Driving Enhanced Customer Outcomes from Accounts Receivable

Capgemini is working with BlackLine to build an intelligent, connected, and frictionless future for receivables.

I’m extremely passionate about change. During my 17 years at Capgemini’s Business Services, I’ve been part of several market-leading evolutions, culminating in our realization of true digital transformation.

This is particularly relevant of our AI.Receivables solution, where we’ve achieved great synergy between our transformation assets and key enterprise platforms such as BlackLine that always put our clients’ end customer experiences first.

BlackLine is a leader in accounting automation software, with a portfolio that includes BlackLine’s Invoice-to-Cash solution (I2C)—an AI-powered, cloud-based platform that enables accounts receivable (AR) automation and digital transformation. Its products and the expertise of the people who support them are a perfect complement to Capgemini’s own strengths in what we term Frictionless Finance and in our approach to receivables in particular.

BlackLine’s I2C solution provides scalable, end-to-end automation of cash application and collection processes. It also provides insight into the overall AR status through AR intelligence dashboards.

Frictionless Finance is the name we give to an approach that aims to remove all the obstacles and sources of friction within an organization’s finance operations. This helps us significantly improve key business outcomes such as growth and working capital for our clients.

Our Frictionless Finance approach orchestrates an intelligent, connected ecosystem of people, processes, data, and technology—with AI, analytics, and GenAI at its heart—to drive sustainable business outcomes, enhanced value, and continuous innovation across our clients’ organizations. This, in turn, helps transition them to what we call the Connected Enterprise.

BlackLine sits at the heart of our Connected Enterprise approach, enabling the standardization and scalability of cash application processes to drive greater efficiency, effectiveness, and accuracy. It helps our people make better, more informed decisions, retain learning and knowledge, and remove mundane rule-based activity, enabling customer service agents to focus more on value unlocks and customer experience.

In addition, it also provides insight and analytics into where pain points exist in customer payments and their payment behavior to support more effective collections, providing automation and speed to payment matching at scale for a step change in productivity.

Together, Capgemini and BlackLine help organizations achieve simplicity and automation at scale for cost-effectiveness and superior results:

• Cost-efficiency. Working within Capgemini’s D-GEM platform, BlackLine addresses common pain points. The joint approach, with automation at scale and technology support, delivers significant savings. Also, cash application support and process exceptions are reduced via increased straight-through processing.

• Speed to value. Payback is typically achieved within the first year of deployment, and savings of over 20% are expected in the second year. In addition, because the process is lean and frictionless, it is highly scalable.

• Transformation. The scalable and global technology enables faster, easier, and better cash applications.

• Customer experience. Automation means faster and more accurate application, which reduces customer queries related to cash remittances and disputes relating to cash discrepancies. Happier customers pay faster and buy more, which has a direct impact on revenue growth and working capital for our clients, which is at the top of the CFO agenda.

Our relationship with BlackLine has delivered great results. We’ve implemented the platform in all major regions and serviced it across the Capgemini delivery network. We’re also supporting a wide variety of payment types in multiple currencies and languages, accommodating a range of different bank interface formats, and processing millions of receipt transactions.

Here’s an example of our success: we transformed the order-to-cash process for a global logistics organization across 50 countries, processing over 12 million payments each year. This delivered average auto-match rates of over 80% (reaching over 90% in Europe), a reduced price per transaction, accelerated collections, increased revenue growth, and fewer customer disputes. In turn, this helped the client achieve a range of outcomes, including a 40% reduction in operating costs for cash applications and improved customer experience with less revenue leakage and better working capital.

Finally, the definition of the word “synergy” is a form of interaction that gives rise to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Working together with BlackLine, Capgemini is helping to build a new future for receivables—one that is intelligent, connected, and frictionless.

To learn how Capgemini’s AI.Receivables solution delivers next-generation O2C processes to drive enhanced outcomes and make frictionless finance a reality for your organization, contact: jon.bell@capgemini.com

This article was contributed by Jon Bell, Head of Strategic Client Relationships for Europe & APAC, Capgemini’s Business Services. Jon is the architect of key market transformation assets such as the Digital Global Enterprise Model (D-GEM) and ESOAR, and defines strategy for technology platforms.