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Top U.S. bank leverages Exela’s technology and expertise to reduce labor demands and improve payment processing efficiency.
The bank was facing narrowing profit margins and a growing workforce dedicated to manual paper check processing. In order to combat rising costs and slow processing, they sought a partner that could introduce automation technology in order to streamline their remittance operations, while also helping them avoid a traditional BPO model, which would be culturally misaligned with their commitment to their existing workforce.
More than 600 employees
Growing costs
Slow processing times
Employee-centric culture
Exela provided a solution that retained and converted the existing onsite workforce and added the technology necessary to digitally transform their traditional onsite activities.
Exela manages six bank locations across the U.S.
Onsite technology upgrade, including state-of-the-art scanning equipment
Integrated with Exela’s omni-channel payment processing platform
Introduced process efficiencies and cost savings
More than 170 million transactions are captured, digitized, and processed annually
Guaranteed employee benefits and human capital continuity
Optimized technology, including the future use of Intelliscan XDS
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How one bank used Exela’s cloud-hosted transaction management system improve remittance processing and ensure business continuity
A leading midwestern bank had remittance processing operations spread across multiple bank-operated processing centers, using onsite software and hosting solutions that required costly maintenance and data synchronization procedures. Processing volumes were down and this made it difficult to justify the high costs of dispersed operations. Additionally, the bank was exposed to a high degree of risk in the event of a disaster, due to a recovery model that included the use of an unstaffed third-party site several states away.
Exela migrated the bank to a “hub-and-spoke” model, leveraging our cloud-based remittance processing platform, which includes proprietary scanning and data management systems. The platform is hosted and maintained by Exela at a secure, fully redundant processing center (hub). The bank was able to reduce its bank-operated sites down to one (spoke), which eliminated much of the bank’s overhead and its management burden related to remittance processing. The flexibility inherent to this operating model, and the associated transaction-based pricing, allows for Exela-processed volumes to ramp up and down as needed.
Implementing the hub-and-spoke model also allowed for a small percentage of remittance volume to be processed in a shared-services environment at an Exela site that is regionally separated from the bank’s site, but close enough for efficient reshipment of mail in the event of a disaster. During such an event, total processing volume can be immediately absorbed by Exela’s operation, which better protects business continuity and enables the bank to reduce expenses associated with maintaining its own systems and its costly third-party site.
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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.”
“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).
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.
One of the largest financial institutions in the U.S. had been handling its own remittance processing—requiring more than 600 dedicated employees across six locations to process more than 170 million transactions annually. Despite a strong commitment to their workforce, market realities and financial pressures had forced them to consider resource allocation, including the possible divestiture of peripheral processes (such as remittance). Seeking insight and ideas at this critical juncture, they turned to Exela, which had already been providing them with services for more than 25 years. In fact, Exela already had 432 employees working at the institution’s various locations, engaged in the processing of the institution’s business, including mail and print operations.
Exela offered to take ownership of the financial institution’s full array of remittance processing operations, including the employment of the more than 600 employees involved in those operations, while bringing to bear Exela’s state-of-the-art payment and processing solutions. The financial institution made the wise choice to leverage Exela’s proven experience and expertise in executing large, onsite remittance operations along with its versatile service-delivery model, technologically-advanced applications, and commitment to the career continuity career continuity and employee benefits.
Specifically, the scope of agreement between Exela and the financial institution includes:
As of the first 9 months of 2019, the institution had already realized $318,000 in savings (representing nearly $40,000 per month in savings). The partnership has been positive and profitable, with virtually all performance goals achieved.
in savings realized
per month in savings
of performance goals achieved
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Whoever said, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” must never have heard of invoice financing (a strategy to turn invoices into cash). Sure, it’s reasonable to recognize the value in something small that you believe to be in your grasp over something bigger that’s even more speculative. In some scenarios, however, the potential inherent in reaching for those two birds right now is simply too compelling to ignore. Those scenarios include:
Borrowing money against your accounts receivable
“Invoice financing” refers to the borrowing of money by a business that has amounts due from customers under outstanding invoices (i.e., accounts receivables). The lender loans a percentage of those accounts receivables, and the borrower pays back the loan, plus interest, once its invoices are paid. Invoice financing helps businesses improve cash flow, pay employees and suppliers, and reinvest in operations and growth earlier than they could if they had to wait until their customers paid their balances in full, notes Cisco Liquido, Exela’s Senior Vice President of Business and Strategy. Because assessing the appropriateness and desirability of obtaining invoice financing is a complex and data-driven process, it can be helpful to utilize data analytics to maximize returns and optimize cash flows. Exela’s Collections Management platform can help enable that by aggregating valuable data from within your enterprise. Additionally, our P2P (Procure to Pay) platform can help automate all of your accounts payable functions, as well as help match you with potential invoice finance lenders and manage the relationship between borrower and lender.
Loaning money against your borrower’s accounts receivables
On the other side of invoice borrowing is invoice lending. There are distinct advantages associated with the lending side of invoiced financing, the most obvious of which is that the borrower’s invoices act as collateral. In other words, you’re lending on a secured basis, and most cases, risk is limited by the percentage of accounts receivable advanced to the borrower (i.e., the lender advances, say, 85% of the amount of accounts receivable, but the borrower’s obligation is secured by 100% of those accounts receivable).
Of course, it’s impossible to eliminate all risk because of the possibility the borrower’s customer(s) will fail to pay the invoiced amount(s), resulting in a complicated collections process in order to recover the collateral. However, as Liquido notes, that’s where effective risk management comes in. “Being the best in class at invoice processing isn’t going to give you a competitive advantage — but being the best in class at risk might.”
Automating invoice assessment is a crucial step in risk assessment and management, and Exela’s solutions (from our P2P platform to our liquidity and collections management platforms) can help. To learn more about Exela’s rapidly deployable business process automation solutions, check out our Solutions page.
