Payments: Exploring the New Frontier of Total Transaction Management Systems

Today’s new total transaction management systems are about as far from the traditional "expense management systems" of the past as can be imagined. In parallel with corporate shifts towards more proactive, forward looking, insight driven business decisions, the new frontier of spend reflects an integrated approach to managing costs, improving processes, and supporting governance and prudent financial management, while aligning with desired business outputs. With sustained pressure for greater visibility, increased process effectiveness, and governance sweeping across corporations, no function or process is escaping scrutiny for potential improvement. Spend management is a prime candidate, made all the easier as traditional transactional reporting systems have morphed into state-of-the-art total transaction management systems, based on a single integrated platform that combines a wish list of capabilities: complete visibility and analysis of all transactional data; timely analysis and reporting from a uniform set of business rules; built in compliance with organizational policies; and hosted as SaaS. The result is a superior identification of potential cost savings; early and easier detection of potential fraud; and greater control over employee spend. The recent growth of corporate procurement as a professional function, often within the scope of Shared Services models, is also supporting a more proactive approach to payments. At the same time, the sudden realization that Shared Services are sitting on veritable mounds of data, and that this data contains untold value in the form of trends and spend habits, means that Finance leaders are demanding better quality reporting and business insight-driven decisions. The risks of not deploying the best solutions for spend management are near unthinkable. While the public sector has had to stomach multiple headlines decrying the misuse of payment cards, corporations have had their share of out of control spend issues. Enforced and improved links to corporate policies and business rules, and automated alerts for exceptions, improve risk exposure while supporting prudent financial management and accountability. Redefining Organizational Spend Data Spend tracking is nothing new, but while traditional expense systems have always broadly grouped spend into categories, reporting has been rather flat, compared to the multi-dimensional capabilities of new transaction management solutions, which link to purchasing policies, offer flexibility in payment systems, integrate multiple data sources, and provide a far more holistic picture of total organizational spend than most of the single-category expense systems commonly deployed. Crucially, this extends to maverick (or untraceable) spend, often unaccounted, which can be effectively tracked through corporate and P-cards. Taking Control Shifting from expense management (of necessity, backward looking) to a more forward looking and disciplined transaction planning strategy means taking control over spend. This also reflects a step change in expense management by integrating corporate policies, guidelines, and automation, with the result that improvements are gained in cost management, process efficiency, and governance – the triple crown of best practice across processes. [eventpdf] It’s About Simplifying While expense management systems have proliferated and many offer excellent results, the benefits are often diluted by the fact that many enterprises run multiple systems for different categories of spend, with limited inter-connectivity, and therefore miss opportunities for total spend analysis. With the broader scope in some of the new total transaction management solutions, however, the need for multiple's systems is eliminated. At the same time, this broader scope also allows for multiple payment solutions, which will only become more important as mobile payments and e-commerce becomes the norm. In fact, given the constantly evolving external landscape – consider the growth of digital transactions, social media, or mobile technology – payments will be required to keep step, while delivering an easy user-experience. Planning Now for the Future Global payment trends point to sustained transitions to new forms of spending: non-cash payments, mobile wallets, e-currency systems, … the list goes on. State-of-the-art payment systems will need to incorporate flexibility in adapting to these changes, while at the same time use data analytics to evaluate the most appropriate payment mechanisms for different categories of spend, to drive improvements down the process. Another significant development is the lengthening of the end-to-end Procure-to-Pay chain – effectively extending electronic engagements to incorporate payment systems, and involve users and corporate finance in the process. This shifting beyond the current confines of end-to-end Procure-to-Pay will have a multiplier effect on value-add, as influence and tracking extends to pre-purchase activities, and reaches beyond payments. And So … The extent to which organizations will embrace the kind of transactional management solutions that are now enabling a more holistic evaluation and control of total spend will depend on how centralized they are, whether business units are integrated, and on management’s willingness to take a big step forward. However, considering the value that is today accorded to enterprise data, and the potential of new total transaction management solutions to drive analytics and reporting, we would expect to see a lot of increased investment in this direction. Don’t be left in the dark. Read about new opportunities to drive efficiencies through Payments here: Creating Value Through End-to-End Visibility, Control and Compliance.

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