Payments Transformation – Accounts Payable

A large, dedicated team managed the manual processing of over 40,000 invoices annually in a Tier 1 European Bank. This substantial volume underscores the importance of a highly efficient and accurate Accounts Payable process. It involved validations, status updates and authorizations, the team also had to log into multiple systems to complete the process. This was one of the most critical processes and the bank had to ensure accuracy, SLA’s and high efficiency on a continuous basis.

Business Challenges

• Data Entry Errors: Manual data entry is prone to human errors, and extra steps to validate correctness of information that is input. Validations in matching them with Pos and proof of delivery, as well as internal approvals for processing were prone to data errors.
• Inefficiency: Manual processes are time-consuming, often errors meant a lot of rework and repeating the process hence no straight through processing was possible.
• Lack of Visibility: Manual processes often lack real-time visibility in the status of invoices and payments. Mails and other means of communication were involved in status checks, updates and reporting.
• Late Payments: Delays in invoice processing can lead to late payments, this was also driven by rework, sometimes resubmission of invoices and often led to service providers and vendors who were not happy about the delays. In certain cases, invoices aged for several weeks before payments could be released.

Solution Highlights

• Process discovery: Business Consulting to ascertain RPA feasibility, that involved comprehensive understanding of the current process, exception handling and current practices in the team.
• Invoice Scanning and Data Capture: Use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to scan and capture data from paper invoices, transforming them into digital format.
• Payment Automation: Automate payment processes, allowing for timely and accurate payments to suppliers and taking advantage of early payment discounts. Single bot was used to run the process across 3 systems that were not integrated.
• Digital Audit Trail: Maintaining a digital audit trail of all financial transactions, simplifying the auditing process and ensuring data integrity.

Business Outcome

35,000 man-hours saved annually. The turn-around-time was reduced to 3 days from 12 days. This was achieved with a 97.2% success rate for orchestration runs across all processes and 98% success rate across all automated processed requests. Customer satisfaction in Finance went up to 99%. The solution was a good business success and paved the way for a larger payments transformation.