Mashreq and Kyriba to carry out “customised finance transformation plan” for UAE’s LuLu Group International
Banking group Mashreq has come together with US cloud finance solutions provider Kyriba to “orchestrate a customised transformation plan” aimed at revamping the financial operations of LuLu Group International.
LuLu is a UAE-based multinational conglomerate specialising in the hypermarket sector, with an annual revenue turnover of around $7.3 billion in 2023.
Lulu Retail Holdings is the largest full-line retailer in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and raised over $1.72 billion via an initial public offering (IPO) on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) in October.
In a statement, Mashreq cites financial decentralisation, multiple banking relationships and resource management as the “key challenges” that drove the conglomerate to seek to streamline its financial operations to boost efficiency.
The partnership will see Mashreq and Kyriba overhaul financial functions such as payments and liquidity management and enhance process automation.
These operations are set to be unified by a new single platform created by Kyriba, through which LuLu can “enjoy full visibility of its finances and manage several of its financial functions, beginning with centralised payments and fund transfers”, Mashreq says.
Elsewhere, the platform is also expected to benefit the conglomerate with automated reconciliation, cross-market policy and process alignment, liquidity optimisation, enhanced fraud and risk control, and reduced manual intervention.
Mashreq says phase one of the transformation plan’s “staggered” implementation will involve integrating 35+ banks into the platform, which is to be rolled out to all markets “in the coming months”.