Hacking Payments: Using Automation to Unlock your Business’s Potential

Traditional business models can be hard to manage and tedious in today’s booming online retail market. With the pandemic, brick-and-mortar shopping has taken a hit to give way to Quick Commerce or other forms of digital retail. Payment Automation Solutions can help your business keep up in rapidly changing times.

What is a Payment Automation Solution?

Payment Automation solutions are integrated programs that enable their clients to make checks, ACH (Automated Clearing House), virtual cards, and wire payments in one package. This allows automation to go beyond the purchase-to-pay model (P2P) which makes departments wait around for invoices before each beginning payment process.

How does it work?

These integrated payment solutions often work by applying automated algorithms for handling a diverse array of payment-related data, enacting prescribed actions without any substantial human involvement.

One of the most critical and time-consuming tasks of the payment process is invoice processing. Here, departments receive invoices in heterogeneous formats from multiple sources that need to be interpreted, stored, analyzed for information, and used to finalize a review that either approves or rejects them. These tasks can be automated to enable departments to focus on critical operations such as dealing with fraud or preventing chargebacks. Rather than performing monotonous, time-consuming work that can yield erroneous results, Payment Automation allows teams to reorient themselves to long-term goals.

Additionally, Automation also enables handling and verification of Automated Clearing House or ACH payments. This kind of payment is digital and is made by transferring funds directly from one account to another. Since this payment method necessitates that the recipient’s data is verified and stored securely, robust Payment Automation platforms store and manage this information and prevent duplication.

Does Your Business Need to Automate Payments?

As businesses around the globe took a hit due to the closing down of industries and brick and mortar shops, online retail skipped and hopped ahead. Digital payments rose to the forefront as people increasingly chose contactless payments and deliveries for their safety. This shift in consumer behavior has irrevocably changed the landscape of retail.

On February 21, 2021, the Ministry of Commerce in Pakistan reported that the local online retail business is booming amidst the pandemic. E-Commerce market size has increased more than 35% over the first quarter of 2021, increasing from Rs. 71 billion last year in the same quarter to Rs. 96 billion recently. (Zeb Khan, 2021)

Furthermore, data also shows that at least 46% of all Pakistanis access the internet every day, one-third of these users go on to make an online purchase also. According to studies into user behavior, 56% of consumers claim to discontinue usage of a website if it doesn’t offer the payment method they prefer. (Tribune, 2021) With a rapidly growing market, consumers have come to expect to pay with their method of choice, making offering local payment methods and a diverse range of options a necessity.

Payment Automation enables retailers to capture Pakistan’s thriving e-Commerce market by offering integrated platforms that offer multiple local payment methods. Automating your Payment process in this manner yields more benefits as well, such as:

Reduced Invoicing Costs: Digital Payments are more economical than paper ones. Processing paper-based invoices on average cost $12.90 and can prove to be even more expensive if there are any complications such as fraudulent activity or erroneous data entry in the process. (Concur, n.d.) E-invoicing is cheaper and faster than paper invoices it also allows companies more insight into the process by capturing more data.

Quicker Cycles: Slow invoice processing and tedious record entry snatch time away from your Accounts Payable teams. Digitizing payment processes means that your business can get paid sooner and so can your suppliers. This allows your business to save costs and process invoices faster by availing of early payment discounts and increasing supplier satisfaction.

Fewer Errors and Duplication: Inaccuracies in your Payments process consume critical time, damage supplier relationships, and may also cause duplications while filing payments. Automated solutions decrease the likelihood of these mishaps, giving your business a robust foundation to build on.

Fraud Prevention: Cheques continue to be the most targeted form of payment by those committing fraudulent activities. The AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey by J. P. Morgan highlight that 81%  of the companies were targeted by payment frauds in 2019, showing that organizations are still grappling with criminal activity and must adapt robust Automated solutions to secure their sensitive information and data. (J.P. Morgan, 2021)

How to Automate your Payment Process?

To efficiently automate your payments, you must consider the specific needs of your organization and teams. Owing to the recent boom in eCommerce retail in Pakistan many retailers are turning to the platforms discussed below to handle their digital payments:

1. Alfa Business: Created by Bank Al Falah, Alfa allows retailers to create an e-Shop through its app. It also allows novel features such One-Tap Merchant Loans.
2. Foree: By providing a WhatsApp-like experience for sending and receiving money, Foree optimizes payments for those business owners that have multiple accounts and want to avoid making payments from the wrong accounts or any duplications.
3. QisstPay: For retailers that want to adopt a Buy Now Pay Later Structure, Qisstpay allows your consumers to make payments in installments.

Deciding which platform is the right fit for your organization can be hard. Once, you factor in the costs of overhauling manual systems and conducting several feasibility studies, deciding which platform offers the easiest transition for both you and your customers is critical and expensive. bSecure works to ease this transformation by offering a simple plugin integration with your online shop. Our checkout experience is frictionless with Onpage Checkout so that consumers feel no frustration when shopping and are less likely to abandon their carts. Moreover, we provide a host of other features like integrations with QisstPay and a range of local payment methods to make sure your consumers have all the choices they need.

Setting Up Made Easy with bSecure: We aim to streamline the checkout process for your customers and simplify managing your business, for you. For this purpose, our setup is as straightforward as installing a plugin! We provide integrations with your favorites such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento -  for detailed information on our easy installation process, review our guides on this link.

By enabling retailers to adapt easily, bSecure allows Pakistan’s business owners a hassle-free transition into the digital. Not only have we dedicated time to optimizing the management of orders, but we have also paid close attention to building a checkout experience that allows consumers to shop carefree. At bSecure we aim to optimize the entire retail experience and some of the features that help us achieve this, are:

1. Communicate in their Language: bSecure allows you to meet your consumers where they are, by enabling Urdu Checkout, our Builders can provide our seamless Checkout experience in their consumer’s language. Additionally, our RoboCall feature helps with improving Order Fulfillment by enabling you to make calls in both Urdu and English to your clients.
2. Manage All your Stores: To allow our Builders to manage all their stores conveniently from one place, bSecure has introduced Multi-Store that reduces redirections for you. For detailed information on Multi-Stores read our guide here.
3. Bykea Integrations: A large part of online retail is Quick Commerce. For this purpose, we provide our builders with the ability to integrate with Bykea’s delivery services. This allows our Builders to take care of multiple parts of the Order Fulfillment process from the same platform, read how to integrate with Bykea on this link.
4. Instant Shop: Creating and managing an online eCommerce shop on one of the traditional platforms is not for every business. Therefore, bSecure enables its Builders to create shops from its platforms instantly! This allows retailers with a small range of products to create catalogs and put their business on the map instantly. These catalogs can be linked with your social media to direct traffic directly to your Shop, read more about this feature here.

Automate Now:

Rather than spending valuable company time and resources on working out individual contracts with merchant banks, let bSecure do the grunt work. bSecure can ensure that your customers can pay in whichever manner they choose and help manage each payment Cash on Delivery payments or those made with a Credit and Debit Card individually. From offering services like Multi-Stores to our largest customers to enabling Instant Shop for our growing partners, we are automating the most tedious part of the process for you, to join our Builders click on the button below!

References:

Concur. (n.d.). The True Costs of Paper-Based Invoice Processing and Disbursements - SAP Concur Singapore. Concur Blog. Retrieved November 14, 2021, from https://www.concur.com.sg/resource-centre/whitepapers/true-costs-paper-based-invoice-processing-and-disbursements

The country’s internet penetration stands at 54%. (2021). Tribune. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2312994/countrys-internet-penetration-stands-at-54

J.P. Morgan. (2021). Examining the Threat and Impact of Fraud. https://www.jpmorgan.com/commercial-banking/insights/afp-fraud-survey-2020

Zeb Khan, M. (2021, February 12). Pakistan’s e-commerce market growing - Newspaper - DAWN.COM. Dawn. https://www.dawn.com/news/1606875

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