Delaware North is a 111-year-old, family-owned, multinational hospitality and entertainment giant operating across several highly complex and diverse industries—including sports stadium concessions and premium dining, retail outlets, casino and online gaming, lodging, and restaurant ownership. Delaware North operates in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Managing financial close processes across these disparate sectors presented an immense challenge for the finance team.

Before embarking on their finance transformation journey with BlackLine, Delaware North’s financial and accounting operations were decentralized, non-standard and heavily burdened by legacy, manual systems. The team was plagued by "Excel-based everything" and local shared drives.

"Delaware North Finance & Accounting was full of Excel-based files stored in local shared drives. Month-end would often last for nine days, and at times, even longer," says Christopher Giambra, Senior Manager of Corporate Accounting at Delaware North.

With massive transaction volumes and a center-led business model still in its infancy, the organization suffered from spreadsheet fatigue, a high risk of human error from manual keying, and limited capacity to perform strategic, value-added analysis. They needed a unified record-to-report platform that could standardize their processes, secure their financial data, and pave the way for true continuous accounting.

To break free from spreadsheet fatigue, Delaware North went "All-In" with BlackLine’s unified platform, implementing the BlackLine platform for complete Record-to-Report workflow, including, BlackLine Journal Management, BlackLine Account Reconciliations, BlackLine Task Management and BlackLine Transaction Matching. Today, they support more than 300 active licenses across their record-to-report, revenue integration, and treasury teams.

One of the primary reasons Delaware North chose to partner with BlackLine was the deep trust and world-class security the platform provides. When it came to evaluating AI, Delaware North chose to partner with BlackLine as their AI partner because of its focus on secure, enterprise-grade AI designed specifically for the office of the CFO. Unlike open large language models (LLMs) (such as ChatGPT or Anthropic) that pose risk by sharing data externally, BlackLine Verity operates securely within Delaware North's unique, isolated instance.

“We trust BlackLine more than anybody else in this business. When it comes to AI, it’s no different. Nobody's had our back the way that the BlackLine team has had our back,” says Christopher Giambra, Senior Manager of Corporate Accounting at Delaware North.

Every automation, AI agent and data flow in BlackLine is protected by an auditable trust and governance layer, ensuring that Delaware North’s AI-powered operations are transparent, explainable, and fully compliant with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and financial regulations. Furthermore, the platform's intuitive "wizard-like navigation" allows accounting professionals to build and configure complex allocations and workflows in minutes without needing data engineering or programming backgrounds.