In a sentence: HOPE International, a non-profit organization that worked across the world, wanted to make the international payments process within their SAP Concur platform more efficient and cost-effective.

About HOPE International

HOPE International is a global Christian charity that works in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. They support people in poverty directly with financial and technical support, allowing them to invest in a business, pay school fees, and invest in their future.

The do this through two fundamental activities – microfinance institutions and training. They don’t simply lend a person money, but also support that person through their journey, developing them holistically.

Challenge

HOPE International were an SAP Concur user who wanted to upgrade their ability to make international payments within the platform. As they work in countries often riven with economic strife and with an underdeveloped financial infrastructure, they needed to expand the capabilities of the SAP Concur platform by using one of the integrated apps available for its users.

Without this integration, HOPE International often had to go outside SAP Concur and work directly with banks. This brought several difficulties including cost, ability to track payments, and extra administration work.

“Working through the banks, we had a number of circumstances where payments weren’t arriving” says Dale Johnson, Manager, Accounting Operations at HOPE International. “It would take a lot of work to find out which intermediate bank it was getting stuck at, and no one seemed to know. The final recipient bank didn’t seem to know. Our bank didn’t seem to know. And it would often take multiple days and dozens of emails to track down money. And in the meantime, we’re out. It could be $75,000. It could be $200,000. That’s not a good situation.”

This inefficiency didn’t just leave them without knowledge of where their funds were, it put strain on the financial team having to solve the problem.

“Sometimes these situations occurred because of an odd little quirk with an intermediate bank, such as running an extra account routing number that we didn’t know about, but whatever the reason we had to figure it out. It was time consuming and stress inducing.”

Working with banks concurrently with SAP Concur also led to more administrative headaches. As the two systems were separate, there was a lot of manual work needed to be done to connect the two.

“We wanted everything to be in Concur because it’s such a great system. Working with the banks, though, meant we would have to basically reenter everything into the bank’s system. And then we would manually put all that information together again into an email that would be for the bank wire release authorizer. We’d have to redo those steps when entering everything in SAP Concur. We would enter the wire routing information into the bank. We would then put all that information again into an email with the invoice and then actually send that off to the third person who would have to then authorise the wire. So, it was quite a bit of work for each one.”

On top of this was the high bank fees and FX rates banks were charging and, because of those unknown intermediaries, they were sometimes hit with hidden charges.

This, in turn, created another problem – the amount paid sometimes not being the amount received. As the payments were going through intermediate banks, fees would be charged that the HOPE International couldn’t predict when they sent the payment. Apart from the charges themselves, this led to difficulties down the line reconciling payments, adding to the time it took to process payments.

Solution

PaymentsHub by TransferMate is an official integration available from the SAP Concur App Center. It allows users to pay into more countries in more ways and with greater efficiency in terms of both cost and administrative time spent processing payments.

The integration immediately solved the difficulties HOPE International had when working with banks. Firstly, they gained the ability to track payments.

“We don’t run into those issues where we’re losing track of wire transfers anymore. The payments information is now automatically updating within SAP Concur and then also flowing through to our accounting system. We can see the payment status all the way through and know what’s happening. No more panicked emails!”

Even when payments don’t go through for any reason, PaymentsHub is able to retrieve the funds immediately and put it back into HOPE International’s account.

“With TransferMate, if for whatever reason a payment isn’t able to get through, the nice thing is TransferMate sends the funds back right away. So, it’s not getting stuck for three weeks and we’re out $100,000 in the meantime.”

Secondly, the amount of administration work to process international payments has been reduced considerably.

“There’s less manual work, in both setting up a payment and processing it. Once the pairing was done in PaymentsHub, we could make payment to that person without having to reauthorize it because the pairing was already authorized. So once something was approved in SAP Concur, it would just flow through to PaymentsHub.’

This resulted in time savings for every payment made, as well as the reconciliation process.

‘It really decreased that manual work for per-bill payment. Instead of taking maybe 15 to 20 minutes per bill payment, it was down to a few minutes per bill payment, which was a lot simpler. And, because all the payments are flowing through from PaymentsHub, it has made things like bank reconciliation faster and smoother because there’s less to think about and there’s less to do manually. It’s just nicer when things happen in an automated fashion.”

Finally, the PaymentsHub integration has saved HOPE International costs when it comes to international payments.

“For one thing, we get better FX rates, so we’re saving money. We get better wire fee rates. The wire fee rates with TransferMate are less than half of what they are with the bank. And then there’s the time savings, which you don’t always quantify so much in a nonprofit, but it does count.”

Results

HOPE International now use PaymentsHub for all their international payments in their SAP Concur platform. With 25 to 30 major international payments per month on average, soon to expand to around 40, and paying them into 10 to 15 different countries and currencies, the integration has been on real benefit to the HOPE International finance team and the organization at large.

They are now able to track their payments right through the chain, have cut down administration requirements, and have reduced costs. At the same time, they can pay their suppliers in their local currencies too, resulting in happier finance teams in their supplier organizations too.

Final Word

“We were recommended PaymentsHub by a partner in the first place, and we’ve recommended it to others since implementation. It’s been so streamlined and automated between systems that we’ve been able to save real time, and money. Ultimately, it’s allowed us to serve our clients better.”

• Dale Johnson, Manager, Accounting Operations at HOPE International

If you’re an SAP Concur user and would like to upgrade your international payment capabilities within the platform, contact the team via the SAP Concur App Center.