Northern Data: from 100 bank accounts and no visibility to an award-winning treasury team in under 18 months with Embat

This is not a typical treasury story. It is the story of a company that built a world-class finance function in parallel with one of the fastest strategic transformations in European tech without the luxury of time, and without a legacy system to fall back on.

Headquartered in Frankfurt, Northern Data Group is a publicly listed German technology company who operates large-scale GPU clusters and data centres across Europe and North America. Northern Data provides the compute power that AI labs, cloud providers, and enterprises need to train models, run workloads, and scale operations.

With over 200 employees, 25 companies operating across Germany, UK, US, Nordics and Southern Europe, and a finance team managing complex multi-currency flows, Northern Data represents exactly the kind of fast-scaling, high-complexity business where treasury excellence becomes a strategic differentiator.

How they rebuilt their treasury while making a complete 180° turn in their business strategy is what we're going to tell you here.

The challenge: building treasury from scratch at speed

In September 2023, Northern Data underwent one of the most decisive strategic pivots in its short history. Having built its foundation as a Bitcoin mining company, the explosion in GPU demand triggered by the rise of large language models made one thing clear: the future lays in AI infrastructure. The company launched three parallel business lines: Bitcoin mining, data centre, and AI infrastructure, and raised approximately €1,500 million to fund the acceleration.

The ambition was enormous. The treasury infrastructure was not.

Dominik Scheitz, VP of Finance, arrived to lead a treasury team built from zero and inherited a financial landscape that reflected the company's mining origins: over 100 bank accounts spread across the group, no consolidated cash visibility, and no system capable of delivering the real-time financial intelligence that a company deploying €100 million at pace would require. Part of the raise had come from debt, which meant debt management added another layer of urgency on top of an already complex picture.

When I joined Northern Data, we had over 100 bank accounts and no clear picture of where our cash actually was. Our first priority was to fix that, and we needed a system that could move as fast as we could. Embat gave us visibility across every entity from day one, and since then, we've never looked back.

— Dominik, 'VP of Finance in Northern Data Group' until july 2026

Manual processes dominated every part of the finance function. A very manual bank reconciliation. Payments required up to 3 full working days and 2 full-time employees to execute. Forecasting was rudimentary at best. And as the company began spinning up new business units (each requiring its own banking relationships and accounts) the complexity compounded week by week.

The risk was not just operational. In the world of AI infrastructure, speed is everything. Competitors were launching new GPU generations every two months. Capital deployment decisions needed to move at the same pace as the technology. A treasury team stuck in spreadsheets and manual bank portals simply could not keep up.

The solution: connecting everything to increase control and visibility

In this scenario, Northern Data contracted Embat in October 2023. Within three months, the team had connected over 100 bank accounts and integrated the company's SAP S/4HANA system into a single, unified treasury platform: a technically complex integration given the scale and configuration of Northern Data's ERP environment.

The first impact was visibility. For the first time, Northern Data had a complete, real-time picture of how its cash was distributed across every entity, every currency, every bank. That clarity alone was transformative: the team could immediately identify which of the 100+ legacy accounts were redundant, which needed to be maintained, and how to structure the banking relationships for the new business lines going forward. Every new account opened for the AI infrastructure and data centre divisions was integrated into Embat from day one, ensuring that the growth happening on the business side was matched, not lagged, by financial visibility.

The Embat and SAP integration was a game-changer for us. It meant we could connect our entire financial reality: every bank account, every transaction into one place, and finally work with a real-time view of the whole group.

— Dominik, 'VP of Finance in Northern Data Group' until july 2026

From there, the focus shifted to forecasting. Embat became the single source of truth for liquidity forecasting across the group with actuals versus forecast analysis running through the platform. The forecast is now a working tool the treasury team relies on to plan cash deployment, and one that continues to mature alongside the business, building towards the level of precision that strategic reporting at this pace demands.

TellMe, Embat's AI-powered treasury intelligence layer, became an integral part of the daily workflow, automatically categorising transactions, surfacing patterns, and providing the kind of continuous intelligence that previously would have required a much larger team to approximate manually. Crucially, TellMe does not operate as a black box: it learns from the team's own behaviour, shows its reasoning at every step, and always leaves the final decision in the hands of the finance team.

The impact

The results were achieved in under twelve months.

Banking rationalisation. From over 100 legacy bank accounts, Northern Data - has rationalised its banking structure to around 80 accounts across the group's 25 companies, closing redundant accounts, reducing operational complexity, banking costs, and the risk of fragmented cash sitting idle across the group.

95% of transactions categorised automatically. What had previously been a fully manual accounting process was transformed. Today, approximately 95% of all transactions are automatically categorised by Embat's AI engine, freeing the accounting team to focus on exceptions, analysis, and strategic work rather than data entry.

Payments reduced from 3 days to under half a day. The payment process that previously occupied two full-time employees for up to three working days has been compressed to under half a working day. Multi-currency payments, central to Northern Data's European operations, are now executed through Embat, which has become not only the company's treasury technology provider but also its financial services partner for payment execution via Embat’s corporate payments module.

Strategic forecasting at board level. The liquidity forecast produced in Embat feeds directly into board and shareholder reporting, enabling leadership to make capital allocation decisions GPU procurement, data centre buildouts, financing management, with real-time financial grounding rather than lagged, manually assembled data.

Going from a three-day payment process to under half a day, and from 100% manual accounting to 95% automated aren't just efficiency numbers. They mean our team can actually focus on the work that matters. That's what a good treasury platform should do.

— Dominik, 'VP of Finance in Northern Data Group' until july 2026

Industry recognition: the Adam Smith Awards 2026

The transformation did not go unnoticed. In 2026, Northern Data was named a Highly Commended Winner in the Best SME/MME Solution category at the Adam Smith Awards — hosted by Treasury Today and widely regarded as the most prestigious recognition in global corporate treasury. Now in their second decade, the Awards have established themselves as the definitive benchmark for treasury excellence and innovation worldwide. The 2026 edition received a record 635 nominations across 42 countries, making the recognition all the more significant.

What makes this particularly meaningful is that Northern Data's entire submission — the reason they won — was built around Embat, and specifically around the transformative impact of the Embat and SAP S/4HANA integration on their operations. In a competition where the world's largest corporations routinely compete, a mid-market AI infrastructure company winning on the strength of its treasury technology is a statement about what is now possible for finance teams of any size.