Lost in Transaction: Overcoming Payments Pitfalls

From simple errors to duplicates, fraud, and sanctions violations, there are several areas where payments can go wrong – particularly in the real-time environment. A recent TMI webinar in partnership with Kyriba examined common pain points and outlined ways to improve payment workflows through better connectivity, control, and optimisation.

Failed payments can be the bane of a treasurer’s life. There are many reasons why payments might be rejected by a bank during the payment flow. These include human error, losing data between systems, incorrect data from suppliers, and the incorrect rule set being used for a specific currency or country. These failures might make up just a tiny portion of a corporate’s overall payments activity, but they take a disproportionate amount of time to manage. The treasurer has to identify the errant payment, correct it and send it out again, which involves repeating the entire approvals process.

Andrew Ferrao
Group Treasurer, Sonnedix

Andrew Ferrao, Group Treasurer at global solar power producer Sonnedix, explains: “The real cost of payment failure is not in the bank fees, it is in the administration time that goes into managing and resolving it. For example, with one of our local French banks, we send them multiple payments of the same amount for the same supplier but relating to different invoices. The bank has rejected these payments as duplicates, even though they’re genuinely different payments. There are all sorts of reasons why this happens, but the administration time and cost involved in sorting it out is the biggest frustration.”

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