Kofax and Visa to smooth B2B payment challenges

Kofax, which provides smart process applications for the business-critical 'first mile' of customer interactions, today announced that Visa has deployed enhanced data and invoice management capabilities in the Asia Pacific region utilising Kofax TotalAgility, a unified smart process application development and deployment platform. 

From left: Howard Dratler, Executive Vice President of Field Operations at Kofax, Olivia Leong, Head of Commercial and Prepaid Payment Solutions, Visa Asia Pacific, and Matthew Horne, Regional Director, Channel and Partnership Development, Visa Commercial Solutions, Visa.

A B2B payments suite from Visa incorporates Kofax technology to help businesses better overcome the challenges that typically stem from a lack of process automation, particularly in accounts payable and receivables management processes. The Visa solution is offered to issuing partners, which are typically financial institutions. The institutions in turn choose how they want to offer them to their business customers. 

"Kofax's solution supports Visa in delivering better payment data to businesses and governments that its issuing partners serve today," commented Howard Dratler, Executive Vice President of Field Operations at Kofax. "Visa selected the Kofax platform based on four very important criteria - flexibility, accuracy, timeliness and efficiency - in managing transactional information. In doing so, we are able to help Visa address key challenges that plague businesses when managing payable and receivable processes."

Kofax TotalAgility, Kofax Kapow and Kofax Altosoft Insight analytics products interact with Visa's B2B transaction information to deliver specific outcomes for business process and corporate cash flow management. These include:

Source: Kofax.

• Automatically capturing details such as dates, product and service descriptions and amounts to enable a three-way match of purchase orders, invoices and payment instructions, thereby eliminating time-consuming manual intervention to achieve both efficient reconciliations and payments.
• Providing and analysing accurate and timely data to enable greater visibility into expenditures, collections and cash flow management.
• Delivering data in flexible formats that enable organisations to seamlessly integrate that information into their existing ERP systems.

"The starting point in developing a frictionless solution for businesses was the recognition of the challenges that organisations face today in accounts payable and receivables processes," said Olivia Leong, Head of Commercial and Prepaid Payment Solutions, Visa Asia Pacific. 

"The basic premise for both Visa and Kofax was that business is never ‘as usual.' For this reason, we focused on ways to reduce the typical friction that exists between these processes. The Kofax platform supports Visa's mission to continuously evolve our payment services to ensure relevance amidst the constantly changing demands in the business, financial and regulatory environment and to continue to be the best way to pay and be paid."

While any company which must issue invoices for Visa cards would have a use for such technology, Leong said that the corporate travel segment has embraced the Kofax-powered platform since it was launched in October 2013. A business, she said, might want to enrich the invoice data they receive about corporate travel usage. The typical Visa card transaction with a corporate travel agency would have the merchant, transaction value and the date listed in a traditional credit card statement. Visa could take the invoice file from the corporate travel agency, run it through their Kofax-based platform, and match additional data with the financial record so that a credit card statement could come with more details, such as the class of travel and flight number. Such information could also be integrated into existing ERP systems for the business, so that it can plan and forecast corporate travel budgets more easily. Maverick spending can even be uncovered with Kofax analytics tools.

Leong added that businesses can apply the technology in other ways, especially with unstructured data that used to be impractical to search in the past, with a review of the existing travel policy for example. "Organisations end up not doing it most of the time as it is complex and time consuming," Leong explained. "Organisations won't review their travel policies often but if they do intend to do it, how do we take that friction away?"

She shared that a business can use the Visa platform to compare publicly available information about flights with the corporate packages they have negotiated to see if they are truly getting  a good deal. Kofax's Kapow can trawl public domain information online to check prices for a particular flight sector, analyse them intelligently against factors such as travel restrictions for an air ticket, and come back with an answer in minutes. 

Visa's investment in the Kofax solution and focus on payable and receivable process automation to achieve quality transactional data is perfectly timed as the Asia Pacific region is witnessing a revival of corporate spending in analytics platforms, the companies say. Gartner has projected that this expenditure could reach US$1.6 billion by 2017, and Visa's Matthew Horne, Regional Director, Channel and Partnership Development, Visa Commercial Solutions, says that under 10% of companies in the region have adopted enterprise resource planning (ERP), with most accounting activities today done via simple spreadsheets.

According to Horne, the most active market for the Visa solution is India on the back of the corporate travel industry, followed by Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan.

The Kofax TotalAgility platform includes multichannel capture, business process and case management, data integration, advanced analytics and mobility in a single platform, while the Kofax Kapow integration and automation platform acquires, enhances, and delivers information to enterprise applications. Kofax Altosoft Insight features rapid, no-coding development, near real-time reporting, dashboard, visualisation and extract, transform, load (ETL) capabilities for both data and process analytics.