3 Ways to Use Next Generation Payment Solutions to Solve Old-School Problems

Cutting edge technology has impacted nearly most areas of contemporary life. From wearables that track our health and alert us to calls and messages and robots that vacuum our homes and mow our lawns, there’s a technology solution to virtually every one of life’s inconveniences. But what about the world of business payments? Thankfully there’s some helpful technology there too. Here are some ideas for using next generation payment solutions to solve old-school problems….

The problem

Even today, many accounts-payable and treasury teams handle payments the old-fashioned way, using manual or cumbersome processes that are inefficient, costly, and slow.

The solution

Organizations can improve their efficiency and move away from paper-based, manual processes with the use of new multiple payment-type options, such as Real Time Payments (RTP) and same-day ACH.

RTP offers a versatile, highly secure, electronic payment option with a two-to-three-day improvement over typical ACH payment windows for payments that need to happen quickly. Payments happen in seconds rather than days or, in the case of some cross-border payments, weeks. In addition, the ability to tokenize payment recipient information greatly reduces the time and cost of onboarding vendors. For those organizations looking for same-day settlement at a lower cost than wires, same-day ACH is a new and ideal option that also accelerates payments processing.

The increased efficiency of these payment types improves your relationships with vendors, sets you up for early-payment discounts and better negotiated rates, while also optimizing cash flow.

Getting started

• Analyze your systems and processes - Take a deep dive into what you have and retain only the legacy processes that still bring more value than change would provide.

• Consolidate what you can - Mulitple payment streams make it difficult to provide centralized control and visibility of enterprise-wide payment and cash management processes. It’s more efficient to consolidate these disparate streams in a “paymment hub.” This will accelerate the elimination of manual intervention to better facilitate the move to straight-through processing.

• Determine the best use case - Evaluate where real-time payments can have maximum impact on your customer and vendor relationships and maximize available cash.

• Give training and change management the attention it deserves - RTP applications may be simple to propose, but finance and treasury organizations need extra time and attention to embrace new technology.

Check out this eBook for even more ways to use next-generation payment solutions to solve old-school problems...