Treasury Technology
Published  6 MIN READ

Through the Portal: Opening the Door to Process Efficiencies at Drax

Drax’s Treasury and Corporate Finance team needed a new money market fund (MMF) portal solution to improve their control environment, streamline their workflow and automate their manual processes. Here, Lisa Dukes, Deputy Group Treasurer, Drax, outlines the benefits of choosing and implementing ICD Portal, and shares key learnings from this Award-winning technology journey.

Aiming to become carbon negative by 2030, UK-based Drax Group is a leading UK energy company. The organisation prides itself on being at the cutting edge of innovation, across all aspects of the business – not least in Treasury and Corporate Finance. To this end, Drax’s treasury function has grown from just two people to a team of ten over the last decade.

As the team has blossomed, they have been investigating ways to reduce the manual workload on team members, improve process efficiency, increase control, and deliver even greater value to the wider business. “This journey began with optimising the use of our Reval treasury management system [TMS] – automating as much of the daily cash balancing, MMF data capture, and FX and liquidity trading as possible,” she says.

As part of this continuous improvement drive, “one area we were keen to address was the workflows around MMF trades,” she notes. “This time two years ago, we had a set-up that was inefficient, time-consuming, and created a risk of human error. After completing trades on the MMF portal we were using back then, we manually entered those trades into our TMS,” explains Dukes. “The same went for any information we wanted from the portal – it had to be re-keyed, which was far from ideal.”