Wedding Planners Tie The Knot With B2B FinTech

The wedding industry was among a handful of markets thrown into chaos when the pandemic hit. With couples canceling their ceremonies left and right, vendors and wedding planners scrambled and hoped for signs of an eventual rebound.

In retrospect, fall 2019 may not seem like the ideal time to have launched a wedding industry-focused FinTech. But according to Elizabeth Sheils and Nora Sheils, co-founders of Rock Paper Coin, the sector’s temporary shutdown was a blessing in disguise.

“Wedding vendors would have otherwise been busy in the summertime, on-site at weddings,” Nora told PYMNTS in an interview alongside her sister-in-law and co-founder. “But instead, many had extra time on their hands, and they took that time to streamline their business and incorporate technology.”

It was an important moment for an industry with a history of manual workflows and paper between wedding planners, vendors and their clients getting married. As Nora and Elizabeth discussed, contracts, invoices and payments are among the biggest pain points of the wedding industry with little time to digitize. And even with a slew of FinTech solutions targeting these workflows, they typically lack one key factor vital for the wedding planning arena.

Bringing Wedding Planners To Light

“The wedding industry really was in the dark ages for quite a while,” said Nora, pointing to wedding vendors — including photographers, cinematographer, caterers and venue operators — typically working with paper contracts and invoices, and receiving paper check payments.

The opportunities for mishaps are numerous as a result of this lack of digitization. The biggest pitfalls occur as a result of a lack of clarity for wedding planners. Although hired to take the heavy load of often tedious and complex tasks away from the couple getting married, wedding planners often lack the visibility into contract signings, invoices and payments they need to do their job.

“What’s been happening in the past is that a vendor would send a contract and invoice directly to a client,” explained Elizabeth. “Where the disconnect is, is the planner is cc’d on an email if a document is sent as a PDF, or the wedding planner is left out in the dark.”

It’s this three-way communication and data sharing requirement unique to the wedding and other event planning industry that often goes unaddressed by industry-agnostic invoicing and B2B payment solutions.

Typically, a couple pay the vendor via paper check and pop it in the mail, or sign a contract they’ve received directly. It disables a wedding planner’s ability to ensure that the contract that planner negotiated was actually adhered to, or to ensure that vendors have been paid in-full and are ready to fulfill that contract on the big day.

This lack of digitization also presents the opportunity for checks lost in the mail, invoice errors and other scenarios in which one mishap can result in thousands of dollars lost for the vendor or the client.

A Spend Management Opportunity

While transactions occur in a B2C model between couple and wedding vendor, the addition of a wedding planner creates a new B2B2C paradigm that looks more like the construction industry in terms of the flow of invoices and payments, according to Elizabeth. As such, digitization is key to giving that wedding planner — who acts like a contractor — greater visibility into the flow of documents and money.

Digitization can also mean handing control of those workflows over to the planner themselves, with Rock Paper Coin allowing couples to provide clearance for their planners to not only view key documents like invoices, but actually make payments or sign contracts on behalf of the client.

By consolidating and digitizing this three-way collaboration process, the opportunity for stronger financial controls and budgeting capabilities emerges. For the wedding planner, couples’ ability to upload payment methods and set limits ensures spending remains in bounds. And for the vendor, features like support for installment payments as well as a flat processing fee can support that business’s own cash flow management needs.

With $1.6 million in fresh funding for the startup, led by XYZ Venture Capital, the company is planning more robust spend management and budgeting functionality, Elizabeth said.

Until then, the ongoing vaccine rollout and encouraging COVID-19 numbers continue to be a good sign for the wedding industry’s eventual resurgence. Now that vendors and wedding planners have had a hiatus and time to focus on workflow digitization, the opportunities to inject efficiency into the flow of invoices and payments continues to climb.

“With COVID, everything is virtual,” noted Nora. “You wouldn’t drop by someone’s place to drop off a check. Vendors were forced to incorporate technology, especially for contracts and payments, because they were losing business if they didn’t.”