One of the more important jobs of the accounts payable professional is keeping up with what is happening in the industry at large. This is critical for a few reasons, including skills development and the hunt for new technologies, but is sometimes difficult to do. That is why, each week, the team at Payables Place collects news stories and announcements on the people, companies, and events that can have the biggest impact on the accounts payable team; this cuts down on the amount of time that the AP professional needs to spend keeping up to date and makes it easier to get back to the task at hand—driving strategic value for the organization.
This week in payables news includes a few developments: the Federal Reserve’s faster payments task force released a list of criteria for the solution, Transcepta named a new vice president of sales, and the Chinese yuan just overtook the Japanese yen in international trade. Read on to find out more about these and all the other impactful news from around the accounts payable world.
Federal Reserve Bank Task Force Sets Terms For New Payments Solution
Forbes reported this week that the payments task force working out of the Chicago branch of the Federal Reserve set out requirements for building out a new, faster payments system in the US. The faster payments task force consists of 325 people from private industry and government agencies, along with a steering committee made up of a mix of bankers and other financial services professionals as well as Federal Reserve leaders. The criteria released on October 5 include requirements for ubiquity, ease of access, and speed—according to Forbes, the task force guidelines noted the new faster payments system should be as easy as paying with cash or check.
The development of a faster payments system is long overdue in the U.S. Something like 20 to 30 industrialized nations already have a ubiquitous real-time payments system in place, which makes the lack of one in the United States disappointing. A faster payments system would make business-to-business (B2B) commerce flow much more smoothly, particularly in the context of making ad hoc payments to vendors. For scheduled payments as well, having the payment clear faster than the current rate means suppliers receive their money faster and can use it much more quickly for other critical business processes.
Transcepta Appoints New Vice President of Sales
AP automation solution provider Transcepta announced last week the appointment of a new vice president of global sales, Gene Kim. Kim joins Transcepta from Konica Minolta, where he was the VP of sales for the enterprise content management (“ECM”) division—a new product line for Konica Minolta that Kim developed the launch strategy for. Kim has 20 years of sales experience throughout the IT space, including his time as sales VP and North America general manager at Sparxent as well as holding the VP of sales position at NetworkD in the early 2000s.
Ephesoft and Archive Systems Collaborate to Add Auto-Classification to Archive System’s FileBRIDGE® Platform
Document management solution provider Archive Systems announced this past week that they had integrated the Ephesoft Smart Capture solution into the FileBRIDGE platform. Ephesoft’s Smart Capture has automatic classification as one of its key capabilities, which aims to increase the accuracy and speed of processing documents. Archive’s FileBRIDGE platform operates as a unified document management system designed to make it easy to pull paper documents into a digital format.
Adding Ephesoft’s classification functionality to the FileBRIDGE platform is a solid move for Archive Systems. Invoice classification is one of those manual tasks that AP needs to move away from if the function is to be of any strategic value to the organization at large. With the capability of Ephesoft SmartCapture to automate that process, AP teams that use both solutions should ideally be able to hasten and streamline the scan and capture process for paper invoices. Or at least that is what Ephesoft and Archive Systems hope will happen with their integrated solution.
Fed Chair: Bitcoin’s Popularity Unrelated to Central Bank Policy
CoinDesk this week reported on Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s response to a July 2015 hearing question about how the growing popularity of Bitcoin and other digital currencies related to public confidence in the Fed. The response came as a result of U.S. Congressman Mike Mulvaney asking Yellen if she felt the rising prominence of Bitcoin meant the public was losing confidence in the central bank. In her reply, Yellen noted that she felt the rise of digital currencies was not accompanied with a loss of confidence in the Federal Reserve. More to the point, Yellen advised caution in creating any new financial regulation for digital currencies, as doing so could potentially stifle innovation.
Yellen’s written response adds a pertinent perspective on digital currency. As it stands right now, the Federal Reserve does not have direct regulatory control over Bitcoin and the like. Whether it should or not is up for debate, but the fact of the matter remains that some enterprises may be leery of digital currencies because they exist in an unregulated environment. What happens next on a federal level may not occur for some time, but Yellen’s views are worth considering in light of the usefulness digital currencies may show in cross-border payments.
China’s Yuan Jumps to Fourth Most-Used World Payment Currency
Continuing the payments theme this week is a story in The Guardian that China’s yuan overtook the Japanese yen recently to become the fourth most-used payment currency worldwide. The yuan now comes after only the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the sterling in terms of prominence—it has surpassed three currencies in the past seven years. The percentage of yuan payments worldwide increased 9.13% in August, according to numbers from SWIFT, which the Guardian story references. This increase means that now 2.79% of transactions worldwide are denominated in yuan, with more than 100 countries using the Chinese currency for payment.
The new SWIFT ranking is a clear sign that China is becoming more economically important on the world stage. With the sheer population in that country—roughly one-sixth of the world—it was more a matter of time for the Chinese currency to “break out” as it were in global importance. As China becomes more important in an economic sense, it is to be expected that more yuan-denominated transactions will occur. How many remains to be seen, particularly in light of new rules opening the Chinese credit card market to foreign competition.
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