There is no such thing as 100% automated payment operations

As they evolve, payment operations solutions will natively and automatically manage more edge cases, unexpected incidents, external requirements, and ad-hoc needs always happen. It means that finance and operations teams always have to be able to understand and manually override or complete workflows. Allowing these teams to do so without intervention from technical teams makes that process much more efficient.

Investigating failed payments

For numerous internal or external reasons, payments can fail, and such failures can be unexpected and not supported by payment operations solutions. To ensure fast payment incident resolution and prevent future similar incidents, payment operations teams first need to be able to detect failed payments quickly and understand what went wrong.

For this process to be efficient, payment operations teams need alerting systems, as well as fast and easy access to failed payments and other related payments (based on counterparties, amount, type, time, etc.) to identify the root cause of the issue – be it on the bank side, in the approval flow, because of incorrect payment information, or other reasons.

Reconciling complex transactions

Payment operations also include the reconciliation of payments with bank transactions. Similarly to payments, the goal is to automate the reconciliation process as much as possible. This process is particularly error-prone as it often relies on user-entered data.

To identify and resolve failed reconciliations and improve the automated reconciliation process, accounting teams need to be notified of failed reconciliations and the ability to identify and deep dive into involved payments and transactions quickly, then reconcile them manually.

Managing funds across accounts