FTNI Blog

What Charles Darwin had to say about the evolution of species applies to business enterprises as well: adaptability is key to survival.

Consider accounts receivable (A/R) operations. The proliferation of check payments during the 20^th Century led many businesses down the path of automation, in the form of lockboxes (managed in house or outsourced), which helped to reduce costs by compressing collection cycles and eliminating labor-intensive processing steps. By the turn of the 21^st Century, however, the proliferation of new payment methods and channels (ACH, cards, online and mobile), created a new, more complex environment, as companies, acceding to customer demands for more payment options, were forced to implement disparate systems for accepting and processing receivables. What has emerged are corporate A/R operations bogged down by costly, error-prone manual processes spread across numerous legacy systems.

Electronic payments continue to be a key focus for both B2C and B2B organizations as companies look to evolve their payment processing and accounts receivables capabilities—and supporting technology—to keep up with rapidly-changing customer payment preferences.

Recently, our Director of Sales & Marketing, Zac Robinson, sat down with the Midlands Business Journal to discuss the ongoing evolution of electronic payment technologies and the value of companies moving to a truly integrated approach that allows them to accept, process and post any payment method, from any payment channel; all from a single platform.

Whether you’re one of the world’s largest corporations, a small Internet store or somewhere in between, doing business online is a requirement in today’s connected economy—B2B organizations are no longer the exception. And making the leap from online business to mobile business is increasingly a priority as business customers expect the companies they interact with to make the move to mobile right alongside them.

For most businesses, however, making the move to mobile is proving a bit more complicated than it might have first sounded. Taking your business mobile is about more than creating a cool app to sell your products and services, it’s about invoicing, electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) and 24/7 account management. It’s about doing all that safely and securely while offering a great end user experience.

Mobile also means customers can do business with you around the clock…from anywhere, on any smart device. What better way to grow your business even while you sleep, right? Yet mobile business is more likely to keep you up at night given all the headlines around security, online fraud, identify theft, data breaches and the explosion of malware threats.

It was a busy but productive 2014 at FTNI. We know that many of you were equally busy and may have missed some of the content we produced throughout the year. So, we thought we’d take the opportunity to create a round-up of all the content created for your easy perusal.

We hope you found these blogs, infographic, eBooks and product Information informative and useful as you continued to learn more about integrated receivables and straight-through processing. We look forward to providing you with even more great content in the 2015!

Let’s face it, the traditional processes surrounding the processing and management of business-to-business accounts receivable are slow, inefficient and expensive. But both times and technology are changing, giving businesses an opportunity to revamp their processes to be more effective and efficient than ever before.

With consumer reliance on mobile technology growing by the day, combined with increased mobile adoption by businesses, mobile is the next great wave of payment technology adoption for traditional business receivables. By 2016, business mobile usage is expected to be 13 times greater than it is today.

As we take a look at recent trends, data and what we are seeing with our own customers, a few things are certain. As the payments landscape changes, we see more payment types and channels being added but not many (if any) being phased out. This translates into increased complexity of payments processing for businesses today and into the future.

Checks Remain Strong but Move toward Electronic Imaging

For example, checks are still in wide use and are not going away as many had predicted in the past. The volume of checks is lower than other payment types, but businesses are still relying on them for both accounts payable and receivables. However, trends show consumers are adopting new methods to enhance the way these checks are processed. Nearly one in six checks are now deposited as an electronic image rather than paper and we expect this trend to continue growing significantly in the future.

Fraud Continues to be a Concern

One of the reasons that businesses and consumers still rely on checks could have to do with fraud concerns. Fraudulent transactions accounted for $6.1 billion in value, representing 31.1 million unauthorized transactions in 2012. Of this amount, card fraud substantially outpaced both check and ACH fraud rates, representing 92% of all unauthorized transactions. That clearly poses a concern for businesses who want to provide convenience to their customers but avoid fraud loss. Businesses must continue to focus on security, such as providing end-to-end encryption to ensure the transaction is secure from initiation to posting through to reconciliation. This becomes even more important with the imminent proliferation of mobile payments.

Mobile Payments Abound

Mobile payments are on their way to becoming the new norm. In North America, mobile transactions accounted for nearly one-fifth of all transactions last year, making up approximately $37 billion in volume. Both businesses and consumers alike are embracing the mobile trend and increasingly leveraging mobile remote deposit capture (mRDC), in addition to credit card and ACH-facilitated mobile payments, for more traditional payment remittances. More than one in eight Americans have used their mobile devices to deposit checks. Furthermore, of the 17% of checks paid as electronic images in 2012, 93% of them came from business customers.

No doubt, smartphone payment usage will only continue to increase as the number of smartphone users is anticipated to be nearly 160 million by 2014 in the U.S. alone. mRDC will likely be the next big wave of growth in mobile payments, with 48 million smartphone users expected to use mobile deposit features by 2016. This could provide significant cost and time advantages to businesses who embrace this trend.

We’re back from Washington D.C. after the 2014 AFP Annual Conference—what a show! Many thanks to everyone who attended the event, and especially those who took time out of their busy on-site schedules to visit the expo floor.

A successful business actively sells what they believe is the best product or service currently available. A successful business with longevity is also focused on innovating the next best product to meet their customers’ needs. Visionary companies see what is coming down the road in technology and consumer demand, anticipate the solution, and develop the best, most sustainable product. FTNI keeps a keen eye on the future and a finger on the pulse of the expectations within the business, consumer and financial services sectors.

In today’s connected world, there is no escaping technology. It is literally everywhere you turn and plays a role in nearly every aspect of our daily lives. This means our customers are definitely connected and entrenched in digital technology. Given that, the next question that comes to mind is … are our businesses keeping that same pace?

It seems like several businesses we run across are trying to catch up – especially when it comes to mobile. But, the data on mobile usage is overwhelming and is becoming the new “norm” for conducting business. That means we need to start preparing and embracing mobile technologies to stay in lock step with our customers, get ahead of competitors and be operating at the highest level of efficiency for our internal staff.