When it comes to delivering desired outcomes to end-users in the context of digital transformation, the first rule of thumb is understanding who your end-users are. Of course, that’s no simple task, as we explain here. Luckily, one of Exela’s strengths is that we recruit and cultivate leaders who possess exceptional analytical prowess. One such leader is Tatiana Koleva, Exela’s Senior Vice President of Service Delivery. Tatiana is responsible for the services Exela delivers on-site for customers in the financial services- and legal-industries. In other words, Tatiana is on-site with our financial services and legal industry customers, ensuring end-user satisfaction at every level, even as the end-user landscape is in a constant state of evolution.

“I interact with people all day long and it is what I love most,” Tatiana tells us. In addition, she feels “privileged” to be leading her teams of “dedicated, customer-focused professionals who strive to deliver excellence in service every day.”

How Tatiana came to be doing what she’s doing

Tatiana attributes her success and her current position to “good fortune,” but it’s clear she’s worked hard for everything she’s achieved. “Six months after arriving in the U.S. from my home country of Bulgaria, I got an entry level job with the outsourcing division of Pitney Bowes and started learning about business and leadership and taking every opportunity to learn and grow.”

Tatiana’s favorite Exela offering

“I am really excited about Smart Office,” Tatiana tells us. “So many of our customers are focused on improving the experience of the millennials they're hiring, while also keeping real estate costs down. Our technology solves both. Our solutions provide visibility as to how services are used. As such, they can be provided where needed to enhance the user experience, while reducing the expense of providing them. It is a win-win.”

What Tatiana’s working on—right this very minute

“We are working on expanding services globally for many customers. It presents new challenges to solve for, which excites me, as well as the team.”

Tatiana on “innovation”

If you ask a handful of people how they define “innovation,” you’ll get a handful of different answers. What we’ve noticed is that the way one defines “innovation” has a lot to do with that person’s particular relationship to innovation. For example, this one comes from a tech-marketing perspective. For Tatiana, “innovation is a cultural trait, it is how we think about what we do, how we listen and respond to client needs, how we define the future of how our customers operate and how we deliver services. Sometimes it is progressive and sometimes it is disruptive. It’s change as a way of life.”

We asked Tatiana to give us her #FiveWordsAboutYou.

Here’s what she came up with:

• #determined
• #fearless
• #extrovert
• #disciplined
• #open-minded

What you probably don’t know about Tatiana

• Would you have guessed that Tatiana wrote poetry when she was younger?
• She also loves dancing and grew up dancing with her family.
• While growing up in a communist country, she really had little exposure to “business” as we know it in a capitalist society. So, her idea of success back then was to be a diplomat, and that was her dream job as a child.
• Favorite author since childhood: Oscar Wilde
• Favorite film: The Intouchables (a French buddy comedy-drama film from 2011 that her daughter, who was studying French, wanted her to watch). “It left quite an impression on me.”

Here’s more about the industry-specific solutions we’re delivering to our financial services industry customers, and to our legal industry customers.

Note:

Not all of Exela’s business process optimization solutions are industry-specific, however, and many of our clients, including our financial services and legal industry customers are also benefitting from our broad variety of solutions designed to optimize the business processes of enterprises in virtually any industry.

These include the entire array of Smart Office suite of solutions referenced by Tatiana above. You can learn all about how a major institution deployed one such solution, Intelligent Lockers, to great advantage.

From September 23 to 25, the best, brightest, and most innovative fin-tech professionals descended upon New York City for FinovateFall 2019, a major cutting-edge conference showcasing the most promising financial and banking technologies. Finovate conferences consistently attract the largest, most high-impact financial and banking executives, so Exela was thrilled to be a part of this latest one.

Check out the Press Release with all the details here.

Debut of Exela’s Real Time Payments Platform

For FinovateFall 2019, Exela was honored to present its new Real Time Payments Platform, a full-service, fully-integrated real time payments (RTP) platform. Exela’s innovative and highly intuitive take on RTP is designed to integrate billing and payment processes on one easy-to-use platform, securely streamlining go-to-market strategy. Salar Salahshoor, Director of Product Marketing, and Hishaam Siddiqi, Product Marketing Specialist, presented a riveting demonstration that began with the provocative question:

How effective is a payment system without interoperability?

Instantaneous and secure payment transactions, now with interoperability

 “In 2017, this industry promised “real time payments” as the future, offering instantaneous and secure transactions,” Salahshoor stated. “However, because of the high cost and complexity of integration, many banks have been slow and unsuccessful bringing RTP to market. And what happens every time we do come out with a new payment system? It’s bolted on as a standalone solution without thinking about interoperability.”

Watch the demo here.

“We’re here today to tell you about a Real Time Payments system that goes beyond the transaction.”

Salahshoor and Siddiqi proceeded to demonstrate how the Real Time Payments Platform is designed with the much-anticipated interoperability built- into the design. “It’s an integrated RTP platform that includes everything from bill rendering to receivables management,” Salahshoor explained, “integrating with everything from bill rendering and presentation to receivables management, providing you with more control over your entire payment ecosystem.”

How’d we do that?

“Exela is able to successfully deliver this because we are one of the largest global providers of transaction processing solutions,” Salahshoor and Siddiqi pointed out during the demo. “Our financial technology is deployed in over a thousand banks, including the top 10 US banks, processing more than 60 million transactions every day.”

Just one week after FinovateFall 2019, Exela proudly announced its partnership with Vocalink, a Mastercard company, to deliver a “Request to Pay” platform enabling consumers to receive payment requests, view bills, communicate with vendors regarding payment requests, and make real-time bill payments. Leveraging structured data to foster increased transparency and simpler reconciliation, Request to Pay is set to launch in the first quarter of 2020 and stands to serve as a core component in PAY.UK’s “new payment architecture” (the U.K.’s new conceptual model for the future development of the shared retail payment infrastructure).

SEE THE DEMO

Fascinated? Then check out Exela’s full line of Banking and Financial Services Suite here.

For more on Finovate, please check out this blog from the spring of 2019, where we discuss FinovateSpring 2019, at which Exela debuted our BFSS solutions. The BFSS solutions use a uniquely designed presentation layer and strong technology workflow to improve liquidity, working capital and compliance for domestic banks, global banks, and large domestic and international companies.

To set up a meeting to examine how our innovative business process solutions can optimize your business—or even just a tour of one of our Exela Innovation Centers, please email salar.salahshoor@exelatech.com.

And please stay tuned for an upcoming video demonstration of how Exela’s Real Time Payments platform can streamline your go-to-market strategy.

While technology can’t eliminate taxes, it can make the process seem a whole lot less painful—for both taxpayer and tax administrator. That’s what we were celebrating on Monday, August 12, 2019, when Exela hosted a lunch at Andiamo on Detroit’s breathtaking riverfront in conjunction with the FTA (Federation of Tax Administrators) Annual Technology Conference and Exhibition.
The FTA has been around since 1937, working to improve the quality of state tax administration. In recent years, technology has played a key role—transforming data, documents and records into mission-critical content, supporting complex information processes at all levels, and streamlining all aspects of customer communication. A leader in this space, with a current count of 39 state agencies and 15 departments of revenue/taxation among our customer roster, Exela was delighted to host agencies from all over the country for a satisfying “chat-and-chew” featuring delicious food, breathtaking views, and insights into some of what’s trending in tax administration transformation, including:

• Lockbox implementation
• Online Customer Exceptions management
• Data processing and keying support for refunds, filing extensions, and other exceptions items and correspondence
• Mailroom servicing, including certified mail receipt tracking, barcoding technology to facilitate and expedite sorting

To give you a sense of how this all translates into real life, here’s an actual case study of how Exela gave Alabama’s Department of Revenue a brand new, automated tax return processing system that reduced average tax return turnaround from 14+ days to less than 48 hours and added up to more than $2,000,000 in annual savings through W-2 fraud detection and prevention. Waving bye-bye to legacy systems (which enabled backlogs, duplication, error, and fraud) and the high cost of tax-season hiring, the Department also managed to relieve itself of 30,000 square feet of warehouse space.

Want more information on how Exela is bringing technology to bear in tax return processing. Read the whitepaper here. For more information on upcoming events Exela is hosting or participating in, check our Events page here.