Industry Insight: Housing Associations
Overview
Comfort. Simplicity. Accessibility. A good finance or treasury team should feel like home.
For many businesses in the housing sector, though, this isn’t the case. Between a history of underfunding and the impact of Covid-19, finance and treasury teams worldwide are lagging behind the industry’s rapid growth. In order to keep up, your internal processes need to evolve in equal measure. Sound daunting? It’s not. In fact, all you need is AccessPay.
Right now, we’re willing to bet the following rings true for your finance or treasury teams…
Security is a
Top Concern
Security is a big issue – especially for many in the housing sector – when it comes local payments and bank transfers.
Not only is fraud a large consideration, but human error is commonplace when it comes to manual processes.
Studies suggest that almost 90% of spreadsheets have errors. Mistakes as simple as misplaced decimal points have the potential to send organisations both big and small into shortfall.
Put simply, many banking operations are tearing apart at the seams when it comes to security, especially when catalysed by post-Covid growth.
Manual Processes Are Getting You Down
Manual processes may well be tried-and-tested – but that doesn’t mean they’re effective.
As we enter the 4th Wave of Banking, workflows involving spreadsheets, card readers, and banking portal logins are quickly becoming unviable.
Without an automated, cloud-based service, your banking operations are at risk of human error and fraud.
And, without a modern Cash Management solution, there’s no telling where the cash is falling through the seams.
Back-Office to Bank Limitations
Chances are, your back-office systems – such as accounting, payroll, treasury, or housing management software – are providing your team with some benefits.
However, larger problems remain. They likely don’t natively connect to banks, meaning payments, statements, and reports must be both downloaded and sent manually every day.
These processes are not only mundane, but further open you up to fraud and error.
Case Study
Places for People have always used Bacs to make supplier and payroll payment runs and to process direct debit rent collections from tenants. But in 2018, Places for People moved to AccessPay as they wanted a cloud-based solution with scope for improvements by way of a Bacs Bureau. With more than 60,000 transactions to process each month, they went in search of a new way of working.
AccessPay offered system-based approval steps which allowed Places for People to remove the need for paper sign–off across the group. Our fully integrated, cloud-based solution enables Places for People to distribute wages, allowing the staff to continue their fantastic work in the UK housing sector. Thanks to our platform’s capability, the parent group will soon be able to make and schedule payments across multiple subsidiaries in one swift payment run.
Read MoreChat to Our Housing Expert Craig Watson
Having worked with AccessPay for over 5 years, Craig has dedicated the majority of his career thus far to helping those in the housing, property, and real estate sectors.
With established relationships and a sizeable portfolio of transformation success stories, there’s no one better equipped to help find your perfect solution.
Why AccessPay?
Given the sector’s fast-changing nature, there’s never been a more vital time to modernise your banking operations.
AccessPay connects housing associations to banks and banks to housing associations. Whether you’re working from a housing management system, accounting or payroll software, AccessPay consolidates its output files, normalising and enriching them before sending onto your banking network quickly, efficiently, and securely.
Not only this, but our Cash Management solution provides total transparency of your business’s funds, compiling your balances from across the world. With AccessPay, you can see your global cash position, regain control of your banking operations through risk mitigation, and optimise your spending with the availability of richer data.
With the availability of HSM, Host-to-Host, API, and statement piping capabilities, there’s nothing more your banking operations will need.
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