Financial Services - Incedo Inc.

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, where efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings reign supreme, organizations are increasingly turning to automation to streamline their financial operations. According to the Institute of Financial Operations & Leadership, only 9 % of Accounts Payable (AP) departments are fully automated today. However, – the Strategic Treasurer survey reveals that, by 2025 67%s of finance professionals anticipate their AP departments will be entirely automated. This transformation is driven by an emphasis on cost savings, with 73% of organizations stating that it is the primary motivator for shifting to fully electronic processing. This shift bolsters both an organization’s operational efficiency as well as its financial health.

In this blog, we will explore why and how automating the Accounts Payables process is vital and delve into the myriad benefits of IncedoPay in achieving this transformation. Further, we will elaborate how IncedoPay eliminates the need for upfront enterprise investments in infrastructure, hosting fees, and licenses. It addresses critical customer challenges by reducing capital expenditure (Capex) and operational costs, thanks to its deployment on the AWS cloud and its service model based on per-payment transaction costs.

The Need for AP Automation: The traditional AP process is manual and resource intensive, – involving tasks such as data entry, invoice verification, purchase order matching, and physical check handling. This manual approach is both time-consuming and error-prone, leading to delayed payments, inefficiencies, supplier frustrations and potential compliance issues. AP Automation can help overcome these challenges by:

Streamlined Workflow: Automation of the AP process facilitates a seamless and well-structured workflow. Purchase orders & invoices are electronically captured, verified, and routed through approval workflows, reducing the risk of errors and fraud. This expedites payment cycles and enables organizations to take advantage of early payment discounts, optimizing cash flow.
Enhanced Visibility and Control: Automated AP systems provide real-time visibility into financial data, offering better tracking of financial commitments. This transparency facilitates more informed decision-making about cash flow and liabilities while ensuring compliance with financial regulations and reporting requirements.
Cost Reduction: Manual AP processes incur hidden costs, of which labor costs constitute the most significant portion. Automation eliminates these expenses, resulting in significant cost savings. Improved cash flows with visibility and control over the liquidity allows organizations to not only reduce costs but to enhance forecasting and spend management.
Vendor and Supplier Relations: Timely and accurate payments foster positive relationships with vendors and suppliers. Automated AP systems streamline the processes effectively to ensure that payments are made promptly and accurately, reducing the risk of disputes and enhancing trust among business partners.

IncedoPay – Revolutionizing the Accounts Payable Landscape for Banks and Enterprises:

IncedoPay, a proprietary payments platform from Incedo Inc., empowers enterprises to automate the process of Accounts Payables (AP) by integrating multiple payment systems while maintaining control, governance, and payment approval. IncedoPay stands as a beacon of innovation and excellence in the realm of integrated payment solutions, tailored specifically for banks and their corporate customers. As a best-in-class platform, IncedoPay harnesses the power of automation to revolutionize every facet of the Accounts Payable (AP) lifecycle, elevating profitability, productivity, and the overall user experience.

IncedoPay redefines the banking experience by seamlessly integrating digital solutions. With self-service portals catering to various stakeholders (eg. bank and their corporate customers) and personalized payer & payee journeys, to offer unmatched convenience to users. Real-time visibility and payment tracking further enhance the overall user experience. The platform streamlines multiple payment methods, including RTP, ACH, PayPal, Zelle, virtual cards, checks, and prepaid cards onto a user-friendly platform. Through the consolidation of legacy systems, IncedoPay enhances user experiences, transforming the way businesses handle their financial transactions.

IncedoPay isn’t just a payment platform; it’s an innovation-led, secure, and efficient payment solution. It adheres to the most stringent industry standards. It empowers banks with proactive fraud reduction and regulatory compliance management by analysing transactional data such as vendor details, payment amount and terms etc to identify anomalies or suspicious activities. This includes sentiment analysis and transactional data analytics. Replacing legacy applications, boosts business performance and unlocks upsell/cross-sell opportunities through data-driven decision-making.

Elevating Payments with Innovation, Security, and Reliability with AWS

IncedoPay is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), a powerhouse in the realm of cloud computing. AWS empowers IncedoPay to redefine the digital payment landscape, offering high-performance, secure, and scalable solutions. In the online payment world, security is paramount. AWS Key Management Service ensures the security and compliance of IncedoPay’s data. Web Application Firewall stands as the first line of defense, guarding against threats and ensuring uninterrupted service. Combining Availability Zones, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing, ensures business continuity and cost-efficiency. Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) allows IncedoPay to swiftly adapt to market demands and Relational Database Service (RDS) enhances resilience, scalability, and compliance. The platform optimizes performance through caching and continuously monitors and optimizes resources with Amazon CloudWatch.

With global supply chains, late payments, evolving regulations, uncertainties, and cybersecurity threats, risk and compliance management become paramount. IncedoPay adheres to the most stringent industry standards. It empowers banks with proactive fraud reduction and regulatory compliance management through the use of information, sentiment analysis, and transactional data analytics.

IncedoPay’s remarkable impact is clearly demonstrated through the key statistics derived from its wide range of customer deployments:

Cost Reduction: IncedoPay has achieved substantial cost savings, with one of our customers experiencing an astounding 80% reduction in processing costs. Another one realized an impressive 37% reduction in operations costs.
User Adoption: IncedoPay’s modular architecture, coupled with tailored campaigns, has significantly boosted user adoption rates. In one instance, digital payment usage soared by 2x, while new supplier outreach increased sixfold. The platform streamlines the process of onboarding new suppliers, capturing their payment details, alerting them about payments, and providing regular metrics on their business relationships.
Enhanced Efficiency: The platform’s seamless integration and comprehensive payment options have streamlined legacy processes and significantly reduced processing times. This improvement is evident in the 70% reduction in support requests from suppliers experienced by one of our customers, enhancing business cohesiveness.

Automation is critical for organizations to optimize cash flow, reduce costs, enhance financial control, and strengthen relationships with key stakeholders. Embracing this change enables businesses to thrive in an increasingly competitive financial landscape. So don’t wait; start your journey toward a more efficient and prosperous financial future today.

Traditionally Wealth management technology for wealth managers was more focused on Advisor technology. As the business model evolved from Product Centric to Relationship Centric and the client expectations changed, the wealth management firms started to focus on investor technology to create a competitive differentiator. As per numerous studies, the wealth management client experience lags behind other industries and its financial services peers such as Cards, Banks, and even Insurance.

Clients focus a lot on the digital experience provided by the firms to decide on their future financial advisors. As a result, the client portal is a critical investment that firms have been making in this space. Per a study, 93% of the studied wealth managers have either implemented a client portal or are in the process of implementing it. Client portals can become a hub where clients access all their financial information. They are a valuable tool to retain clients and grow your practice by increasing assets with existing clients and attracting new prospects. When advisors and wealth manager firms find it difficult to differentiate themselves from other competitors, the client portal can become that key differentiator and a source of competitive advantage.

In this whitepaper, Gaurav Sehgal, Vice President, Financial Services, Incedo talks about the critical importance of client portals and digital experience for Wealth Management organizations.

Business executives today are increasingly required to make decisions in a dynamic environment under the following circumstances:

Uncertainty: The situation evolves with time and it is difficult to define business rules a priority. There is uncertainty in factors impacting business.
Contextual: Increasingly, external factors have a significant impact on how decision makers need to respond to situations. So, only a certain set of internal factors cannot be taken into account for decision making.
Iterative: Decisions are no longer limited to linear cause-and-effect scenarios. Instead, decisions have to be made in an iterative manner in a ‘test and learn’ mindset.

There is clearly an opportunity to provide Decision Automation Solutions that can leverage AI/ML technologies to augment the human decision-making process. We believe that Data and AI/ML can be leveraged to develop the next generation of Decision Automation Solutions.

In this whitepaper, Vivek Vijay Kakade, Senior Director of Product Management, Incedo talks about how to ‘harness the power of data using Incedo Lighthouse^TM for Operational Decision Automation’.

About the Author

The global financial services industry has seen disruption over the past few years with new fintech players and digital giants eating up into the market share of the legacy banking institutions. Whether it is digital credit lending platforms, payment tools or new credit card issuers, the common narrative to drive user adoption and build market share is enhanced customer experience through personalization.

The Value of Personalization for Retail Banking

There has been a sudden shift in the way some of the banks are leveraging personalization across the customer lifecycle. The key focus areas and objectives to enhance customer experience and deliver incremental impact for the bank are mentioned below :

Building a Growth Engine to capture new markets and customer segments
The next gen fintech players have been able to create data-enabled products that enable faster underwriting by using the prospect’s bureau scores, digital KPIs, social media data etc. to identify the creditworthiness of a prospect. The big banks need to move fast to enable similar, faster turnaround times for loan fulfillment to enable higher acquisitions from new customer segments.
Maximizing customer lifetime value for existing customer base
In order to maximize the share of customer’s wallets, banks have the following levers – improved cross sell, better servicing & higher retention rates. The best-in-class firms are leveraging AI-enabled, next best action recommendations to identify what products should be offered to a customer at what time and through what channel. The focus has also moved from reactive retention interventions to proactive, data-enabled retention strategies personalized to each customer.
Improved risk assessment and mitigation controls
Use of Personalization is not limited to marketing interventions, the digital world needs personalized controls when it comes to risk management, fraud detection, anti-money laundering and other control processes. Sophisticated AI models for risk, fraud & AML detection coupled with real time implementation is critical to build strong risk defense mechanisms against fraudsters.

The overall impact of personalization in Retail banking is dramatic with added opportunity to improve experiences across the customer touchpoints. Based on Incedo’s deployment of solutions for banking and fintech clients, given below is an illustrative example of use cases and potential opportunities.

Building a personalization engagement engine requires integrated capabilities across Data, AI/ML and Digital Experiences

The reimagined customer engagement built on personalization requires a clear understanding of customer’s needs, behavior, requirements etc. and the ability to integrate these with customer front end platforms and channels (website, mobile app etc). This requires capabilities interwoven across the spectrum of Data, AI/ML and Digital Experiences.

Data foundation and the strategy to enable a 360 degree view of the customer:
Most of the banks struggle to stitch together a holistic profile of the customer in terms of their products, lifestyle behavior, transactional patterns, purchase history, offers used, preferred channels, digital engagement etc. This necessitates development of a clear data strategy right from capturing customer touchpoints to building 360 degree data lakes for the customer. Given the huge data storage requirements, this may also mean building modern digital cloud platforms that capture not only customer’s purchase history but also granular data points like digital clickstream data.
AI, ML and Analytics-enabled decisioning layer to drive Next Best Action Recommendations:
Identifying the right product/offer/service for the customer at the right time and through the right channel of engagement is important to ensure it converts into an optimal experience for the customer. This is done through a series of AI models, customer segmentation, optimizations etc. These AI/ML models are built on historical data and are tested, monitored and enhanced on an ongoing basis to ensure any new feedback is incorporated into the models.
Building an AI/ML engine needs expert Data Scientists and Business Intelligence experts with a background in ML, statistics and contextual domain knowledge.
Optimal Digital Experience to capture customer attention and maximize conversions:
Data-enabled recommendations do not work if not supplemented with the right creatives and simplified communication that drive call to action for the customer. Digital Experiences that enable impactful omnichannel journeys whether through email, website, mobile app, ATMs, branches, service reps etc. are very important in this regard. The A/B testing of digital experiences that may include application forms, digital journeys, website interstitials, campaign banners etc. is critical to build best-in-class customer experiences.

While data, AI and digital experiences are the three key building blocks of the personalization enabled engagement layer, there is a need to orchestrate and integrate these capabilities to ensure that banks are able to deliver value from the personalization initiatives. Building these capabilities is no mean task and can take long time cycles to reap any tangible benefits, especially in cases where firms are building these capabilities from scratch.

How to turn the personalization opportunity into reality ?

While many traditional banking institutions have tried to build personalization enabled engagement, it has been observed that either the efforts fail or do not scale up over time, leading to non-optimal ROI on investments made.

Apart from building capabilities across data, AI/ML and digital experiences, it is critical to embed the personalization recommendations into enterprise users’ workflows whether it is a part of CRM, Salesforce, Credit risk decisioning systems etc. The end-to-end decision automation of workflow is critical to drive adoption and actual implementation of personalized experiences for customers.

Incedo’s Lighthouse^TM enabled CX personalization for the banks is an enterprise grade solution that enables shorter time to market for Data/AI enabled marketing personalization and accelerated realization of personalization opportunity.

Incedo’s Lighthouse^TM enabled CX personalization solution for the banks enables automated AI/ML enabled decisioning right from the data layer to customer reach out, to ensure personalized product, offer or service is delivered to the customer when it matters. The prebuilt library of Customer 360 degree data lakes and AI/ML models enable accelerated implementation of personalization initiatives. This is supplemented with digital command centers and on-a-click of a button operationalization of recommendations to deliver omni-channel engagement.

No matter where the banking clients are in their personalization journey, the solution is implemented in a way that it helps realize the business impact within a matter of weeks and not years. The solution implementation is supplemented with a personalization roadmap for the organization, where Incedo’s team of experts work together with client teams to not only implement solutions but also help the firm build its in-house personalization capabilities over a period of time.

It is critical for banking institutions to acquire new customers, maximize customer value and retain their best customers at a greater speed and accuracy then ever before. Right from personalized account opening experience to hyper-personalized cross sell product and offer recommendations to trigger-based retention strategies, providing a “wow” experience to the customer needs personalization capabilities. Complementing the trust that traditional banks and credit unions have with these capabilities would ensure that they continue to maintain their competitive advantage over the new fintech players or digital giants.

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