manufacturing and process development, worldwide.

Arxada faced challenges typical of a multinational organization: multiple banking relationships, a patchwork of legacy systems, and inconsistent connectivity types across regions. New payment formats and regulatory standards added another layer of complexity.

This decentralized model made it difficult to maintain transparency, ensure compliance, and control fraud risk effectively. IT maintenance demands were also rising, stretching internal resources thin.

In addition, the challenge of ensuring file format consistency across every bank partner, connectivity channel, technology system, and country was significant, and extremely time-consuming. Arxada needed a solution that could unify global operations while remaining flexible enough to accommodate regional needs.

Arxada came into being as the Lonza Specialty Ingredients division of Lonza AG. At the time of the spin-off, Arxada’s treasury team was using Fides’ reporting and some bank connectivity services. The structure overall was fairly decentralized. To increase efficiency and reduce development costs, the company knew that it had to prioritize process standardization, both internally and with strategic partners. Based on Fides’ market leadership and the strong existing relationship built on a proven collaborative approach, Fides was chosen to help Arxada reduce treasury complexity.

Through collaboration and a targeted gap analysis, Fides was able to support an international realignment of Arxada’s bank connectivity. Today, Arxada leverages a suite of Fides solutions to power its treasury operations across EMEA, North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific:

• ONEHub as the centralized platform for payment sign-off and process
• ONEConnect for one connection from/to Fides
• ONEReport to aggregate and reconcile bank data efficiently
• ONEPay to connect to banks, to make and track payments
• ONETransform for bank format conversions
• Sanctions Screening for compliance assurance

Fides is directly connected with Arxada’s SAP ERP and TMS systems, enabling automated, streamlined flows of payment and statement data from banks to backend systems and vice versa.

As a result of its treasury transformation initiative, Arxada has achieved its goals of format and process standardization, improved operational efficiency, and reduced costs.

• Standardized payment and reporting processes globally
• Reduced complexity by standardizing on a single payment format
• Reduced administrative workload and IT maintenance costs
• Improved operational efficiency
• Increased fraud prevention and compliance through centralized controls and increased transparency

Today, Arxada is in the process of moving completely away from bank portals, as with Fides ONEHub the treasury team can manage everything needed through one central interface.

Uwe Podlech, Associate Director, Group Treasury at Arxada, has worked with Fides since the Lonza days. He stresses the importance of trusted technology partners, as these relationships significantly contributed to the project implementation success. Thanks to this trust and good working collaboration between Arxada’s and Fides project teams, any challenges or issues have been identified and proactively addressed as they arise.

The strength of Fides’ reputation as an innovator and market-leader also influenced Mr. Podlech’s decision to continue working with the provider.

Fides is the world leader in multibank connectivity, payments and transaction communications. A market leader for more than a century, Fides is committed to making financial operations as efficient, transparent and secure as possible for all organizations. More than 4,000 clients rely on Fides for efficient cash and liquidity management, through connectivity to more than 13,000 banks and comprehensive workflow, reporting, conversion, validation and security services. Whether you access via the secure Fides ONEHub or leverage our seamless integration with third-party ERP, TMS and other backend systems, Fides is the only platform you need.