Fintech
Northwind Treasury
From 60 spreadsheets to a realtime cash-position platform
- Industry
- Corporate finance
- Engagement
- Discovery + build
- Team
- 6 specialists
- Duration
- 24 weeks
The problem
Northwind's group treasury closed each day by consolidating more than 60 spreadsheets from 14 subsidiaries. Cash positions were always at least a day stale, and a single broken formula could misstate liquidity by millions.
- Daily close took 4-5 analyst hours across three time zones
- No audit trail on manual adjustments, blocking their SOC 2 programme
- Bank feeds arrived in six different file formats with no validation
- Leadership had no reliable forward view of liquidity beyond one week
Our approach
React · Node · Postgres · AWS
Two-week discovery inside the close
We sat with analysts through two full month-end closes, mapped every spreadsheet dependency and ranked them by risk before writing any code.
An event-sourced ledger core
Every balance change became an immutable event, giving the team a replayable audit trail and making reconciliation a derived view rather than a manual task.
Normalised bank ingestion
A single ingestion service accepts all six bank formats, validates against expected balances and quarantines anomalies for review instead of failing silently.
Forecasting and controls
A 13-week rolling forecast built on historical event data, with maker-checker approvals and role-based access mapped to their control matrix.
Timeline
Discovery & audit
Weeks 1-3Process mapping, spreadsheet risk audit, target architecture and a costed delivery plan.
Ledger foundation
Weeks 4-10Event-sourced core, ingestion service for two pilot banks, CI/CD and observability in place.
Pilot with two entities
Weeks 11-16Parallel running against the spreadsheet close, daily variance reviews, UI hardening.
Rollout & handover
Weeks 17-24All 14 subsidiaries migrated, forecasting shipped, runbooks and training delivered to the in-house team.
Results
- 12 min
- Daily close, down from 4-5 hours
- 1.2M
- Balance events processed per day
- 100%
- Adjustments with a full audit trail
- 0
- Critical findings at SOC 2 readiness review
- Treasury reports intraday liquidity instead of yesterday's position
- Two analyst roles redeployed from data wrangling to cash strategy
- Platform handed to Northwind's internal team with 84% test coverage
“They replaced a two-year internal backlog in six months. The architecture they left behind is still the backbone of our platform.”
