How a top-10 European bank compressed an 11-country month-end close from three days to a single overnight window — and gave the treasury team five days back per cycle. Client details have been anonymized for confidentiality.
A top-10 European bank closed the books across 11 country ledgers on a 3-day cycle that consumed treasury, finance ops and IT every month. The work was a series of manual handoffs across ten systems, with a long tail of exceptions handled in spreadsheets.
Adding regulators, acquisitions and a thinning back-office made the run untenable. The CFO needed a close that scaled with the business — and a finance team that did not lose a working week to it every month. Identifying details have been anonymized at the client's request.
Six weeks of frontline diagnostics found that 74% of close work was repeatable reconciliation, and another 18% was exception handling that followed predictable patterns. The root constraint was not the GLs — it was the absence of an orchestration layer that could drive them all to one regulator-ready state.
We sized the prize, scoped the platform and contracted against measurable outcomes: cycle time, manual touches, and adoption at +90 days.
A close-orchestration platform built on top of the existing GLs, integrating with ERP, treasury and reporting. An agent fleet for reconciliation and exception triage with policy-bound actions, segregation-of-duties controls and human approval for anything above defined thresholds. A custom finance-ops portal for the treasury team to monitor the close, approve exceptions and export regulator-ready packages.
Governance was built in, not bolted on: every automated action writes to an immutable audit trail, an evaluation harness checks every agent path before release, and integration tests run across the ledger network. An adoption programme took the treasury team from sceptics to confident owners in a single cycle.
Twelve months post platform go-live, with the operating model embedded in the bank's treasury team and the agent fleet trained on a full close cycle. All figures were measured during post-go-live operating reviews and reflect this engagement, not a portfolio average.
Norton-Gauss did not bring us a product. They brought us a way of running the close that we could own — and a small team that built it with us.— Group CFO · European Bank
Five phases over fourteen months. The same shape as every Norton-Gauss engagement — Discover, Diagnose, Design, Build, Operate.
Close-process map across 11 ledgers and 10 systems.
Constraint analysis, exception-pattern catalogue, business case.
Orchestration architecture, agent design, ops-portal product spec.
Platform build-out, agent factory, portal, ledger integrations.
First close wave, adoption programme, exception triage live.
A 45-minute working session with a partner. We bring a perspective on your operating constraint. You leave with a sharper question and a concrete next move — useful whether or not we ever work together.
