In April 2021, Delivery Hero broke another record: processing 100 orders per second on a single day. That’s 100 servings of pizza, pasta, sushi, schnitzel and curry — whatever hungry customers desired — per second. In the first quarter of 2021, Delivery Hero handled more than 650 million food orders overall. Orders that were cooked in local restaurants, processed through the Delivery Hero platform, ordered, and paid for by hungry customers across about 50 markets.
These numbers tell an impressive success story that Delivery Hero has written, over recent years. Founded in Berlin in 2011, the start-up grew from 12 to more than 29,000 employees globally. Today, Delivery Hero is the largest food network outside China and has been a member of the DAX-30 since 2020.
Traditional treasury approaches reached their limits at Delivery Hero
All those millions of food orders worldwide, every day, make for a significant amount of money coming in together with a large amount of corresponding payment transactions being carried out. For the treasury function at Delivery Hero, the great success of the business also created great challenges, because traditional approaches and systems could hardly keep up with growth figures on this scale.
"We found that the existing software solutions could no longer meet our requirements for mass processing, automation and transparency. So, we worked with our long-time advisors from SAP and EY to determine how we could get an innovative and efficient treasury solution deployed," says Thomas Boully, Senior Director Finance Systems at Delivery Hero.
Christian Schmahl, Treasury Director at Delivery Hero, explains: "On the one hand, there is the incredibly high and steadily growing volume of transactions themselves. We must keep this in mind. On the other hand, payments always involve risks that need to be addressed. The technological infrastructure must grow with the business."
A tall order: An innovative and ambitious solution
“Developing and implementing an innovative and ambitious treasury solution like this was a tall order for the team at EY and for our alliance partner SAP," says Thomas Schmidt, Head of SAP Treasury Consulting GSA, Ernst & Young GmbH. Schmidt and his team specialize in adapting SAP solutions specifically to customer environments and challenges.
"Delivery Hero's business model would push even mature finance departments in large corporations to the limits of their treasury management performance. It is even more remarkable that Delivery Hero has sought not only a suitable solution, but also an innovative and ambitious one," says Schmidt.