CCR2 Technology Futures


In with the new


CCR recently spoke to Natalie Fedie, Vice President of Customer Value at HighRadius, to understand how credit and collections professionals can embrace new opportunities in technology and showcase their true value. Natalie and her team are dedicated to helping HighRadius clients improve working capital and increase cash flow through the use of the Integrated Receivables and Treasury management systems. Across this interview, she highlights some of the key developments of technology in the order-to-cash space and how A/R Leaders are leveraging it to elevate their role in the current fluctuating economy


How can technology help collectors to improve customer experience? There is currently an increased focus on collectors to improve the customer experience while collecting past dues. With technology in place, the collections teams can be more proactive and prepared as they will have access to more information. As a result, this will help collectors turn requests faster and also provide the personalised touch that had been missing before.


How do you think the pandemic has impacted the need for technology in the order-to-cash space? Throughout the crisis, we have been able to have some good conversations with business leaders on how the situation has impacted them. The interesting insight that we discovered was that companies were in urgent need of cash in hand, and they had been looking at all the options. Accounts Receivable, which previously


might not have been on the radar, suddenly became very important. Senior management increased their focus on the credit department to get detailed insights on customers who have their payments outstanding. The other thing that we discovered was


that the credit department needs to be ready for anything. People never saw this crisis coming. Credit professionals thought they had a good relationship with their customers and knew all about their behaviour. But the moment economic disruption hit, they could not predict their customer’s behaviour anymore. They were not able to find out how the situation would impact their customers. The companies that invested in technology


had insights into some of those patterns and could make reasonable predictions. This eventually helped them to cope with the crisis.


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How has the technology in the collections function developed in terms of on-premises or cloud? If we talk about the on-premise solutions, they are managed by the in-house IT teams. People need to understand that the impact of the pandemic was so far and broad that IT teams were able to focus on limited requests at a particular time. For example, if the IT teams were working on a particular task and suddenly their priorities changed, they had to shift their focus to the new task. On the other hand, cloud solutions do


not face such challenges; instead, there are multiple advantages of using cloud technology. The vendor is responsible for the maintenance and management of the software. And they can make changes to the


software to accommodate the impact of the crisis, whether that means adding additional features or making things move quickly to help customers.


What are the latest trends in the use of analytics in credit and collections? It is amazing to me how several large companies did not have access to data or had data in silos that they could not bring together. Solutions like HighRadius, which have rich data resources, allow businesses to put in time and effort where they need to. For example, one of the trends we see


is a need to leverage data to improve the performance of the teams. If I have accurate data in place, I can have visibility of my team’s performance and the areas that require improvement. We can also leverage data to compare


ourselves to other companies and ensure that we are the best in class. I think businesses will see more access to data not just on operational metrics but also


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People need to understand that the impact of the pandemic was so far and broad that IT teams were able to focus on limited requests at a particular time. For example, if the IT teams were working on a particular task and suddenly their priorities changed, they had to shift their focus to the new task


process mining to make improvements. It is not just about the system anymore; instead, it is about the information that businesses will get from using the system.


How do you see the development of automation in credit and collections? In A/R, we have an end-to-end automation solution. We can automate the entire process, be it credit, collections, deductions, or cash application. There are some aspects parts of the work done by credit and collection professionals that can be automated completely. It takes people to run systems in most


places, and in other areas, robotics can replace the repetitive, low-value work to focus your staff on the higher-value work. I do see AI being used more than


ever, but it can be only as smart as the information that it gathers. So if companies have good data and can increase the accuracy, AI is the direction where they will see the most benefit.


August 2021


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