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 past two weeks in payables news includes a few developments: Citigroup and Invapay launched a B2B commercial card solution in Asia, Basware announced an executive departure, and Procurify launched an AP solution. Read on to find out more about these and all the other impactful news from around the accounts payable world.
Citi Launches an Asia Pacific First B2B Commercial Cards Solution
Invapay and Citigroup last week announced the launch of an Asia Pacific B2B commercial card solution for Hanson Australia; the solution uses the Visa network and is underpinned by Invapay’s technology platform. The card solution is designed to simplify commercial card acceptance for suppliers that traditionally have not accepted payment via credit card. Citigroup will act as the card issuer for the new solution.
Citi is one of the largest card issuers in the world, so the ability to offer effective card solutions worldwide is not out of their reach. This is more of a win for Invapay, however, and presents the possibility of the solution provider expanding further in the Asia Pacific region with more partnership deals. It will remain to be seen how Invapay capitalizes on the new joint solution.
KPMG and Taulia Align To Help Organizations Transform Financial Supply Chains
Taulia and KPMG last week announced a strategic partnership designed to streamline financial supply chains and offer efficient access to early payment financing. The partnership leverages Taulia’s supplier financing and eInvoicing solution suite, as well as KPMG’s experience with designing and managing supply chains. The partnership came about as an outgrowth of extensive collaboration between the two companies in years past, and is designed to make it easier for buyers to offer early payment financing to their suppliers.
This partnership makes a lot of sense. Taulia has long experience in the financial operations technology space and, combined KPMG’s tax and audit focus, can streamline a fair amount of the financial supply chain. KPMG is also only one piece of a global conglomerate, so there is no telling how far this particular partnership could spread worldwide. Regardless, however, the KPMG brand name has a fair amount of pull in a wide variety of industries, and Taulia hitching to that is incredibly smart from a business perspective.
Procurify Introduces New Accounts Payable Solution
Procurify last week announced they had added an accounts payable solution to their product catalog. Procurify AP offers multi-tiered workflows, automated three-way matching, and the ability to make partial payments as needed. The new solution dovetails with Procurify’s existing purchasing platform, extending those capabilities to the second half of the procure-to-pay process. The new AP solution also adds special functionality for auditors, including side-by-side purchase order matching and making viewable entries that need to be accrued.
Releasing an AP solution is a natural next step for Procurify, which has until now only had a purchasing automation solution. The AP automation tool extends the functionality of the platform, and should add another level of value-add for Procurify customers—now they do not need to find a separate AP solution that can integrate with Procurify. Ardent Partners will keep a look out for any future developments in the solution.
Changes in Basware’s Executive Team
Basware announced recently that their senior vice president of global sales, Kari Aarvala, is planning to leave the company effective December 19. Aarvala has worked at Basware since April 2013, having joined the Finland-based business network from SAP’s Central and Eastern Europe office in the Czech Republic. Pekka Lindfors, vice president of sales, is going to take over global sales in the interim while the company searches for a new senior vice president to replace Aarvala.
SWIFT Announces Global Payments Innovation Initiative
SWIFT last week announced it had launched a global payments innovation initiative designed to improve the speed and predictability of cross-border payments. The initiative will focus on correspondent banking and first emphasize business-to-business (“B2B”) payments. The resulting solution will be built in collaboration with industry, and is meant to enable same-day usage of funds, transparency and predictability in fees, end-to-end payments tracking, and the transfer of rich payment information. The end goal of the initiative is to reduce friction in the cross-border payments process.
The announcement of this initiative is a heartening sign. Cross-border payments are hugely inefficient and woefully lacking in visibility, so seeing a global cooperative like SWIFT take this issue seriously could make a world of difference for enterprises that work with foreign suppliers. Keep in mind as well that more than 526 million financial messages crossed through SWIFT’s network in October 2015, with the total year-to-date number around five trillion. SWIFT is hugely important in global cross-border trade, so this is a game-changing proposition if they improve correspondent banking enough. The pilot program in 2016 is sure to be interesting, and Ardent will keep an eye on how that goes.
Download Ardent’s “The State of B2B Payments 2015” report today to get updated on the ePayment marketplace and other tech trends affecting AP.
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