FinTech & banking perspectives TAILORED TREASURY: THE PROMISE OF FINTECH Disruptive new technologies promise to shake-up the payments space by offering highly-tailored services to specific market segments. What does it all mean for treasurers? By Simon Brady. At the fundamental, cross-border infra- structure level, the services offered by banks to their customers are being trans- formed by new FinTech-driven network initiatives. But for most treasurers, Fin- Tech treasury solutions are service layer integrators that allow companies to plug into multiple external systems and auto- mate one or more treasury processes at the same time. The choice solutions in the payments space is bewildering, but most are aimed at smaller and midsized companies that need to receive multi-channel digital pay- ments as part of the digitalization of their business and who need to make increasing volumes of low-value payments – for example firms that do business with many small vendors or marketplaces. Online payments and processing So, to list just a selection: Adyen, Stripe, 2CheckOut, Tipalti, Braintree (backed by PayPal), GoCardless, Paymill, Credo- online dashboard. The service is an off- Evernote, Etsy, Nike, Spotify, Airbnb, rax, YapStone, YeePay, Omise, Trustly shoot of Sentenial’s well-established Mango, Vodafone, Booking.com, KLM, Group, Bridgepoint, Cheddar Up, Fly- Cloud platform for acquiring ACH Superdry and Groupon. wire, CyberSource (a VISA company), transactions, SEPA credit transfers and Payoneer, WePay, PaySimple, Network direct debits. That payments processing Tipalti (see article on ACH) is one of the Merchants, Citrus Payment Solutions, business that directs more than €35 bil- leading providers of B2B supplier pay- Exchange Corporation, Zooz, Mobeam, lion worth of payments to European ments to global enterprises. The com- Slimpay, ToT Money, Quisk, Alpha Pay- banks annually. Sentenial also provides pany claims to be the first-ever cloud ments Cloud, Sequent Software, Razor- its payments origination and processing platform to automate the entire ‘end-to- pay, Payza, Authorize.net, BlueSnap, services directly to corporates and to end’ accounts payable workflow. Its aim Bitpay, Skrill and many others in the other payment service providers (PSPs). is to create an automated, seamless sys- payment gateway space. tem to allow accounts payable depart- For corporate treasurers, Adyen and ments to manage their entire global This wave of largely new companies is Tipalti are gaining ground. Adyen is a supplier payments operation. It handles often seen as an explosion of innovation global platform that connects businesses the payment chain from invoice but many of them look very similar to the directly to Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and processing, supplier on-boarding, tax Authorised Payment Institutions all the other key payment methods, ena- compliance, anti-money laundering launched in Europe following the first bling them to accept payments across compliance, global payment remittance, Payments Services Directive and spurred online, in-app, and in store. It is a well- and payment reconciliation and AP on by SEPA. For example, Nuapay’s established platform that doubled its financial reporting. SaaS solution allows companies to easily transaction volume to $90 Billion in set up payment and collection accounts, 2016, and has recently added Microsoft, Unlike most FinTechs, Tipalti is invest- make and receive payments, create auto- Sephora, Symantec, WeWork and ing heavily in infrastructure to allow it to mated payment and collection schedules Bonobos to its impressive customer roster service companies from smaller fast- and have access to full reporting via an of companies like, Uber Facebook, growing operations to global enterprises. 24 // TREASURY PERSPECTIVES 2017/2018 www.eurofinance.com