ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India designs real-time treasury to empower growth strategy

A joint venture between two of the world’s leading steel companies, ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel, ArcelorMittal Nippon Steel India (AMNSI) is an integrated flat steel manufacturer that boasts an annual revenue of USD6bn. AMNSI operates a cross-country network of mines, pellet plants, crude steel making plant, downstream plants, ports, power companies, and sales centres. Altogether, their cash flows originate from 20 locations across India.

The company has pledged significant long-term investment over the next decade dedicated to boosting steel production capacity in India fivefold to 40 million tons per annum in the next 10 to 15 years. They thus embarked on a significant treasury overhaul in order to ensure that they would be well-equipped to handle the anticipated fivefold increase of their current payments and collections volumes that would accompany this.

The Challenge

From a treasury and cash management perspective, AMNSI were looking to resolve the following issues:

• Manual bank access: Finance teams were manually logging into multiple bank portals to check balances and track funds. This led to delays in gaining information, which subsequently impacted decision-making.
• Domestic intrabank fund transfers: These were conducted via manually prepared real-time gross settlement (RTGS) letters
• Domestic payments infrastructure: Low levels of payment automation due to lack of integrated connectivity between treasury systems and banks
• Cross-border payments: Paper based instructions were used, with formats differing across each bank
• Fixed deposits and mutual funds: Opening, maturity, withdrawal, and rollover of approximately 10,000 annually investment transactions, were all booked and transacted manually.

To address this, AMNSI initiated an ambitious transformation project, beginning with the establishment of a center of excellence in Hazira, Gujarat, to centralise cash management across 14 legal entities to one location.

With this in place, the focus then moved to process standardisation, with the aim of leveraging their newly-implemented cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as the single, standard interface for all treasury and cash management activities. They envisioned further empowering this new treasury architecture with a greater overall level of automation, and real-time processes.

The Solution

Working with their various banking partners in India, AMNSI were able to create this envisioned end state through a variety of system integrations between their cloud-based ERP and their banks. With HSBC specifically, AMNSI adopted the following solutions:

Real-time cash information – HSBC’s Transaction and Enquiry APIs feed real-time balance and transaction information from AMNSI’s accounts into a custom cash dashboard on their ERP. This has allowed them to gain timely updates on cash in accounts in a centralised space, resolving longstanding operational issues related to using multiple bank platforms to manage cash, and using multiple report formats for reconciliation. It has also led to several additional benefits, such as enabling Agentic workflows, and a higher degree of robotic process automation (RPA).

End-to-end payment automation – API connectivity was also leveraged to achieve a fully standardised and automated interbank fund transfer process with HSBC, and integrate a live balance dashboard onto the ERP. Similarly, all domestic and cross-border service payments are now executed on-demand digitally via API, which subsequently reverse feeds the necessary information for automated reconciliation. First adopted with HSBC, AMNSI have since replicated a similar workflow across their other banking partners.

Automated investment placement and cash forecasting – AMNSI were also able to harness HSBC India’s capabilities to automatically sweep INR funds in and out of appropriate time and cluster deposits to better meet short-term liquidity needs. This is complemented with customised reports of all term/cluster deposit reports being fed via API into their ERP system, automating reconciliation. A dynamic liquidity planner now also updates forecasts fortnightly on a six-month rolling basis, improving accuracy and reducing financing costs by riding on the real-time balance information fed into the ERP via API.

Success

• Number of current accounts across entities reduced by 33%, across all banking partners in India
• Overall reduction of banking relationships for payments and collections
• Complete elimination of paper-based instructions- a remarkable achievement considering that market conventions remain heavily paper-based
• Transaction automation increased from 23% to 92% between 2024 to 2025, despite increasing in year-on-year volume
• Productivity increase of 15% despite overall increase of transaction volumes handled per headcount
• Improved investment returns, translating to additional annual revenue, compounded with general cost savings from automation