Editor’s Note: With this edition, the Payables News Roundup moves to a biweekly posting schedule from a weekly one. We will still write about the most pertinent payables news, but on a slightly less frequent schedule.
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: FIS completed its acquisition of SunGard, Bottomline and Visa signed a new partnership deal, and the interchange fee caps in Europe may cause a shift away from individual-pay commercial cards. Read on to find out more about these and all the other impactful news from around the accounts payable world.
FIS Completes Acquisition of SunGard
FIS this week announced that it had completed its $9.1 billion acquisition of SunGard Financial Systems, which creates a combined company with 55,000 employees worldwide and $9.3 billion in annual revenue. FIS announced the acquisition in August, noting that the two companies have complementary solutions and the blended solution set would create the possibility to offer a wider variety of financial products and services worldwide, including payment processing, cash and liquidity management, and fraud management.
Neither FIS nor SunGard are exactly slouches in the AP solutions marketplace, focusing mainly on the payment processing and cash management arenas in addition to the more traditional financial technology (“FinTech”) spaces of retail and institutional banking. FIS acquiring SunGard is a solid move by the financial technology giant; SunGard offers strong FinTech solutions and is a successful company in its own right ($2.8 billion in revenues in 2014). This is a natural move for FIS, and allows the solution provider to expand its product portfolio into new areas without developing its own products. Overall, this is sure to be a profitable move for the combined enterprise.
Bottomline Technologies and Visa to Offer Solution for Business Payment Automation
Bottomline Technologies announced recently a joint solution with Visa that blends the credit card giant’s commercial card solution—Visa Payables—with Bottomline’s flagship Paymode-X payment network. The new product, called Paymode-X with Visa Payables, draws on the combined experience of the two solution providers with the aim to streamline B2B payments between buyers and suppliers. More than 300,000 businesses already use Paymode-X, according to the announcement, and the addition of Visa Payables adds another payment option to the stable for network users.
Inking a solution agreement with Visa is a solid move for Bottomline. The New Hampshire-based solution provider’s Paymode-X network is in wide use already worldwide, with many millions of dollars of ACH payments flowing through, but a deal with a marquee payments solution provider such as Visa puts the network on an entirely different footing. This is not to say that Bottomline was not already in a strong position to extend its network’s capabilities, but Visa is a household name worldwide and, given this reality, one of the most effective partners—from a branding perspective—that Bottomline could ask for. On the other side, Visa gets access to a whole new network of potential clients with attaching their solution to the Paymode-X network. Overall, this seems very much like a win-win.
AOC Solutions and 3Delta Systems introduce AR-Exchange Supplier Portal
AOC Solutions and 3Delta Systems recently announced the launch of AR-Exchange®, a new cloud-based solution designed to help manage remittance information and assist with invoice matching. AR-Exchange functions as a supplier portal that is designed to make it easier for buyers to deliver remittance details at the same time as the payment, which will ideally make reconciliation easier on the supplier side. AR-Exchange operates alongside AOC’s EnCompass cloud-based payment solution, and is designed to augment that solution’s payment capabilities through offering a central source of remittance information to the supplier.
A lack of standardized remittance information has long been a barrier to the greater adoption of electronic payment methods, as well as an inability to reliably deliver remittance details alongside the payment itself. For these reasons, the AR-Exchange solution is a good product choice for AOC and 3Delta. Both providers also have a long history providing payment solutions, so designing what is essentially an add-on to boost remittance delivery is a valuable addition to the solution suite.
New Features Available to Oildex OpenInvoice Customers
Oildex recently announced OpenInvoice 15.3, the fourth and final set of updates for 2015, which comes after a series of four user conferences where Oildex solicited input from its user base. The latest update involves enhancing workflow automation, something that, according to the announcement, is a key area of interest for OpenInvoice users. The updates to the solution’s workflow capabilities include allowing users to automatically code, verify, and approve invoices based on defined rules—in essence driving straight-through processing functionality. If the invoice meets the user-defined criteria for automated processing and approval, it moves through the system without human intervention.
As enterprises process more invoices in a straight-through manner, fewer AP staffers are able to process higher numbers of invoices. This drops the cost of invoice processing in the long term, and can help shift AP into a more strategic focus. Overall, making it easier for enterprises to enable straight-through processing is a solid update to the OpenInvoice platform; Oildex thus made a valuable update to their platform, which should help many of their customers improve their AP operations.
OFS Portal and Taulia Partner to Help Companies Unlock Value From Their Financial Supply Chain
Taulia recently announced that it had joined the OFS Portal community, a member-based organization of upstream oil and gas suppliers and service providers. The OFS Portal community is a global forum designed to deliver process, information, and technology standards for oil and gas suppliers and service providers worldwide. As part of the deal, Taulia will allow OFS Portal community members to join its network as suppliers, resulting in Taulia acting as the connection point between the OFS Portal members and their largest customers.
This partnership with the OFS Portal community is a good strategic move on Taulia’s part; networks operate best as more and more members join, so opening up the proverbial doors to a member organization allows Taulia to add many more suppliers to the network without needing to necessarily do the same level of supplier outreach they would normally have to. Given that OFS Portal is also a standards organization, this could doubly benefit Taulia by allowing them to get involved on the ground floor with creating some relevant best practices in the oil and gas space. Overall though, this is a good partnership on both sides.
EU Interchange Fee Caps Could Spark Drift From Individual-Pay Cards
Business Travel News reported recently that the cap on interchange fees slated to go into effect in Europe this month—0.3 percent on all card transactions—may spark a change in what type of commercial card is used in the European Union. There are a high number of individual-pay corporate cards in play in Europe, which means the employee pays the bill and is reimbursed, but regulators feared that card issuers would try to side-step the interchange fee cap (which excludes commercial cards) by issuing corporate cards to individuals. Because of this, regulatory updates removed specific language that could have created ambiguity, which some European card network leaders now believe could mean a shift away from individual-pay cards.
If commercial cards do come under the fee-cap regulations, which will not be clear until potentially January, then this could dramatically alter rebate potential on commercial card programs. JPMorgan Chase already plans to exit the international commercial card market on December 13, but it is unclear if that is because of the interchange fee cap or not. Regardless, Ardent Partners will be watching what impact the fee cap has on the card market in Europe.
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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