Speed, reliability, and service: non-negotiables when processing 200,000 Direct Debits

When your Direct Debits collections reach into the hundreds of thousands, you need a payment provider that just works – all the time, every time. What really matters are speed, reliability, and strong service – to keep the core of your business functioning.

The Company

Founded in 2009, Omni Capital Retail Finance (Omni) is a finance firm offering instant digital lending to businesses and their customers.

Supporting over 2000 retailers in their annual accounts and hundreds of thousands of consumers, the Hampshire lender works at rapid pace and huge scale.

Where payments and collections happen almost non-stop on a daily basis, reliability becomes the number one requirement for financial systems and operations.

The Challenge

Until 2018, Omni was working with an international market-leading payments provider.

Whilst service was good and the product did its job, its pay-per-transaction model was becoming prohibitively expensive and stifling scalability.

Plus, working with such a large company meant a long delay in time-to-knowledge, where challenges took too long to identify, diagnose, and fix.

With thousands of collections per day, even the slightest delay can cause a big drop in revenue and cash flow for the firm.

The process wasn’t where we wanted it to be, and there wasn’t a face-to-face relationship there. We need that, because if something goes wrong, requires changing, or need fixing, we have to get it sorted pretty much instantly.

Looking for an alternative provider that would both be more present and be more cost-effective, Omni turned to AccessPay.

Spreading resource without spreading risk

With Direct Debits being the cornerstone of Omni’s operations, several people are involved in processing.

That means training individuals, setting suitable permissions, and leveraging shared resources – so that the right people have the right access at the right time.

It has to be done each and every day without fail, it’s our largest and most important process. So, we needed a supplier which allowed for lots of different users, without the big license costs that you sometimes see.

Some of our staff will only use it occasionally, during periods of leave or high collections volumes. We don’t want to pay big license costs for those sorts of accounts, and for security reasons we also want to make sure they’re not used unnecessarily.

AccessPay’s extensive customer success services, including live webinars, on-demand training, and dedicated customer success managers, allows Omni Capital to get new staff up to speed quickly, and to master new features in a short amount of time.

Saving time and money

Automation played a big part in the procurement process for a new partner. Finding a solution that did the leg work in a repetitive process like collections was paramount.

We used to do a lot of things manually, like downloading BACS reports and entering card details every time we started a new session.

You don’t realise how much time can be saved when you have a system that can do this for you, we now have a fully automated process with AccessPay – security checks, auto file and report downloads, no logging in and out. It has saved us a big chunk of time, it used to take a few hours or more but now it’s more like just one hour.

When you scale that over a year, it’s huge.

From an auditing perspective, especially for a financial service like lending, having everything in order and with appropriate audit trails is also a big relief.

Most of the files go straight to one location, we don’t need to pull reports from various sources and wondering whether we got the right ones at the right times. Every morning at 9:15am, all our reports are automatically pulled and saved and logged. As a result, we’re pretty much always audit-ready

AccessPay is great for operational resilience too, we’re very prepared. User permissions are set up thoughtfully and strategically, we can easily limit the number of users and check that they’re all trained up on processes.

We also know how long tasks take now, so we can always make sure we have the right amount of resource when it’s needed. All those new automations are a massive help with this, so we’re leaner operationally.

As a team leader, especially when I came back from maternity leave, I needed the time to work one-on-one with all of my team members. Without AccessPay, I’d have struggled to allocate time to focus on my staff.