Business cases
Published on Friday, February 5th 2010
Veolia Environment is a major worldwide provider of environmental services. The Group is active in four main areas: water, energy, transport and sanitation.
The Group is active in almost 70 countries and employs over 336,000 people. 76.5% of its business is done in Europe, two thirds of which with local authorities and one third with industrial and tertiary segment customers.
Turnover (sales) 2008: 36.2 billion Euros
Net profit 2008: 405 million Euros
In December 2005, Veolia Environment’s Legal and Financial departments published a circular concerning sign authorisations and the division of functions. This circular was issued subsequent to the Sarbanes-Oxley law (2002) which required Groups to adopt new rules on accounting principles and financial transparency.
The Veolia circular established several basic rules concerning internal control: all signature delegation chains must originate from an executive officer; sign authorisations are delegated on a personal basis (intuitu personae) and for a given scope of company(ies) / establishment(s).
Four types of authorisations are defined: the power to validate commitments, the power to sign commitments, the power to authorise financial transactions and the power to issue payments. Rules concerning the non-accumulation of functions makes some of these powers incompatible: concerning procurement for example, it is prohibited to hold both the powers to validate commitments and to authorise financial transactions at the same time. The same restriction is applicable to the powers to authorise financial transactions and to issue payments.
These rules apply to delegated sign authorisations throughout the Group’s subsidiaries. There are also certain features such as restrictions on values (thresholds) and conditions of exercise: power limited to one domain, double signature required, etc.
The size and structure of the Veolia Environment group, with over 2600 consolidated subsidiaries in almost 70 countries, meant that the application of the circular was complex and cumbersome. The need for a tool to establish, monitor and update signature delegations seemed evident.
In parallel, the financial staff of each Division expressed their wish to have a tool for managing sign authorisations on bank accounts. In light of the absence of such tools on the market, Veolia Environment’s legal and financial departments made a joint decision to commission a solution that would fulfil these multiple requirements.
Since 2007, Veolia’s Legal Department has used Equity’s Visual Scope solution for its Group subsidiary and entity governance requirements. This application organises and presents information on all group entities and executive officer mandates. In other words, the Visual Scope database contains the principal data required to monitor sign authorisations. From here, the idea of a partnership with Equity was a natural progression.
Veolia Environment therefore asked Equity to work jointly with Veolia teams to develop an application to manage delegations of signature and banking powers, where the application would share the data provided by Visual Scope.
Based on the technical platform used for Visual Scope, the new application was named Visual Sign. The new solution was designed to be used as stand-alone software or in synergy with Visual Scope, in order to share the same database.
Visual Sign was designed to define rigorous validation processes while respecting the work rhythm of each user group. The legal and financial departments use a shared, central database but can access distinct scopes of information and process data at different times. With the “entities pending” function, the financial department can, for example, provide bank account data and delegation information for companies / entities that the legal department has not created in Visual Scope.
A “pending entity” retains this specific status until the legal staff responsible for the zone in question validate the applicable “legal” data. This information remains within the legal scope and its access is secured. The Veolia teams thereby make the best use of the complementary features of the two Visual repositories. Visual Sign solution is a flexible and reliable solution: it enables extensive responsiveness from the financial department while guaranteeing the integrity of protected data for the legal department.
Visual Sign guarantees that all financial management rules defined by the Group circular are respected. One of the major issues concerns the compatibility of powers, as certain are not compatible. The software enables us to define which types of powers are incompatible, in which management domains, and to configure whether the accumulation of powers produces a simple notice or completely blocks the process. For a given entity or subsidiary, it is possible to print the list of powers that are incompatible for a given scope. Visual Sign thereby guarantees the traceability of incompatibilities, an essential element for internal control.
To ensure the confidentiality of data, special attention was paid to respecting the requirements of user management: for a given user, only the powers and delegations valid in their scope of activity are accessible.
Visual Sign allows all you to print document templates in various formats (Word, Excel, PDF) and make them available to users, legal and financial staff: delegation circulars, account openings and closures, signature collections, etc. Automated mail printing ensures the update of contracts with banks, e.g. concerning new accounts and sign authorisations.
Using the flexibility of Microsoft Word, Visual Sign can generate documents in many different languages and therefore be deployed in all Group subsidiaries.
Reporting also offers a great deal of flexibility: dashboard indicators, mapping, individual delegation documents, etc. Veolia teams can provide custom reports to their management at any time.
2008 : start of project
October 2008: roll-out of bank account management and authorisations functions for the financial departments of the Transport and Water divisions in France.
June 2009: optimisation of reports on bank accounts and sign authorisations.
Starting in June 2009: deployment of the complete “bank account delegations and financial authorisations” solution in France and almost 70 other countries.
For this international deployment, some functions are still undergoing finalisation, such as the signature delegation mass input module, the delegation transfer and joint power holding tool, or unlimited consultation by all managers of authorisations and delegations held, which is used to provide executive officers with an accurate view of the extent of their powers.
To know more about us, to ask us a question or know the current appointments, do not hesitate to
