Fixing The Leak: How Automation Is Set To Transform Billing Accuracy, Transparency

Billing is the beating heart of every financial firm. Yet for many organisations, billing and revenue management is constrained by spreadsheets and manual processes. Globalisation, growing numbers of high-volume accounts and ever-more demanding clients with complex fee structures, are further compounding the pressure on stretched billing processes. Digital solutions and automation can help.

Latest Industry Research: Revenue Leakage Is Real.

Today, billing teams are dealing with more complex global operations, as well as greater numbers of increasingly demanding clients. This pressure is exerting itself on aging legacy systems and exposing firms to the serious risk of revenue leakage.

In the billing function, revenue leakage is the unnoticed or unintentional loss of money due to poor billing procedures. This might be underbilling, overbilling or even not billing at all. In an ideal world, revenue leakage would be zero, but new research suggests that there is still a ways to go for zero to be realistic.

In fact, more than two-thirds of firms claim to suffer revenue leakage, according to findings from a recent survey conducted by Fiserv along with Worldwide Business Research (WBR) with heads of billing at major Investor Services firms and institutional investors across Europe. With margins tightening across the industry, firms cannot afford to leave room for error, waste, or process inefficiency.

What Else Is At Stake?

The ultimate beneficiaries – or victims – of your billing processes are your clients. Inefficient billing operations not only exert a direct, negative effect on the business’s bottom line in the form of revenue leakage, but can also negatively impact its customer service and reputation as well.

The reissuing of invoices is one area that can certainly affect customer service. Fiserv market research reveals that 80 percent of firms do have to reissue invoices, and half claimed that doing so had a negative impact on their customer service overall.

Technology Can Help.

All is not lost for forward-thinking firms who aspire to a truly accurate and efficient billing function. Technology like AI and robotics will be central to the ability of financial firms to efficiently analyse revenue data across their organisation and relay it to the relevant stakeholders.

At Fiserv, our single flexible billing platform is designed to streamline processes and mitigate the risk presented by revenue leakage. We do this by focusing on automation, while also balancing the need to maintain a high level of accuracy in billing and data consolidation across the organisation to enable full transparency.

Using technology and automation in such a way has a number of clear advantages for financial services firms. Automated processes can help to free time from an abundance of clerical tasks, and instead shift the focus toward activities that generate revenue. Increases in efficiency offered by automation can also reduce the entire information management and fee processing cycle. This has a direct impact on margins and cash flow and frees full-time staff to focus on more strategic tasks.

As a fully integrated solution, we provide firms with one source of billing data to assist with internal reporting. This allows for significantly more advanced proactive analytics capabilities and increases transparency.

The Path Forward.

The future goal of billing is 100 percent efficiency. To get closer though, firms are making efforts to improve operational control of their billing processes and systematically delivering greater transparency through increased efficiency, accuracy, and reduced risk. For most, this is not a distant goal, with 88 percent planning to make significant improvement in the next 18 months. In an increasingly complex, diversified and highvolume global marketplace, the accuracy, reliability and scalability of your billing processes will set your organisation apart from the competition.

Learn more at fiserv.com/AdvantageFee.

David Mote Head of Investment Services International Fiserv

Furthermore, 61 percent of firms only have a partially consolidated view of their revenue streams, and 17 percent do not have any kind of consolidated view. This can be a real issue for both internal and external reporting. For instance, an audit can become far more cumbersome if relevant data must be extracted from a wide variety of different sources and legacy systems.