Companies Look Beyond Hype, Show Preference for AP Solutions That Work

At a time when there’s both an expanding economy and a labor shortage, businesses are finding it difficult to handle the volume of transactions, alongside an increase in manual work. While many are using software, digital tools and automation to get the job done, not all companies have made the switch.

“Accounts payable is a laggard area in this space,” Ernest Rolfson, founder and CEO of Finexio, told PYMNTS. “Companies are still tackling this largely with paper checks, largely by hand, largely with people.”

Finexio, a B2B payments platform, helps software companies and banks offer customers turnkey digital payments solutions. The company announced Jan. 5 that it had completed a $10 million funding round.

“The big story for the payment space in general is, how can we have more user-friendly, embedded financial tools to help businesses and people do a lot more efficiently at scale,” Rolfson said. “That’s why all this paper is going away — or will go away.”

Offering AP “Payments-as-a-Service”

Finexio is in the business of addressing bill payments for clients and providing as many payment methods as possible, Rolfson said. It currently supports 10 forms of payment.

The company has built process automation around managing refunds, partial settlements and resends, and task automation around managing massive amounts of payment volume. These are things corporates and banks are not going to build themselves, Rolfson added.

“That’s where the ongoing investment has been and why this has been working out for us is, purpose built for AP ‘payments-as-a-service,’” Rolfson said.

Delivering the Embedded Finance Experience

With a proven product, a strong customer base and the recent funding injection, Finexio is now focusing on adding as much volume as it can handle with the right partners.

“We are definitely key proponents of that and ‘keep it simple, stupid,’” Rolfson said. “You don’t see a lot on our website about AI or machine learning per se, because those are phrases that are a little scary and not necessarily resonating with Joe Smith users of the service — they just don’t want to be doing things by hand anymore.”

For the software companies and banks that serve these customers, Finexio offers a solution that is seamless and ready to be implemented. Because AP trails behind other business functions in terms of digital adoption, the company is seeing plenty of demand. Rolfson said the CFO of a major health plan recently said that the firm still has someone coming in the office just to print and cut checks.

“Something with your payment system isn’t quite fully meeting your needs if you still have someone that is just on check duty one day a week, every week,” Rolfson said. “Something is missing there; your bank is not quite providing the service you probably need.”