BlackLine, a leading provider of financial controls and automation solutions that enable Continuous Accounting, today announced the details of its latest European expansion, including a new base of operations in Frankfurt, Germany, that will serve as a strategic hub for meeting the needs of companies across the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).

The new Frankfurt office and DACH expansion efforts will be led by Petra Ellmerich, a 30-year software industry veteran with sales and management experience at such market-leading companies as Infor, Oracle, Cognos and Siemens.

BlackLine’scloud-based software platform helps organisations remain competitive, reduce risk and transform their existing Finance & Accounting (F&A) departments into Modern Finance organisations by automating key processes such as the financial close, account reconciliations, intercompany accounting and controls assurance.

“The tremendous reception we’ve had for our software from companies all over the world confirms the value our solution provides and our ability to help global companies transform their existing F&A operations into true Modern Finance organisations,” Mario Spanicciati, BlackLine’s chief strategy officer, said.  “We’ve seen increasing demand from mid-size and large organisations across Europe.  The market opportunity, coupled with our long-standing relationship with SAP, made opening an office in Germany a logical next step.”

The BlackLine Financial Close Suite for SAP® Solutions complements the functionality inherent in the SAP ERP Financials solution and the SAP S/4HANA Finance solution, bringing enhanced control and automation to F&A departments worldwide.  In 2013, the BlackLine Financial Close Suite for SAP Solutions became an SAP-endorsed business solution.  Earlier this year, the BlackLine Connector 3.0 achieved certified integration with the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform running on the SAP HANA® platform, providing embedded, real-time integration between SAP ERP and the BlackLine Financial Close Management solution.  Working together, the BlackLine and SAP offerings deliver an end-to-end solution to accelerate the financial close and enable Continuous Accounting.  Both BlackLine and SAP were recently recognised by Gartner as Leaders in the 2016 Magic Quadrant for Financial Corporate Performance Management (FCPM) Solutions.

BlackLine customers include more than 100 companies operating in the DACH region, including locally headquartered companies Kempinski Hotels and Trivago.  BlackLine has sales, implementation and support teams to serve customers in German.  Additionally, BlackLine products and solutions are available in the German language. To visit the new German website, go to www.blackline.com/de.

BlackLine‘s EMEA operations (Europe, Middle East and Africa) are headquartered in London.  Leveraging BlackLine’s expanding global footprint in EMEA and APAC (Asia-Pacific), several of the world’s leading accounting advisory and professional services firms, including Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, PwC and Resources Global Professionals, offer ‘BlackLine Certified Implementation Professionals’ to assist in the deployment and execution of the BlackLine Finance Controls and Automation Platform.