Accounts Payable automation for a global financial services firm

The Customer

This enterprise organization within the Financial Services industry approached the Roots Automation team with the goal of implementing automation within their Accounts Payable department. This Customer is a global financial services firm based in Australia, with an estimated 15,000 employees and $11 billion in annual revenue. Their U.S. division – a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ – wanted to partner with Roots Automation to prepare to separate aspects of their business and sell entities.

This global organization is present in almost every industry in the world, and this particular division was comfortably classified as infrastructure. Their executive goal was to reduce costs and manual effort associated with the Accounts Payable process.

The Situation

COVID significantly impacted this customer, and the parent company was searching for ways to cut costs. As a result, our Customer was prioritizing cost efficiency and faced significant pressure to separate aspects of their business and sell entities. As a result, all financials needed to be fundamentally sound.

As a financial institution, their accounts payable processes were under scrutiny. The process itself was too long – something as simple as paying an invoice would take, on average, a week to process, would touch at least 3 different sets of hands, and wasn’t core to their ability to make money. The entire Accounts Payable process involved roughly 30 people, and processed an estimated 1,000 invoices every day.

Additionally, the company needed to manage cashflow while keeping their partners happy because their partner services help the organization meet its customers’ expectations. Roots Automation worked with the financial leaders within the organization to ensure that the company was paying its partners on time. There was no margin for delay or human errors.

The Challenge

The company’s accounts payable process was hugely inefficient – eating into the Customer’s efficiency goals and operating margins. Because the account payable process isn’t core to their ability to generate revenue, executives were frustrated with the slow turnaround.

Each day a team of 30 people would review and pay approximately 1,000 invoices. In addition to the significant costs associated with this process, the company struggled to ensure payments were made accurately and timely.

The Customer was facing significant pressure to resolve this issue, as the parent company was eager to sell entities. Due to the number of FTE involved in the process, accuracy and timeline objectives were difficult to meet.

The Solution

The Customer leveraged a Digital Coworker for its ability to read documents as they came into the AP team, and then use Process Automation to manage the process once the relevant data was extracted. Roots Automation utilized Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Optical Character Recognitive (OCR) in addition to the Process Automation to train the Digital Coworker to take over this process.

The Digital Coworker processed the data, checked for duplicate contracts or invoices, and ensured that taxes were appropriately applied.

The Digital Coworker also acted as a system of checks and balances, noting any missing documentation and notifying the team as needed – performing a 3-way match before paying an invoice. After the Customer sold several entities, the Digital Coworker went on to perform the same work for two additional companies in the new Group.