CFOs Must Seek Internal, External Opportunities To Drive Digital Efficiencies

Today’s chief financial officers (CFOs) are digitizing across every part of the business that finance touches. They are doing so to provide external customers with the service they want — and to give internal customers, like sales and product teams, the data they need to make better-informed decisions.

“Access to information, the ability to easily access information, is becoming more and more of a requirement,” Paymentus CFO Matt Parson told PYMNTS.

The shift has been accelerated by the pandemic. With the move to remote work, companies have had to quickly develop new ways of doing things. There has been a greater need for information, too, as teams have had to make day-to-day decisions to keep companies moving forward over the last two years.

“So, as an organization, the more digitizing we can do internally and take things out of spreadsheets, take things out of manual processes, allows us to be able to respond to those things faster,” Parson said during an interview for PYMNTS’ “Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO” series.

Providing Information to Clients and Their Customers

Customers, too, need to be able to access information and process it faster. Like a company’s internal stakeholders, they are trying to react quickly and have little patience for spreadsheets or paperwork.

As Paymentus supplies a platform for billers that helps them provide bills and get payments from their consumers, the company has also digitized service to its clients’ customers by using chatbots.

For consumers, this makes it easier for them to ask questions, get information and ultimately pay their bills faster. For billers, chatbots allow them to get paid faster and reduce the cost to serve by taking that interaction out of the hands of employees.

“If we have chatbots that can take away — whatever the number is — 95% of the questions without a human having to respond to that, it’s a massive savings for the biller,” Parson said.

Using Continuous Innovation to Retain Clients

Also contributing to the speed of payments is the Paymentus Instant Payment Network (IPN). As with other things, people expect instant gratification when it comes to bill payments.

Since they have access online to everything, they want to see the payment applied to their account the minute they make it. IPN meets this need by giving consumers optionality of when, where and how to pay their bill, and allows them to do it in a real-time way.

In this environment, innovation is the way to retain clients, Parson said.

“If you think about the themes we talked about earlier — digitization, patience, people expecting real time and expectations going up and up and up — you have to be continuously innovating in order to retain your customers,” Parson said.

Helping Clients Move From Paper to Digital

Looking ahead, Parson said he remains focused on digitization internally because Paymentus is growing, and the organization is building the right foundation for scalability. Externally, too, he expects digitization to remain a priority for companies of all industries in all spaces.

“So, we’re excited for 2022,” Parson said. “I think what we do as a business really fits right into the whole digitization conversation and helping clients move from paper to digital.”