Welcome To
The Bottom Line

A colleague of mine once said, “God was able to create Heaven and Earth in six days because He did not have an installed base of users.” Anyone who has spent any time in the software business understands this axiom all too well.

This is essentially the premise behind technical debt. As soon as your institution commits to a solution and begins adding customers or members to it, constraints emerge making it difficult to enhance or upgrade the technology.

Vendor invoices in the financial services industry are complicated, with some listing over 500 line items. Further, annually auditing these invoices is a time-consuming task and, in the face of that kind of resource drain, many financial institutions tend to compare one month’s invoice to the last. If the amounts are similar, the invoice is approved. 

This may sound rather casual, but even when banks and credit unions commit the time required to manually review vendor invoices, human error compromises the value of that effort. Further, human errors made during the manual review process can become self-perpetuating, compounding over time without the institution’s knowledge.

It’s no longer a question of “if”, but rather how and when. For an increasing number of consumers, the primary means of interacting with their financial institution is the mobile banking app that lives on their smartphone, not the physical branch. And this segment of the population will only continue to expand. Younger tech-savvy generations will continue to age into the need for banking services while, at the same time, other demographics gain more comfort with digital channels.

A study conducted by the International Association of Contract and Commercial Management (IACCM) found that poor vendor contract processes cost companies as much as nine percent of their total revenues. Although this was a cross-industry study, there is little reason to believe the financial services sector fares any better or that the picture has improved since 2015. With so much money being left on the table and the drumbeat for cost efficiencies sounding as loudly as ever, financial institutions are seeking new ways to make this area easier to manage more effectively.