We’ve come a long way since the days of trading cowrie shells and shekels, and yet payments continue to evolve as societies and technologies advance. The world is more interconnected than ever, with hundreds of billions of transactions occurring around the world every year. The financial tools of today offer convenience and security, but there’s always room for improvement and forward progress.

Exela’s latest edition of PluggedIN: “The Digital Transformation of Making Payments,” covers the history of payments and how the forms of exchange we’re most familiar with today developed, as well as the latest cutting-edge technologies that are shaping the way payments will be made in the future.

The full issue of PluggedIN is available for download now at: https://www.exelatech.com/pluggedin.

How does the Digital Transformation Roadmap look in organizations? The starting point and the direction to take have always differed from company to company when it comes to digital transformation. MIT principal research scientist and author of Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation, George Westerman says, "Digital transformation marks a radical rethinking of how an organization uses technology, people and processes to fundamentally change business performance."

Digital transformation was well in the picture for many years, though 2020 saw an overturn of things after the pandemic hit. Businesses and industries globally were forced to quickly shift to and adapt digital transformation, as it was the only option for survival.

While today's business leaders are open to embracing digital transformation, they still struggle to understand where and how to start. With the overwhelming number of choices and options, business leaders are faced with numerous challenges.

The question remains, where to start with?

The focus of every organization is to serve the customers best and keep efficiency high within. Initiate by understanding the maturity stage in both these areas and develop a governance framework. Start by assessing the current business situation, identifying gaps, and defining the actions and resources required to fill those gaps.

Stay competitive, keep up with the demand, and future-proof yourself with a digital transformation roadmap.

In general, a transformation involves a holistic approach or broad change that alters the way the business or segment works. And this shift is not just a technology change, nor just an organizational structure change – it impacts all the people involved in various levels and processes of the organization.

To set a digital transformation on the right course, a company must place it at the core of its plan and understand the magnitude of that undertaking. It is for business leaders to spearhead the digital strategy in the right direction, define the significant investments, and set clear targets.

Do you have a roadmap to guide your organization's digital transformation? Contact us today and let us help!

As technology has trended toward greater mobility, remote or flexible working arrangements have been gaining popularity, especially among employees. While some companies have been offering work from home days as perks to help them attract talented professionals, employers were generally more skeptical, worrying that the distractions present in non-office settings could hamper productivity. Then COVID-19 hit, and many businesses had no option but to give remote working a try.

Remarkably, that shift has not resulted in a broad drop in productivity as some businesses feared. One recent study found that 94% of employers reported no change or even an increase in productivity. Similarly, a survey by PwC shows that a permanent flexible work week has gained broad support with both the employers and employees. Eighty-three percent of employees would want to continue working from home at least one day a week. At the same time, 55% of employers anticipate that most of their workers will do so long after COVID-19. 

While it’s clear that workers like the idea of working remotely, there are some good reasons for businesses to get on board as well. Not only is there evidence that working from home may actually boost productivity in some cases, but it can also help reduce turnover, attract quality job candidates, and allow businesses to expand into less competitive - and less expensive - geographical talent pools. A decentralized workforce can also translate to lower real estate costs and can even improve business continuity.

Of course, these benefits are only within reach with the right solutions in place. Thanks to ever-evolving technologies and applications, businesses are equipped to streamline their processes and improve output, making it no longer necessary to be in the office to be a productive team member.

Remote Working Tools

When evaluating the state of modern technology, it’s apparent that there are more options to choose from than ever before, particularly for organizations adapting to the changing business environment. Getting the most out of your budget while ensuring high-quality service and functionality is paramount. There can be many challenges from remote working, and long-term adoption requires more than just laptops and video conferencing software. Here are three less flashy, but equally important solutions to consider:

Onsite/Offsite Time Clocks

Effectively managing employee time and location information is often critical to ensuring compliance with relevant labor laws and overtime regulations, as well as tracking productivity, travel efficiency (for drivers, service technicians, etc.), and resource management. Just because current evidence suggests remote working doesn’t tend to harm overall productivity doesn’t mean it’s not worth monitoring.

Effectively transitioning to a more remote workforce requires more flexible schedules and a location data management system. Exela’s Contactless Entry & Exit(CEE) is one such cloud-enabled technology that helps track employee time and location and manage the growing mobile workforce. CEE is enabled by a seamless reporting dashboard with analytics for managers and HR. It helps to improve operational transparency and compliance while supporting social distancing protocols. Easy to install, it can function as a standalone system, integrate seamlessly into existing payroll platforms, or operate as a core component of Exela’s broader human capital management platform.

Electronic Signatures

New distractions aren’t the only potential threat to productivity concerning business leaders as the world embraces WFA. Historically, physical distance has had a way of slowing down key processes. Requesting and receiving legally binding signatures is a critical step in many processes. In order to keep things moving as they should be, digital signature solutions like DrySign provide an easy, efficient, and secure way to request and send signatures from anywhere and at any time from both mobile and desktop platforms.

As a cloud-based application, DrySign enables an end-to-end paper-free process for drafting, discussing, executing, and administering contracts and other forms of important documentation. No matter how dispersed teams may be physically, electronic signature platforms ensure that you can get enforceable signatures, even from multiple signatories in an easy and timely manner.

Digital Mailroom

Another important but easily overlooked business function that will undoubtedly be impacted by a greater shift to remote working arrangements is the delivery of physical business mail. While digitization has already transformed many aspects of running a successful business, physical paper mail still plays a crucial role in a number of important processes, especially within certain heavily regulated industries.

Needless to say, the standard delivery model for office mail won’t work with a largely remote workforce. In order to fully empower remote workers and ensure that critical communications reach the intended recipient regardless of where they happen to be working, businesses should invest in a Digital Mailroom solution, like the one offered by Exela. Industry-leading scanners quickly intake mail items and use powerful ICR and OCR technology to transform them into fully digital assets and deliver them to recipients electronically.

There are many more tools that specialize in remote collaboration and assist in productivity measurement that can help organizations overcome the challenges of working from anywhere. Take your time while exploring the various options available that you and your business can utilize to assist you with remote working and team collaborations.

Learn more about how Contactless Entry and Exit, DrySign, and Digital Mailroomcan help you support your remote workforce.

The words ‘artificial intelligence’ often bring to mind lofty visions of a miraculous, futuristic world. But, despite its name, AI isn’t really all that intelligent. Most current AI technology works less like a human brain and more like a complex system of pattern recognition that relies on set inputs and desired outcomes to operate.

Still, today’s AI can do impressive things based on pattern recognition. Some might even say AI is already capable of being creative. For instance, AI is able to compose music quite impressively after being trained on a set of MIDI files gathered from various genres. It views the data over time to “understand” the context that the song’s melodies fall into and predict the next notes in a sequence.

After millions of rounds of a game of hide and seek, AI systems managed to discover creative ways to win – including exploiting programming errors and glitches. AI is also making significant strides in the field of writing.

As exciting and interesting as these developments may be, many people have raised concerns about the potential for smarter automation technologies to replace a great deal of physical human labor, and so destroy manufacturing and service jobs as it goes. Recent developments in AI might cause knowledge workers and creatives to take note as well.

The Expansion of AI Into Writing

The current status of AI-based writing can be seen predominantly in areas where the “creative” aspect is minimal - or where the writing is more of a reporting of the facts than an artful example of storytelling.

You might be surprised to hear that The Associated Press and The Washington Post, for instance, already use AI to write news articles and many organizations are using similar technology for financial reports. Subjects like these are easier for AI because the system just needs the right facts and a style guide to create an easy-to-read piece.

Still, there are rules and patterns to good storytelling - just take any creative writing class and you’ll begin to recognize the formulas in all sorts of entertainment, from classic novels and movies to comic books and TV shows.

The basic structure of a good story is something that can be codified and programmed into an algorithm, and the elements of language and stories are already pretty well-defined, as are their relationships in good writing. As AI advances, input from creative human minds may become less critical to the production of “creative” work.

Researchers are also completing more ambitious projects than simple pattern- and statistic-heavy articles and reports, though often with less convincing results so far. While computers have produced poetry that could pass as human-written, as well as a whole Jack Kerouac-esque novel that came surprisingly close to the real thing, the output is generally created one sentence at a time, leading to an awkward, jerky flow, and inexplicable, confusing, and even nonsensical narratives.

AI may not be able to create a more satisfying ending to Game of Thrones (low as that bar may be) quite yet, but its understanding of the characters within these stories is a strong indication that these attempts at creativity have the potential to become more advanced.

What Will AI Mean for Professional Writers?

The future of creative writing isn’t wholly dependent on whether AI can churn out competent writing that gets the facts right — it also depends on how good the writing actually becomes, and perhaps more importantly, how expensive intelligent systems are to produce. If a publisher can use a bot to spit out usable content at a lower cost than paying a staff writer, then the majority of writers are all but unemployed.

For humans, however, the good news is there is currently no indication AI will ever be able to truly cross the barrier between copycat creativity and true imagination. AI isn't really "aware" on a deeper level the way a human is, and therefore doesn’t make some of the connections a human might.

Even the most advanced AI still just consists of pattern recognition and big data lookups. If given a random piece of writing, it wouldn’t be able to tell you whether it was “good” or not - just whether it bore similarities to existing works its been told are “good” writing. True creativity requires much more than just recognizing and extrapolating patterns.

Making an AI system that’s a truly creative writer would require getting much closer to solving "the hard problem" of consciousness. This is what cognitive scientists call the problem of coming up with a tenable view of what conditions are required for there to be an “experience of being.” Genuine creativity likely requires this level of consciousness, and there’s currently no clear path to it in AI.

If AI stays stuck in an unconscious state, then, at the very least, the top tier of creative writing is still safe from the machines, even if much of the relatively mindless, fact-based work dries up. The problem is, even in this kind of scenario, the future doesn't look too rosy for the majority of writers who aren't the next Leo Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf.

What a Future of AI and Content Writing Could Look Like

There’s no point in sugar-coating it: a future with creative AI will be a hard one for content writers. It's already hard for most professional writers in an increasingly saturated market. The growth of freelance work is outpacing total workforce growth by three times.

Add machines to the mix, and the writing market only becomes more saturated. News and media will be flooded with content from humans and machines alike. Books created by AI will stop making news because they’ll become so common. The line between which content comes from humans and which from AI will blur even more, making it difficult for anyone to stand out.

Still, a world where AI programs dominate the field of content writing is a ways off, if it comes at all. The development of revolutionary new technologies is often met with concerns about its impact on jobs. By definition, automation is designed to take certain tasks from humans and hand them over to machines. It changes the nature of work, and often leads to new jobs that compensate for its own weaknesses.

In this way, AI is no different than automation technologies that came before it. A day may come when AI is capable of writing a compelling narrative touching on complex themes, with thought-provoking allegories and surprising twists that enrich the story, but it’s nowhere near there yet. For now, at least, AI can help improve a writer’s content, but it can’t create great content on its own.

Digital technology has accelerated innovation, bringing major societal changes and transforming our everyday lives and work for decades. It’s helped businesses become more efficient, power new solutions, streamline workflows, enable new business models, and a lot more.

Today, many businesses in a wide variety of industries are turning to digital technology to stay customer-oriented and competitive, in some cases completely reshaping the major aspects of their daily processes and interactions with customers. Digital transformation initiatives like that can be a massive undertaking, but the benefits of modern technology make it not only worthwhile, but in many cases necessary. It is estimated that worldwide spending on digital transformation is to reach $2.3 trillion in 2023.

Modern digital transformation can optimize virtually every department and facet of a business, usually through two major changes. The first is digitization, the process of bringing physical processes and even some physical objects into the digital world, and the second is leveraging advanced AI and machine learning systems to speed up processes and improve efficiency.

Shift From Physical Space to Digital

Thanks to the COVID-10 pandemic, many of us are now working online - as well as shopping, maintaining social relationships, and many other aspects of our lives. And while the pandemic may have accelerated this trend, a significant portion of traditionally physical or in-person activities and daily functions were already on track to be digitized as part of digital transformation efforts.

Even one of the most iconic symbols of the COVID era, the dramatic shift to remote working arrangements, was really just an acceleration of a shift already underway. Statistics show that in the last 5 years there was a 44% increase in working remotely.

The broader shift from physical to digital has opened up more opportunities for businesses and created a better experience for end users. Online shopping and digital banking have quickly overtaken traditional brick-and-mortar-based errands, and digital mailrooms can quickly and accurately transform physical documents into digital files.

Today more and more businesses are implementing their digital transformation strategy by moving from traditional operations to digitally transformed processes to offer more to their customers and also to keep up with an increasingly agile work culture.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Adoption For Success

A study by Forbes suggests that in the next 5 years, AI-driven enterprises will be up to 10 times more efficient and hold twice the market share over those that don’t adopt to the technology. This makes AI adoption not only crucial for innovation but important for business survival.

AI supports mature business outcomes, increased ability to leverage data, greater collaboration, and improved processes and analytics. As an example, AI is especially useful in creating and enhancing digital marketing strategies where it can gather data relevant data and help create more targeted campaigns.

Transformation as a Service

While many large corporations realize the need to transform their processes and the value of AI and machine learning for generating useful insights through data analysis, the challenge is how to do so quickly and at scale.

Exela’s answer to this has been to develop highly configurable, ready-made business solution suites that are more plug-and-play than rip-and-replace. We pair this with flexible, global operations, which enables rapid solution deployment and a shorter ramp time. This helps reduce our customers’ transition risk and likely accelerates their return on investment.

With Exela’s Digital Now approach customers can:

- Automate time-consuming and error-prone work

- Digitize paper-based workflows

- Integrate systems and eliminate data silos

- Increase efficiency, productivity, and work quality

- Reduce total cost of ownership

According to a Harvard Business School study, firms that embrace digital tech transformation saw an average 55% growth in gross margins. While companies that weren’t sufficiently prepared to embrace digital tech had substantially lower margin growth, just 37%, for the same period.

Moving Toward Digital Transformation

Over the years, technology has proved capable of driving productivity and improving results, while reducing costs and saving time. Exela has fully embraced the value that automation and digital transformation technologies can offer, and will continue to innovate to push toward continuous advances in those areas. During this global pandemic, and certainly in the future, we expect the value of digital transformation to be even clearer, and for its spread to accelerate.

If you’d like to learn more about how digitization, automation, and AI can help your business, get in touch with us today.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors around the country were burning out. Worker burnout is an issue in many industries, but it can have serious consequences in healthcare in particular. Overwhelmed, overworked, and under-supported workers run the risk of making errors on the job. And when your job involves administering complicated medical treatments and saving patients’ lives, the stakes are that much higher.

With so much on the line, you might think healthcare professionals would be eager for workload-reducing, time-saving technology. But, in fact, the medical field’s relationship with tech is a bit more complicated than that.

In theory, technology could do prognostic and diagnostic work quicker than a doctor, and just as accurately, which could inform triage and help direct doctors where their attention is needed most.

One ophthalmologist spoke with CNN recently about what AI could do for the overworked doctors in his field. He partnered with an AI research center to develop an algorithm that can diagnose eye diseases in around 30 seconds. In testing, the algorithm’s accuracy matched that of doctors themselves — it got it right 94.5% of the time.

The above is just one example of how AI could lessen the burden on overworked physicians, bettering both their own health and the well-being of their patients. But hospitals — and doctors — are still much slower to adopt this kind of technology than professionals in other industries.

Why Doctors are Skeptical of Automation

Healthcare automation technology faces a number of hurdles before it can be implemented and relied upon, but the most difficult for many solutions to overcome is the doctors themselves. In a 2019 Medscape survey, nearly half of physicians in the U.S. reported being uncomfortable with or anxious about AI-powered software. Many don’t trust it to be accurate enough. Others worry that it’s here to replace them.

But many AI researchers recognize the immense potential new technology has for bettering the healthcare system. How can they convince doctors, too?

Building Trust in Automated Systems

When dealing with broad skepticism of an entire industry, in this case healthcare AI technology, it becomes very important for companies to differentiate themselves from the rest of the field. Not all AI systems are created equal, and each one should be judged on its own merits. Companies need to build consumer trust in their own specific AI systems in the following ways:

1. Undersell and overdeliver.

When introducing any new technology, it’s important to properly manage expectations and not overhype the solution’s capabilities. IBM’s Watson Oncology AI was marketed on exaggerated claims that sold it as a revolution in cancer diagnosis, but reports showed that it consistently returned inaccurate results that could be unsafe. Tesla made a similar mistake in a different industry space when overselling its self-driving cars as fully autonomous, until a number of accidents made it obvious they weren’t.

In both cases, bold, attention-grabbing claims about a technology’s abilities led to even greater negative attention when the technology fell short. The unfortunate result of overselling is that big claims that are proven false garner the biggest negative reactions.

Getting buy-in for an AI initiative is important, and it can be tempting to make lofty claims and hype up a new product. However, to start solving the long-term trust problem, AI companies and healthcare organizations should take care to verify all claims and err on the side of underselling. It’s better to exceed expectations than fail to live up to them.

2. Be clear that humans are still in control.

No existing AI system runs so independently that it never needs human oversight or review, especially not in the healthcare space. Yet doctors often say that fear of giving complete control of their patients' wellbeing over to a machine is a key factor in their apprehension regarding AI. Clear communication regarding the nature of the AI tool as it relates to doctors’ and other healthcare professionals’ day-to-day work is essential to dispelling this mindset.

The fact is, even the most advanced and capable AI systems are no replacement for the value of human doctors and medical teams. Accurate diagnoses are only part of a dynamic relationship between patients and their healthcare providers. When used properly, AI streamlines those processes to promote deeper healthcare relationships. Be sure to emphasize the continued role of human safeguards and compassion in healthcare AI to put doctor’s minds at ease.

3. Highlight the things AI can handle.

Of course, you don’t want to make the AI system sound so limited in scope that it seems not worth the investment. There are plenty of examples of AI success stories where the technology has proven faster and more accurate than the people that rely on them.

For example, Google’s LYNA (LYmph Node Assistant) has proven effective at learning how to analyze slides with greater precision than human pathologists. When distinguishing between slides that exhibited cancerous cells and slides that didn’t, LYNA was correct 99% of the time.

The best way to market any AI solution is to emphasize its capabilities in a way that promotes — but does not exaggerate — its specific value to human users. It shouldn’t be marketed as a catch-all, cure-all solution, but rather a means of completing a particular task. This helps limit the hype, while still making the case that the system adds real value and improves doctors’ ability to do their jobs.

4. Use big, accurate datasets.

Diagnostic AI is based on machine learning and pattern recognition, which means the bigger and better the dataset it’s trained on, the more accurate its conclusions will be.

For instance, researchers at the University of California in San Diego trained an AI system with records from more than 1.3 million patient visits to a medical center in China, including highly specific doctors’ notes and lab test results. When put to the test, the AI returned diagnoses of glandular fever, roseola, chicken pox, hand-foot-mouth-disease, and different strains of the flu, and maintained an accuracy rate of 90-97%.

Final Thoughts on AI in the Healthcare Systems

The bottom line is, when it comes to AI, data matters. Make sure your systems use the maximum amount of high-quality data possible, and use that as a major selling point for your solution.

AI systems have improved efficiency, productivity, and accuracy in a wide variety of industries, and can offer the same benefits to healthcare. On top of that, wider adoption of AI-powered healthcare systems will fuel development of even more powerful healthcare technologies. Assuaging doctors’ concerns and demonstrating the real value of AI systems is the first step in launching healthcare into a new and exciting future.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our society and has forced everyone to reevaluate basic daily tasks. This unprecedented change in our lives is apparent in the current work environment, where the disease has required business leaders to evaluate all aspects of business interactions, including the use of office space, meeting protocols, safety, productivity, and more.

But the business world, with its contemporary and ever-increasing adoption of digitization and automation, might have been more prepared for these changes than many had realized. Technology has enabled us to digitize and automate many previously manual tasks, limit our physical interactions as much as possible, and envision a future where we can reopen our workspaces safely, and without productivity loss.

Digital Solutions Lead the Way Forward

Though the future of work remains somewhat unclear, organizations are evaluating how to adapt to the “new normal” once they decide it's time to reopen office spaces. For instance, how will an organization handle safety protocols? How will remote work and operations factor into office space occupancy and functionality decisions? And what alternative methods of communication and virtual meetings will be needed?

All of these questions stem from one underlying question – how can an organization continue to be effective while maintaining the proper protocols required by this “new normal?” Here are a few examples of how going digital can help:

1. Replicate physical interactions with virtual interactions

While there are certainly situations where an in-person meeting is preferable, many daily activities can be made virtual without loss of productivity. Daily tasks, such as deliveries, lobby and reception services, and office management, can become less physical and more virtual with an added layer of automation.

Some examples of this include intelligent lockers, virtual concierge services, and space management technology, which remove the go-between and help create a digital office experience. When a courier needs to make a drop-off, an intelligent locker makes for easy shipping, receiving, and storage with no direct human contact. When the recipient visits the office, a software-enabled kiosk provides a contactless office check-in experience, providing useful information, assisting guests as needed, and virtually managing any interactions.

Through this kind of smart office technology, occupancy rates and social distancing can also be managed. A visitor can be informed of how many people are in a particular room, and this can help people choose a suitable working location and avoid having too many people in any one place.

2. Digitize paper processes

Mail and print are physical assets that remain an essential part of business despite the digitization of some paper-based processes, but both are undergoing a digital makeover. Digital mailroom and print solutions have entered the forefront of office process improvement, particularly during the pandemic, as organizations are looking for ways to eliminate the need for physical interactions.

Digital mail solutions offer regular mail services for a remote workforce with automated mail digitization, classification, and routing capabilities. In addition to minimizing the need to possess a physical piece of mail, digital mail systems can offer far superior visibility, reporting, and control into the mail system, tracking mail volumes, recipients, and actionable items.

Digital mail and print solutions offer the ability to print from anywhere through a web application. This includes software that creates print-ready documents, cost estimates, delivery options, and live status reporting. Both of these tools existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but their value is becoming more apparent with each passing day of remote work.

3. Safe, smart reopening procedures

When an office space reopens, having a plan in place to maintain employee health and safety is paramount. While hand sanitizer, social distancing, and office cleanliness will all factor into maintaining a safe working environment, organizations should be looking to take reopening strategies a step further.

To start, consider implementing a virtual (web-based) services portal to enable a safe and productive return to the office. This portal can provide a means for employees to make service requests, help to manage welcome services and temperature checks, coordinate the distribution of PPE equipment and supplies, and track room checks and sanitization services. For remote workers, a virtual services portal can also enable certain curbside services, such as dropping off documents for shredding and picking up or dropping off packages.

Final Thoughts Going Forward

Most importantly, the onus is on organizations to be proactive, mindful, and communicative during this pandemic, and moving forward. But as we do move forward, it’s important to understand that we have the tools and technology to maintain productivity, while keeping a safe, healthy work environment. With a sound digitization strategy and a technology-based process overhaul, there’s an opportunity for all of us to become more effective than ever before.

In the past few decades alone, “business as usual” has been significantly altered by new technology. However, despite rapid technological advancements, signing documents has remained largely unchanged. In an increasingly digital world, exchanging legally enforceable signatures is still commonly a physical, paper-based process.

For many organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a stark reminder of the value that digital transformation can offer. As companies around the globe adjust to accommodate social distancing guidelines to slow the spread of the virus, the value of solutions that enable remote working arrangements has been made all the more clear.

E-Signatures with DrySign

As a global leader in business process optimization, Exela has developed a powerful suite of solutions designed to facilitate our customers’ digital transformations. With the launch of DrySign, a new Electronic Signature platform, Exela adds this critical component to our comprehensive set of digital solutions.

As the COVID-19 pandemic maintains its grip on large parts of the world, and with the potential for more quarantine and lockdown orders to slow future waves, many businesses are prioritizing solutions that enable a more agile and remote workforce.¹ This makes the ability to request and receive enforceable signatures from multiple parties anywhere, any time, more important than ever.

As a cloud-based web application, DrySign enables an end-to-end paper-free documentation process, in which you can draft, discuss, execute, and administer contracts from anywhere, at any time, on any device. DrySign is designed to overcome physical distances while also enhancing document security and process transparency.

Maintaining a clear audit trail on a physical document can be difficult, but DrySign makes document tracking simple. Once a request for digital signature(s) is submitted, the document’s status can be tracked in real-time. All signed documents are archived on cloud servers and can be accessed by simply signing in to the app. This minimizes tampering risk and false signatures, and ensures that documents get executed in a timely manner.

E-Signatures as a Part of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is not only helping businesses better survive these unprecedented times, but also delivering valuable competitive advantages in an evolving landscape. Secure, reliable, and enforceable e-signatures are an important part of that transformation. Learn more about how DrySign can help make your organization’s digital transformation a success, or try it out yourself with the free version.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebailey1/2020/06/02/is-your-supply-chain-ready-for-a-second-wave-of-covid-19/#53475be970c6

It’s clear that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely have a lasting impact on many things, from the way we travel to the popularity of remote work arrangements and contactless delivery options. Add to that list the way individuals and small businesses make and request payments. As this new white paper from Finextra and Exela discusses, the economic crisis brought about by the pandemic will create a situation where both payers and payees will benefit from Request-to-Pay (RtP), a more agile solution to settling invoices and debts.

Request-to-Pay removes some of the friction related to sending and receiving payments and increases liquidity - a crucial benefit for the post-coronavirus world.

Influx of Gig Workers

One of the biggest groups RtP stands to benefit is the newly-unemployed. The closures, temporary or permanent, of businesses across the world led to a massive wave of layoffs and furloughs. According to Fortune, 44.2 million people filed for unemployment services in the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic, as of mid June. This spike will likely lead many who previously held full-time positions to turn to freelance or gig work as a source of income.

With a less stable income, many of these workers are likely to opt out of direct debit bill payments, as they may not be able to guarantee that their accounts will contain the necessary funds when the bills come due. But with Request-to-Pay, they get a direct line of communication with the payment requestor, as well as the ability to renegotiate and submit partial payment, allowing them to retain more control over their obligations and payments.

Lenders Pulled in Two Directions

As more people are faced with the looming or present threat of financial instability, many will turn to banks for support. This will naturally cause lenders to want to tighten their lending criteria in order to protect their assets and invest wisely. However, at the same time, due to the nature of the crisis leading to the rise in financial instability, banks and other financial institutions may face political pressure to take on more risk to help support families and small businesses.

In some cases, utility companies facing similar pressures have sought flexible tools that would allow people to slip into shortfall without taking a sizable credit hit. Financial institutions may want to adopt similar practices in order to assist their customers through these unprecedented times.

Request-to-Pay can mitigate some of the risks associated with lending by combining an instant payment function with an easy communications channel where parties can enter into a dialogue to discuss and potentially update terms of payment. This not only reduces some of the costs associated with chasing down payments, but also limits the need to involve third parties like debt collection agencies.

In many cases, it’s in the lender’s benefit to allow some flexibility in payment terms. Many customers may only need a few extra days. RtP makes it easy to formally agree to this type of modification, allowing lenders to avoid a lengthy and expensive arrears process and instead receive payment, albeit a little later.

This type of flexibility is made possible by the speed at which RtP delivers funds - that is, instantly. The ability to send and receive payments instantly creates greater liquidity, making it less risky to negotiate bills and invoices.

Conclusion

As COVID-19’s impact continues to reshape our economy, cash flow will be top of mind for small businesses. At the same time, faced with unexpected job losses, millions of consumers may enter the gig economy, forcing them to adapt to a life with less consistent income and less financial security. Financial institutions and lenders will face pressure from governments to resist the natural inclination to tighten lending criteria in order to provide support to families and small businesses as they deal with the financial fallout of COVID-19. Innovations like RtP can help dampen that blow and smooth out the transition.

New products that harness real-time payments and Open Banking are uniquely suited to thrive in this new normal. Such innovation is often stifled by apathy or inertia, but the current crisis has invigorated businesses to actively seek out paradigm-shifting solutions like RtP. As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic to discover a new normal, easier, more flexible payment options may be one way it changes for the better.

For a deeper dive into how Request-to-Pay is tailor-made to solve some of today’s biggest financial challenges, download the full whitepaper here.

When business managers need to make a purchase, they often use a regulated purchase process that includes research, comparisons, a bid process, and an approval matrix. When done this way, the process concludes with the creation of a purchase order (PO). The PO document explains the details of the purchase (what was bought, how many, at what price) and a unique ID number.

After the purchase order is authorized, it is sent to the supplier who validates it and delivers the goods or services and then submits an invoice for payment. When everything proceeds as it should, the invoice is matched up with the PO by its ID number, and the accounts payable (AP) team is able to confirm the details, see that the purchase was authorized, and easily approve payment of the bill.

Not every purchase a company makes follows this process, however. Some purchases are unique and not in the system, certain transactions need to be handled quickly, and other circumstances arise that don’t allow for the purchase to go through the usual approval processes. In this case, the resultant non-PO purchase results in a non-PO invoice, sometimes called an expense invoice, which must be handled outside the system, and so outside the typical approval workflow.

Non-PO invoices may be submitted via email, regular mail, or in person, but whatever the means, these invoices are difficult, if not impossible, to be integrated into the standard purchasing and payment system. Instead, a manual, and often complex and time-consuming workflow is kicked off to get these bills paid.

Automating the PO Process

The relatively straightforward process of creating purchase orders and handling corresponding invoices within a procurement system makes it an ideal area for automation. When purchase requests are created within the system, they can be automatically routed and monitored within the workflow, and exceptions can be automatically flagged and escalated. No need for the complex approval matrix system that bogs down so many procurement and AP processes.

When a PO-invoice comes back into the system, intelligent matching technology can quickly and efficiently match invoices with corresponding purchase orders and identify any irregularities. When a properly approved PO is matched with an invoice and verified, even the payment can be automated and the whole process runs smoothly. Once finalized and paid, purchase orders and invoices can be stored in a centralized archive, reducing the potential for missed invoices or duplicate payments, and providing the finance team with informative records.

What About Automation for Non-PO?

Automating non-PO orders has never been as simple. These purchases must typically be added into the approval workflow manually, and they often move through a complex process that can only begin after the invoice is received from the supplier. To make matters worse, this type of invoice tends to come through the mail, or possibly email, so there is not even the chance of having an API connect the supplier and purchaser’s systems.

This isn’t the only way a non-PO purchase gums up the works. Just because a purchase originates outside of the standard purchasing process doesn’t exempt it from scrutiny - in fact, it may demand even more rigorous investigation. Once a non-PO invoice is received, the accounts payable team often must confirm whether it is from an approved vendor and check the price against comparable products or services already within the system.

If any exceptions are found, they are typically handled manually. This can lead to downstream issues, such as late payments or incomplete purchase information, which greatly impacts the finance team’s ability to monitor and analyze the company’s spend and assign purchases to the right cost centers.

Automating Non-PO Invoice Management

On the bright side, technology does exist that can bridge the gap between existing PO systems and non-PO purchases. Exela’s all-in-one Procure-to-Pay solution, for example, is capable of automating even non-PO and non-EDI invoices. For paper, we use high definition scanners and powerful optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) technology to digitize invoices and extract information.

From an email we can skip the scanning and go straight to the data capture. Either way, we then transmit that data into the customer’s approval system, or into our own purchasing and payments platform so that the invoice can be easily approved and paid.

No matter how the purchase was created and no matter how the invoice is received, whether it was through our procurement system, our customer’s, or even a phone call and a mailed bill, every step of the process can be handled seamlessly through one centralized system. Exela even handles the backend investigative work that must be done to confirm the legitimacy of a non-PO invoice and supplement purchasing and payment records.

Our system automates approval for purchases from approved vendors and backfills the necessary information to provide better visibility and transparency to improve financial operations.

Conclusion

As with so many other business processes, some operations are fairly straightforward, and maybe even already automated. And then there are the other processes that tend to be messy and complex. From our point of view at Exela, handling PO and non-PO purchases is just another way we work hard behind the scenes to reduce complexity, speed up operations, and provide value to our customers.