Close Invoice Finance Limited started life as a small factoring company called Century Factors, based above a car showroom in Yeovil, Somerset. Century became one of the first acquisitions by Close Brothers and in 1993 their name was changed to Close Invoice Finance Limited. When the company started in 1984, it had just 20 clients. Today it provides finance services to over 1,000 clients and was recently awarded the title of Best Factoring & Invoice Discounter Provider for 2006 by Business Moneyfacts.

Close Invoice Finance is a distinct business group within the Close Brothers Group, one of Europe’s most enterprising merchant banks and a FTSE top 250 listed company. Close Invoice Finance continues to grow at a rate that is ahead of the industry average and contributes more than 7% of the Close Brothers Group’s total revenue.

In order to enable them to achieve ambitious growth plans, Close Invoice Finance sought a new invoice discounting solution that could deliver extended capabilities and a significant competitive advantage to their business. After considerable research and assessment of products on the market, the Close Invoice Finance management team decided that Citadel ID best matched their ambitions.

Rob Harris, IT & Strategy Director, Close Invoice Finance, explains “We required a solution that would enable us to build greater scale and opportunity into our business model. We wanted to find a partner who could help us redefine our marketplace and re-engineer our business model.”

The solution that Close Invoice Finance required had to fulfil clearly defined criteria which included:

• To enable the business to work with customers whose revenues were otherwise too small or their ledger composition too complex or high-risk to service safely and cost-effectively
• To provide a transparent view of the underlying debt structure of clients through invoice level access
• To improve service levels and provide self-service options for clients
• To achieve greater account management efficiencies and, therefore, lower costs in order to be able to offer customers more flexible and more competitive pricing
• To increase overall control and significantly reduce risk

According to Rob Harris, Citadel ID from Demica was the best route to meeting both their solutions criteria and business objectives. “Citadel ID provides real-time comprehensive views on our clients accounts. This enables our business to be far more responsive and dynamic. The drill down capacity to invoice level detail provides a clear and comprehensive view of the status of each client and, as the system operates in real-time, we are now much less reliant on tacit knowledge. This is an important aspect of the project as Citadel ID removes the risk component from the decision making process, which is a critical factor in building scale. Citadel ID’s breadth of functionality which includes limit triggers, fund availability, warning flags etc. will enable us to reduce our operational costs by a dramatic 50%.”

Citadel ID is operated via a secure web user interface and can be provided as either an in-house or hosted solution. One of Citadel ID’s key differentiators is its ability to record such high levels of contractually agreed information on an individual client basis and exceptional detail at the invoice level. This allows Close to work with clients that they would have previously had to decline, creating broader opportunity for business expansion through a more diversified and dynamic client portfolio. In creating Citadel ID, Demica leveraged its knowledge and expertise in managing complex trade receivables transactions and its in-depth understanding of the fundamental business requirements of the Invoice Discounting marketplace.