Making Cloud-Based Payment Processing Pay Off for Your Business

There’s never been a better time to start taking advantage of the new technologies that are emerging within B2B receivables payments processing. Although check use is on the decline in total—in 2013, 50 percent of B2B remittances were made by check, a 75 percent decrease from 2004—checks and remittance documents continue to be a large part of many B2B receivables processes.

With automated (self-service) AR, mobile purchasing, and web transactions all on the rise, the B2B payments space is seeing lots of change, and it’s not going to stop any time soon. Having a well thought-out plan to grow and evolve your current receivables processing processes and technology in addition to traditional paper-based remittance processing methods such as check and remittance advice scanning, is crucial.

Customers love the convenience of paying bills online, banking with their mobile devices, and being able to quickly and accurately track their payment records any time and from anywhere. As B2B receivables continue to evolve from from paper-based invoices, checks and remittance coupons (and the associated manual reconciliation that comes with them), to electronic invoices, credit cards, ACH payments, and now, online and mobile payments, many companies have begun piecing together multiple systems and solutions in hopes of keeping up with their customers growing demand for new payment methods and channels.

While your customers may be happy about the flexibility to pay via multiple payment methods and channels, behind the scenes, it may not be the pretty picture of cost savings and efficiency gains that you had originally envisioned. Building and investing in separate payment platforms and solutions can result in data silos that require lots of overhead to maintain, not to mention increased training, oversight and manual reconciliations. The result to you? Platform madness, and ultimately, higher costs.

Platform madness is an easy trap to fall into, and yours wouldn’t be the first company to do so. According to a 2014 study by ACI Worldwide and Wiese Research Associates, more than half of U.S. businesses use siloed electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solutions—costing them $1 billion each year. So how can you stop spending money on manual work and start giving your business a competitive edge? By consolidating your platforms and processing payments in the cloud.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue to dive deeper into things to consider as you plot your move from a siloed, messy, and costly receivables infrastructure into an elegantly flexible, affordably deployed and managed, high-security payment processing solution in the cloud.

Here’s a quick glance into the topics you can look forward to:

1. Simplify Your Systems – Learn how the strategic consolidation of payment processing, remote deposit capture (RDC) and EBPP systems and solutions can save you money and move you closer to true straight-through processing.
2. Security in the Cloud – We take a look at why some companies are still skeptical of moving to the cloud and how in many cases, gained cloud security expertise via partner relationships actually increases the security of your data.
3. Timing Your Move to the Cloud – There’s no need to eat the proverbial elephant in one bite when you move to the cloud. We’ll discuss how easy (and affordable) it can be to move your payment processing to the cloud at the pace that is right for you.
4. Partner with a Payments Pro – At the end of the day, the whole reason you pursue outsourcing any part of your business operations is because it can make the entire process and user experience better (and more cost effective) than if you were to do it internally yourself. We’ll offer some key insight into how to choose the right partner and solution for your unique business needs.

Well, there you have it, a quick preview into what you can expect to see as we dive into the much talked-about topic of cloud-based B2B receivables processing. Check back regularly as we continue the journey into this new series.

The Path to B2B Mobile Payments

Learn more about the trends and considerations to keep in mind when evaluating mobile payments for your business in our latest infographic.