Drive more growth, efficiency and customer satisfaction

The past 24 months have been relentless for most organisations. Take the bank restructures, the geo-political and economic landscape as a starter, then layer several new payment frameworks such as Open Banking, ISO 20022 and the New Payments Architecture (NPA).

We understand that it can take a lot of work for businesses to know where to start, especially as it requires time and effort away from core business activities. However, there’s no better time to pause and review your payments strategy and see how it stands up to the evolving landscape.

After all, who wants to miss out on new opportunities for growth, operational efficiency and happier customers? Corporate payments are our heritage. Our solutions focus on automation, digitisation and leveraging the latest innovations and regulations to help manage your business payments securely and efficiently to ensure a frictionless customer experience, whatever the playing conditions.

Here’s a helpful introduction to optimise your payments strategy.

Manage Money Into Your Business

Present customers with their preferred payment method and channels, whether that’s PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay or making payments over the phone, and/or on your website to improve payment conversion and reduce abandonment rates.

Here are ways to introduce more ways to pay:

• Recurring Direct Debit and card payments can improve cash flow as you’re able to collect regular fixed or variable payments.
• Collect one-off card payments – the most widely used payment method.
• Take secure and compliant account-to-account payments straight from your customers’ bank accounts using Open Banking to provide real-time data exchange, including settlement and statement information and payment reconciliation.

Manage Money out Your Business

How money is sent out of your organisation is just as important as how it comes in, ensuring it leaves your business with the necessary scrutiny. Our solutions help you save time and money by enabling you to settle payments electronically via Bacs or Faster Payments and choose a convenient method for your payee, whether via email, embedded in your website or a letter with a QR code.

What’s more, you can manage approvals with customisable rules for the following payment methods:

• Create, send and easily track direct payments securely, leveraging built-in account validation and verification checks.
• Automate the request of bank details and the payout process where the bank details are not held.
• Faster Payments, does what it says on the tin, send a payment almost immediately 24/7, as an alternative to Bacs (which can take up to three days to process).
• Utilise cost-effective and convenient cloud-hosted cheque solutions to manage all electronic and paper-based payments and supporting documents. Alternatively, outsource printers, stationery and manual processes to send cheques, invoices and payslips with our printing service.

Protect Payments in and Out of Your Business

Protecting business payments has never been so important, with fraud cases regularly making the headlines. Verifying customers and suppliers during the onboarding process can be tedious and adds another layer of complexity to an already cumbersome and manual process. As a leading payments partner, we leverage bank-grade payment technology and provide innovative solutions to protect your business payments.

Here are a few examples:

• Leverage gold-standard bank verification with our corporate Verify: Confirmation of Payee solution so you can ensure you’re paying the correct person and benefit from;
  • Operational efficiencies, as accounts are verified digitally which helps reduce costs associated with manual checks.
  • Reduced risk of fraud and direct financial losses as >92% of personal and business bank account coverage is via Pay.UK’s Confirmation of Payee service.
  • A better customer experience as you’ll know instantly if payments have been processed correctly.
• Embrace secure, single sign-on, which leverages your company security credentials whilst incorporating approved lists of IP addresses for an added layer of security.

Manage Cash Within Your Business

The complexities, cost, and long implementation times of traditional Treasury Management Systems (TMS) have left many organisations reliant on manual processes, multiple logins and risk of high error when gaining insight into their cash management and liquidity.

• Gain a centralised view of your cash position across all banks, currencies and subsidiaries with our easy-to-use cash flow analysis and liquidity management tools.
• Tailor and adjust forecasts to your business needs and combine AP (Accounts Payable) and AR (Accounts Receivables) to improve accuracy.
• Leverage a single view of cash positions, financial instruments and forecasts so you can more efficiently allocate funds and maximise returns.
• Adhere to mandatory reporting such as FBAR, which is part of the Bank Account Management process within our Cash Management solution.

Manage Payments Centrally

Your teams are facing ever demanding and more complex playing conditions. Our Payments Hub helps you meet the challenges of an evolving economy, legacy infrastructure and connecting to new payment rails via a robust and secure platform.

• Access a comprehensive global payments network allowing you to send, receive and manage payments anywhere in the world.
• Banish multiple bank portals and manual ways of working by moving to standardised payment controls and straight-through-processing for efficient payments.
• Centralise UK bank statements as a standard and run searches and alerts across multiple banks using Open Banking.
• Leverage automation and consistent workflows to better manage payment processes which will act as the glue between different teams and functions within your organisation.
• Secure your payments by leveraging sanctions screening, SSO and multi-factor authentication.
• Embrace the New Payments Architecture (NPA), Open Banking, and ISO 20022 and benefit from access to a wide network of global banks

It’s important to ensure your payments partner offers ways to pay that customers are familiar with and prefer whilst providing solutions to understand your organisation’s cash position at any given time to help respond to market conditions and remain competitive.

Over 11,000 UK corporates rely on Bottomline’s innovative SaaS-based payments solutions to navigate the changing landscape. We help businesses like yours pay, get paid and gain visibility into their cash position resulting in payment efficiencies which will help grow, scale and delight your customers.

"Over half of the financial decision makers surveyed highlighted a limited understanding of new payment initiatives. This includes Open Banking, Payments Services Directive 2 (PSD2), UK New Payments Architecture (NPA) and ISO 20022 formats. "

– The Business Payments Barometer 2023