Amarante Uses C2FO to Fund Continuous Investments, Business Growth

A French company takes control of its cash flow through the C2FO platform. 

As a leading security provider in France and abroad, Amarante International Group works with large corporations and foreign companies that have longer payment terms. 

Frédéric Sauvé, director of performance management at Amarante, said these already lengthy payment terms, combined with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, disrupted the company’s cash flow. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic impacted Amarante’s activity. Some services had to be stopped, particularly in the air transport sector,” Sauvé said. “And that also further impacted our cash flow, because some of our clients’ payment deadlines were also impacted.”

As a fairly young company, Paris-based Amarante relies on liquidity to innovate, research and grow. 

“Amarante was created in 2007 and has experienced quite strong growth since then, so we’re in a state of continuous investment,” Sauvé said. “We need permanent working capital because any new contract increases our working capital.”

Fortunately, Air France, a key customer of Amarante and a leader in corporate social responsibility, offered an early payment programme through C2FO. Through the C2FO platform, Amarante could accelerate its invoices from Air France at a faster rate to provide cash flow on demand. 

“When I was introduced to the C2FO programme, I first thought it was just another cash flow optimisation solution we didn’t need,” Sauvé said. “I quickly realised that it was, instead, an approach led by our client to help assure our working capital needs.”

In the past, Amarante almost exclusively used bank financing, whether that was cash facilities, factoring or the mobilisation of trade receivables.

“Factoring solutions, compared with the C2FO solution, are much heavier to implement. They take up a lot of the teams’ time, and they need to respect certain bank ratios,” Sauvé said. “We use the early payment solution offered by Air France through the C2FO programme because it’s a very simple, very fast solution that doesn’t need to be formalised by a legal contract. It has a very simple system for offering rates for early payment discounts and a simple process for selecting the invoices from the client that I need.”

Sauvé said Amarante uses the credit line offered by Air France “100%” of the time. 

“We always use it, which also helps prevent us having to draw more on our credit lines with the banks,” Sauvé said.