CIOInsider India Magazine
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Aditya Tulsian, CEO & Rajeev Chari, Co-Founder & COO
Baskar Ganapathy, CTO
Founded in 2015, numberz AR is an award winning, cloud-based, enterprise solution that enhances the working capital of the businesses by significantly improving the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of collections. Integrating with financial service platforms and with the leading ERPs, numberz helps to automate the AR processes while providing actionable AR insights – providing better control and visibility to the CFOs and the Finance leaders. In a brief discussion, Co-Founder and COO, Rajeev Chari, tells CIO Insider how numberz is a one-stop-shop for corporates to automate, analyse and accelerate all things AR.
In conversation with Rajeev Chari, Co-Founder & COO, numberz
Enterprises are seeking methods to reduce the burden of payment collection by adopting adequate solutions which result in the improvement of accounts receivable. Tell us about numberz’ advancement in this particular department of a business?
Businesses are doing a lot in the area of money-in. The need is to have more control over the process and make it more predictable. Most business leaders believe that this process can’t be influenced – since they can’t change the client behaviour. They end up either throwing more bodies or a generic tech solution at this issue. The result is collection process that is marred by lack of visibility, delays, disputes, high efforts, poor client experience etc., leading to high DSOs, higher cost of collections and higher risk of write-offs.
numberz's approach to collections is to identify and act on two key areas. First, things that are controllable, which are mostly internal process inefficiencies
and second, the areas that are ‘influence’able viz. the challenges faced by the payer. Integrating with the existing solutions and data sources, numberz uses its workflow automation modules along with the insights that it uncovers to orchestrate the collection strategies basis the client payment behaviour. Whether it’s the Automated Reminder Engine to create communication strategies, the AR CRM module to ensure close coordination between the teams, or the client module to provide visibility and incentives to the clients to pay - numberz offers an effective way to discover the issues and then operationalize the tactics.
At numberz, we aspire to ensure that businesses grow and never run out of money
numberz is a B2B collections/accounts receivables SaaS platform, that makes getting paid faster, easier and predictable. It improves visibility and predictability of cash flows and credit risks. This is done by reducing sales outstanding, disputes and bad-debts by 15-20 percent and increasing the productivity of collections and finance team by 30- 50 percent. Better collections with lesser heart burn - essentially much higher control over ‘money-in’!
To be able to achieve the above results, numberz improves the key aspects of the collections value chain – people, process and technology. We enable all the key stakeholders to collaborate seamlessly, towards e2e collections process automation and insights. The firm innovatively captures debtors’ transactional and behavioural data along with third party data sources to manage AR. Essentially it removes the one-size-fits-all approach by segmenting the clients and hence creating tailored collections strategies. It also deploys proprietary analytics to obtain actionable insights ensuring proactive collections. Along with this, the company integrates with loyalty programs, payment gateways, insurance providers & other financial service providers to facilitate AR management.
Please throw some light on one of
numberz’s successful client ventures.
One of our marquee customers is Konica Minolta India – a key player in the office automation space. Under the helm of the CFO, Nitin Gupta, this Indian arm of the Japanese conglomerate had a clear mission to enhance its business footprint across its segments – without sacrificing profitability and working capital. One of the key initiatives was to ensure effective management of accounts receivable. That is when they partnered with numberz. Implementing numberz created a lot of visibility and efficiency within the system. The coverage of each credit controller, roughly, has increased by 33 percent - they can serve a higher number of customers, more effectively. Also, the time spent in creating reports and obtaining insights has reduced substantially. This has helped the client to improve their collections; they don’t have to juggle with their vendor payments to manage cash flows. The increase in efficiency of the teams is also helping them to run the department operations profitably without increasing the team size.
Some of these approaches have also seen a lot of validation from the ecosystem. numberz was a winner of 2019 NASSCOM Emerge 50 awards. It also a bagged the Accenture Applied Intelligence Awards in 2019.
How do you intend to bring in more enablements in your platform for a more supportive numberz? Brief us about your plans for the organization’s future.
At numberz, we aspire to ensure that businesses grow and never run out of money. Towards that end, and specific to AR, we are on a path to create both product and thought leadership. As was mentioned before, the AR/Collections problem is prevalent globally – albeit for nuanced reasons. With proprietary data and analytics, we intend to explore various avenues, providing the best practices, services and value to the enterprises. We have begun with integrating with loyalty platforms and FIs that create incentives for the ‘pay early’ and ‘pay later’ behaviour. We also plan to integrate with other FI service providers facilitating receivable insurance, invoice financing, risk scoring etc. which will provide client-specific, unique offerings. Further, we intend to expand the global footprint, especially in US, ME and SEA markets. Parallelly, we will continue to expand the product prowess by utilising AI, ML and RPA capabilities.
