Allied Irish Bank Joins With HPD LendScape Cloud Program

HPD LendScape has announced that Allied Irish Bank (AIB), a client, has transitioned to HPD’s cloud-hosted program for the company’s receivables finance operations, according to a Monday (Nov. 16) press release.

With that migration, AIB’s whole U.K. and Republic of Ireland receivables finance programs can now be accessed online, hosted securely by HPD LendScape.

In addition, a software update to AIB’s LendScape solution allows a one-stop package for receivables finance features including a web portal for the bank’s small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers allowing for better user experience and better offers for funding access, the release notes.

The solution upgrade and migration will work with the bank’s existing cloud initiatives, helping to future-proof its IT infrastructure and simplify operations through letting operations be hosted by HPD LendScape. That also serves to reduce costs and let the bank scale up more easily, the announcement says.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift in the priority of banks toward digital operations, the release notes that numerous banks had been working on outsourcing major opportunities to create efficiencies. According to the release, over half of Irish small businesses named access to credit as one of the biggest reasons they use bank funding.

David Avery, Head of AIB Commercial Finance, said completion of the migration was “an important initiative” for AIB.

“Having our receivables finance business operating on a hosted cloud platform means our customers now have a better, more seamless way of accessing funding, boosts our efficiency in this area, helps to expand the range of services we can offer and enables us to be more agile,” he said, according to the release. “As a longstanding client of HPD LendScape, we were very happy with how the two teams worked together so closely to ensure a smooth delivery, and I look forward to continuing our relationship for many more years to come.”

The pandemic, as it crunched businesses down to just weeks of cash reserves, with payment reserves stretched by customers and leaving a “large working capital gap,” according to Raistone Capital CEO Dave Skirzenski, interviewed by PYMNTS earlier this year. He said receivables financing providers like Raistone had more often been seen as an extra source of working capital.