MASTERCLASS SERIES

How to end late payments using BigTech best practices

Webinar Transcript

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[00:00:00] Nick Cooper: Excellent. Hi, Raj, how are you?

[00:00:06] Raj Kuckreja: Good. Thank you, Nick. How are you?

[00:00:08] Nick Cooper: Very well. Very well, sir. Good to see you again as always. Good. Hi everyone. Who’s joining us today. It’s a pleasure to be joining us in this wonderful Wednesday morning, looking forward to a, a session, we’ll try and keep it to time. But.

[00:00:22] I think this topic, Raj can correct me if I’m wrong, but you, we could spend we could spend a whole day workshop on this this topic just just quietly and still not reach the end of it. But you know, we’ll give everyone a flavor for it as best we can. Yeah. So, yeah, there’s a lot there, but we’ll, we’ll try to get through it. Great. Excellent.

[00:00:40] Raj Kuckreja: Maybe just while we wait for everyone to join if you can all just type your, the industry that you’re in might help us frame the conversation a little bit. In, in the chat box, that’d be. Thank you. Yeah,

[00:00:56] Nick Cooper: it’s lovely. It like I say, there’s, there’s, there’s lots and, and, you know, actually, if anyone you know, I’d encourage people to, if there are further questions or, or either things we didn’t get quite enough time to cover today, or you want further information on, on any of it or our thoughts or just our musings on, on this Look, encourage you guys to, to drop us a line, reach out because we, I think we’ve got our emails at the end and you know, happy to, to help, like we say, cuz it’s it is certainly a hot topic and it’s something that. From my mind in my mind, it’s quite a, it’s such a game changer and it’s such a sort of easy one to, you know, cha I guess, you know, deliver such dramatic change in, in in a businesses, you know, operating process and, and, you know, achieve it, you know, zero days late, which is obviously our, obviously our motto, but motto, but it’s.

[00:01:54] It’s one, you can do everything perfectly right. As a business, but if you don’t get paid at the end of it, seamlessly and easily, just yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We’ve got a great spread actually. Yeah. I’m just looking at it now. Yeah. Oh, I like the equine and stream my, my family historically in, in sort of involved with the horses show my parents and whatnot.

[00:02:17] Oh, me. And no skill whatsoever. So I can’t add. Julie for that, but I think it’s it is a wonderful industry being, cause it’s when he doesn’t like being out in the outdoors it’s animals and the rest of it it’s it does certainly beat being indoors in front of the laptop. It’s you know, that’s we are, we do we have to do what we’ve gotta do.

[00:02:35] That’s right. Cool. Excellent.

[00:02:43] We’ll just wait another minute and we’ll get going. Yeah, no worries. Everyone grabbed that. Oh, literally as I was about to mention everyone, maybe grab a coffee, but Helen’s joined us who looks after coffees. Excellent, wonderful. Maybe we need to strike up a conversation and we can get some new coffee machines for our office.

[00:03:00] So I, I certainly could do with one at home. So but yeah, like I say, grab water, grab a coffee, and then we’ll get way.

[00:03:16] Okay. I should kick off, kick off. Welcome everyone. Really. Nice to have you today. It’s a nice day for maybe not for being inside, but it’s good to everyone there. So what the topic for today’s seminars, you all know is applying the learnings of big tech to end late payments. Make sure we get paid on time and why do big tech do it so well?

[00:03:36] And how can we apply that to your business as, or our businesses as a whole? So that that’s the topic in terms of just. Housekeeping questions, please type them in the chat between each section. We will try to address any questions. So please we wanna keep it open and conversational and as much as possible between me Andika between me and us and, and you, so please do, do add your, your questions as we go.

[00:04:03] Raj Kuckreja: Just a quick introduction. My name’s Raj Kuckreja, I’m one of the co-founders at easy collect. I’m also a chartered accountant and the director of the company. My passion is small business and small and medium businesses and, and really seeing it, working with people, working and seeing the growth and, and.

[00:04:20] Where it ends up and where it takes people and their communities and their lifestyles and their worlds and their families. So that’s sort of me. Nick, you wanna do a quick intro? Yeah. Thanks Raj.

Nick Cooper: So the CFO of, of easy collect I joined about six months ago as we sort of ramp up towards sort of our IPO, we scale this, this great business that we’ve got.

[00:04:41] I guess I’ve worked across the gamble of, of. Within finance teams. So from start of my life, over in the UK and big assets managing yeah, big, hard things and then went and, you know, did some further study and flipped into tech as, as people tend, you know, can do once you go through sort of a master’s program and it was I guess have changed the world.

[00:05:03] So, and I haven’t left. Since then and you know, returned to Australia about two, three years ago, just before just scooted out before COVID hit and joined a payments business over here. And like I say, with where we want to be sort of taking these collect in the future, a big, big, heavy focus on payments.

[00:05:22] It was a, it was a great marriage between say myself and, and the business. And so here I am. So yeah. It’s a great it’s a great time and, you know, we’ve got lots of things to deliver and do, and yeah. Really wanted to, to be part of the, the company. So that’s a bit about me. Thanks, Nick. Nick’s also got a deep experience in payments, which makes it exceptional to our, this webinar today.

[00:05:45] So the agenda today is firstly, we’ll just sort of define what the problem is and what is zero days late and why it’s significant and why it’s important. I think it’s. Best to start with the problem statements. What are the biggest changes in technology driving? A lot of the changes that big tech are implementing and how are they approaching it?

[00:06:02] What are they doing differently that allows them to fund their businesses in phenomenal ways to grow so quickly? And how do we apply those learnings to your business? So we wanna go through in that, in that order. Very quickly before we delve into what, what is zero days late? Just, just to, to state the problem.

[00:06:20] And most of you’re looking at industries are in B2B, but. It’s especially problematic in B2B businesses. It’s, it’s messy. You know, it’s complicated. Payments is complicated. It’s, you know, suppliers want suppliers wanna be paid on terms. So wanna be paid on terms there’s predictable cash flow. We’re after all these things, and there’s no visibility between both.

[00:06:42] Yourself and your customers, where are they in paying that bill? You know, which authorization level, what are they up to? What are the different issues that they’re having and paying it? Where’s the data flow. Where’s the transparency it’s causes disputes. It causes bandaid solutions. It makes inefficient processes.

[00:06:58] It. It’s a big problem. And, and I think you all feel it there’s high DSO. So high day sales outstanding. You might have terms of 30 days, but you don’t know if you’re getting paid on that 30th day. It’s it’s hoping maybe, maybe not. There’s no predictability, it’s hard for you to budget or change. Use your cash flow.

[00:07:15] You it’s really based on trust and, and maybe, you know, people being available to, to make payments and things like that. It’s costly and there’s no visibility. That’s where we’re starting and, and. What we wanna do is get to this, what we, we see it as a Nova and easy collectors, a zero days late, where everything is paid on time, on their due date.

[00:07:36] And if not earlier, and we want, make sure you have the technology to achieve that no different to what big technology companies do. And you’ll see that through the seminar.

So why is zero days late important for small businesses? And smaller and medium businesses. I mean, firstly, it’s obvious, you’ve got a ma a huge amount wrapped up in a balance sheet, asset call account receivable with interest rates, rising higher capital adequacy requirements from banks and obtaining loans.

[00:08:04] You wanna free that up. You wanna change that into cash and small changes in that means you have access to that cash that cash can be used to fund growth fund working capital fund a million different things, but accessing that. In a speedy way means you have that money available to take your next step, as opposed to using, you know, the, all the other opportunity costs that come with them that potentially miss out on.

Three critical areas of focus to ‘0’ days late

AJ Singh:

kay. All right. So if we have the lens of this win-win where we’re trying to focus on, I want to now move to what are the three critical areas that we want to talk to you about today? Some we’ve built, some we are building more of and some are yet to go, right? But it’s really important that if we want to get to be involved early in the process and create this win-win environment, there are really three things that we want to talk to you about today.

1. Best practice credit approval

One is we want to talk about at the very start of the process, right, before you even invoice the customer. How do you onboard customers? And this is something which we’ve been talking about for the last probably six months. And it’s one that I’ll touch on, just I’ll show it to people who don’t know it briefly. I think it’s really important.

2. Introduce automation earlier in the process

3. Auto-Collect and Auto-Reconcile

AJ Singh:

But really number two and three, which is what Ricardo will talk about is about getting involved much earlier in the process. So when you talk about disputes and issues with this, we’ll focus on how we are looking at collections. And I think the best way number two and three is for Ricardo to show it to you. So I won’t spend too much time on number two and three, but I’ll go straight now into the number one, which is the credit application process.