When distributing payments across multiple currencies and recipients, the behind the scenes demands to facilitate those transactions can quickly spiral out of control as your business grows. Unaccounted for details in the end-to-end payment process start to take up more and more of your operations team’s time and effort as your company scales and expands its geographical footprint. When looking to reduce your operational costs, it pays to introduce an automated payment process.
A typical workflow
The end-to-end payment process for most organizations tends to look something like this — a user will log on to their banking platform to enter a range of transactional details for each and every payment. Depending on the security processes in place, another member of the team may then have to sign in to authenticate each transaction detail to ensure that everything is in order. And if it’s an international payment, the process involves converting each transaction from one currency to another before the payment is sent to a beneficiary.
When you’re first getting started, manually inputting and routing each payment through a simplified workflow may seem feasible. But as you scale and the sheer volume of transactions grows, the time spent inputting payment details can become a time-consuming and taxing endeavor.
When building your business methodically, it’s important to always look for a scalable way forward. That’s why integrating with a third-party payment engine can help lay a sound foundation for your business as it grows.
A more sophisticated workflow
Now let’s say you’re a typical international company making and receiving payments in several different currencies. At this point in your growth, you’ve more than likely introduced an accounts payable software to help the greater team keep track of revenue and expenses. You might be working through different banks to route payments across varying currencies or could also have an FX platform in place to help mitigate the risk of fluctuating exchange rates.
Regardless, at this stage in your company’s evolution, the time wasted by your employees lies less in physical data entry and more in having to work through a variety of different platforms to complete the singular task of sending or receiving a payment. By directly integrating a payment engine via API into your current end-to-end payment operations, you remove the need to route your payment details through multiple systems to handle a complex payment process.
From now on, when onboarding a new employee, there’s one system to train on. Going forward, no longer are there multiple banking systems for your team to use. A truly sophisticated workflow comes from introducing automation.
Introducing automation
By plugging into a cloud-based platform, the full payment lifecycle becomes a truly automated process. Your team now has access to convert over 30 currencies at wholesale exchange rates along with full transparency so you always know exactly what a given conversion is going to cost you. No longer are your team’s finite resources spent inputting payment details, that’s fully taken care of through the payment engine with fast and reliable payments to more than 200 countries.
By integrating with Currencycloud’s suite of APIs, you can bulk multiple payments to the same destination to cut down on costs. You can also introduce greater control and allow for multiple levels of permissions and authorizations for the different members of your team. And with the power of automation, you can divert your team’s attention away from dealing with payments and back to their core function — growing your business.
Interested in learning more about introducing automation into your end-to-end payment process? Schedule a free consultation with a payments expert today!
