The Urban Dictionary defines “Late to the Party” as “AKA “Day late & a dollar short,” when one finally arrives on the scene of an event that’s already ending.”
With Canada’s Payments Modernization program in full flight, businesses neither want to be too late or too early to the party. But there are so many potential use cases to tackle (Per below) as per the Payments Canada website, where does one start and how does one plan for this:
Here are some uses cases to consider:
Expedited Business Payments
A business is seeking to expedite an important payment before the end of business the day is able to close a transaction on time to ensure prompt delivery.
Payroll
A large corporation is able to distribute payroll, bonuses, and expense reimbursements to its employees faster and later in the day, giving it more flexibility around how it manages payment cycles.
Retail Rebates & Refunds
A retailer is able to offer better, faster customer service for rebates and refunds at the point of sale.
Real-Time Payment Upon Confirmation of Delivery
A retailer makes a real-time payment to their supplier upon successful delivery of fragile or perishable goods, avoiding the need to make a prepayment and deal with refunds in the case of broken or perished goods.
Control Over Payments
Quicker fund availability enables a small business to compress their ordering and payment cycles, improving productivity and cash management e.g., small business could get paid immediately for goods sold on their website.
Save Cost on Real-Time Payments
A small business makes a relatively small, urgent payment to a supplier without having to worry about high wire transfer fees or transaction limits.
Improved Cash Management
A small business owner can better manage their cash flow due to increased payment processing speed and predictability.
More Options for Data-Rich Payments
A small business owner now has multiple options for making data rich payments that meet his cost and timing needs. He no longer relies exclusively on cheques.
Paying Multiple Supplier Invoices
A small business owner pays multiple invoices to her supplier using a single electronic payment, including information from each invoice in the same payment message. This eliminates the need to send and reconcile multiple payments.
Data-Rich Payroll
A small business pays its employees, including information from the employees’ pay stubs with the payment.
Automated Invoicing and Payment
A large corporate uses an ISO 20022 message to fully automate its invoicing processes from the disbursement of invoices, to the release of finances, to reconciliation against invoices.
Paying Multiple Supplier Invoices
A large corporate pays multiple invoices to their supplier using a single electronic payment, including information from each invoice in the same payment message. This eliminates the need to send and reconcile multiple payments.
Straight-Through Processing
An insurance company receives a data-rich insurance premium payment that automatically reconciles in its accounting system against the invoice that was paid.
Interoperability
A large multinational corporation gains cost and effort efficiencies through the use of a single payment messaging standard across its global operations.
Potential for Innovation
Fintechs and innovators can develop creative new real-time payments products and services.
How to Get Started
- The first step is to get informed. Try one of these
- Talk to Your Banker
- Attend the next Payments Canada Conference
- Reach out to someone with some insights (Happy to talk)
- Put together a Plan
- Get some Seed funding and find a partner to advance your thinking if necessary.
- Confirm your desired strategy? Are you going to be an early adopter, or a later adopter? What’s your business cases to consume some of the new payments related capabilities?
- Establish a budget to advance your strategy
- Implement your strategy
- Here’s the thing; depending on the size of your business and your business case, it could take awhile (think years) for a bigger organization. The next big set of changes will be hitting in 2019 and 2020 so that’s not so far away to consider and start implementing things on your side.
- What types of things would I need to be implementing? Consuming new ERP or Accounting Related systems that are ready for the integration of “rich payments data” through ISO 20022. Changing legacy systems to support these changes internally? Supporting new cash flow management models as payments frequency and velocity changes?
Why Would I do this?
Every businesses situation is going to be different, but the promise of rich data, straight processing and enhanced efficiency of a payment either received or sent is not to be ignored. Get started with your thinking and planning now and don’t be late to the party!
