The One Thing: Removing Pain Points Builds Trust, Helps Companies Scale

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Confidence … thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance.” What was true then is doubly so in the age of digital, when so much business is conducted between parties that rarely — if ever — meet.

Businesses need to trust everyone involved in the B2B payments process more than ever,  but generating that trust is easier said than done.

Devoting a great deal of thought to that notion of building payments confidence, Routable Co-founder and CEO Omri Mor told Karen Webster the one thing on his mind as 2022 begins is how his company and the industry can instill more confidence in users.

Saying the typical B2B payment now takes 14 steps involving three or more people, Mor said, “Creating one payment time, you can have confidence. Creating 10,000 payments at a time, that confidence per payment drops significantly. Bump that up to 100,000, and  you actually have no idea what’s happening. It’s way too difficult to make a decision.”

Noting that companies often approach Routable to fix processes, to scale faster improve experiences, he said questions he’s not getting are what more businesses should ask. Everyone is so focused on those factors that they ignore other important details.

“For example, I onboarded a vendor. How confident are we that that vendor is viable, compliant, not fraud? I send a payment. How confident are we that it will arrive on time? How confident are we that this is the right bank account to send to?”

Much of it comes down to reducing complexity as businesses grow and payments scale and having the data needed for digital decisions executed with the push of a button.

That’s why 2022 “is about data aggregation” for Routable.

See also: Readying High-Volume B2B Payments For An Era Of Transparency And Control

Empathy Goes a Long Way

There are ways to inspire confidence among transactors. That’s where the focus needs to be.

For Routable, the first thing prospects ask is, “how many payments our platform can help send and what the price will be,” Mor said. “They’re very direct. It’s because they’re thinking about their growth of payments and how much it’ll cost them.”

As qualification moves along, discussions seem to return to confidence.

“The questions that they ask upfront — how many transactions can we help them process and what pricing they can get — they’re trying to buy confidence so that they can grow,” he said, “and so they won’t have to think twice about the cost of transaction in 12 months. I think that’s actually very critical.”

However, with scale comes complexity, and companies needing to automate accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) face vendor choices that impact overall confidence.

Surveying the landscape of payments processors and banks, Mor said the issue becomes, “what steps am I saving? What does a processor help me do? Then the pricing is something that is inversely correlated with their growth. More payments, less cost, which is a dream for every CFO and treasurer. It’s just hard to achieve.”

Feeling a client’s pain by asking about processes they most dislike is a revealing step in helping growing businesses solve for payments scale with confidence in themselves and their partners.

“Each team has a different part of the supply chain of accounts payable that is broken, and for them it’s the part that they hate doing the most,” Mor told Webster. “I think it starts out with just understanding what is the worst experience that they go through right now. It’s usually a definitive step.”

As finance teams can expertly identify these areas of heavy lifting, these conversations usually make the task of a partner like Routable clearer and less anxiety-filled for all involved.

“When you get on a phone call with a couple AP clerks and VP of finance and a controller, they’ll crack up about it. They’ll tell you the honest truth,” Mor said. “If you can take away their biggest pain, it allows them to focus on growth and forward thinking. That’s the first thing to do. Just what sucks the most at this process? Can we remove that off a plate and give you confidence that our platform can help scale?”

See also: Routable Raises $12M In Series A For Expansion Of Digital B2B Services