When it comes to B2B accounts payable and receivable processes, AR is often seen as lagging behind in the financial automation race.
“It’s unfortunate, but I’ve been in the industry for almost 30 years and almost 40 percent of the collections that our supplier clients have to manage are still done in paper form,” Alberto Casas, product head for global treasury management at U.S. Bank, said in a recent interview.
Together A gradual transition away from paper checks In business-to-business payments, vendors have little control over the technology or process that buyers use to pay their invoices. They’re highly dependent on the buyer’s technology level and technology structure, which creates a completely different and more difficult challenge than payments, Casas said. On the payments side, the business effectively has control and decides who gets paid, how and when, Casas said.
However, new Partnering with BilltrustThe Minneapolis-based bank wants to help vendor-centric companies speed up their accounts receivable collections process through automation and digitization. It is positioning the new platform as a way for CFOs and treasurers to improve their working capital situation by accelerating the collections process.
“For a $20 million order, the difference between a paper process that could take 60 days to collect versus a digital process that could take 40 days is huge,” Casas said.
U.S. Bank is currently rolling out an end-to-end accounts receivable management platform called Advanced Receivables that aims to modernize and automate invoicing, payments, cash applications and collections. After launching a pilot program with a “handful” of companies this year, he said the bank is targeting B2B suppliers in industries such as technology, transportation and homebuilding.
Through the partnership, the bank hopes to leverage the experience and services of Billtrust, a B2B AR automation and integrated payments provider. The Hamilton, N.J.-based company already has connections to more than 200 AP platforms that U.S. Bank’s new platform can leverage, he said.
“Money doesn’t always travel with the information, which requires complex reconciliation,” Casas said, noting that Billtrust can store the data and automatically apply funds to a supplier’s accounts receivable system. “No matter what form the information comes in in — email, fax, paper invoice — we can simplify it and reduce the friction and manual intervention required.”
The new system comes a few years after the bank offered AP Optimizer, which automates invoice receipt and payment spending for businesses, and the bank previously offered some AR services. The service is not automatically provided to corporate clients who use the bank’s digital portal, SinglePoint, and clients are charged a service fee.
And if the bank receives an RFP for collections services, he said, it will jump at the opportunity and bid on the entire process. “We’re a financial institution, we have the bank accounts, we have visibility into every dollar that goes into the accounts,” Casas said. “When you combine those two, you have a strong proposition.”
