Kevin Long

Vice President, Global Cash Operations, ACI Worldwide

Supernova Award Category: 

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Organization: 

ACI Worldwide, the Universal Payments (UP) company, powers electronic payments for more than 5,100 organizations around the world. More than 1,000 of the largest financial institutions and intermediaries, as well as thousands of global merchants, rely on ACI to execute $14 trillion each day in payments and securities.

The Problem: 

ACI uses complex billing scenarios, modifies contracts frequently, includes periodic price escalations, and processes very high volumes of usage data. As a result of high growth and multiple acquisitions, the company had collected three separate billing systems and 80-plus usage tracking platforms. These disconnected systems required extensive spreadsheets and manual processes to ensure accurate billing and invoicing and prevented the company from conducting in-depth analysis and forecasts.

The Solution: 

Finance and accounting teams are under greater pressure than ever to deliver new levels of speed, precision, and insight. But they must manage many challenges: accommodating new business models, scaling to higher transaction volumes, keeping up with complicated contractual terms, supporting the sales organization’s creative pricing structures, and new compliance requirements – to name just a few. The faster pace of business means that legacy accounting systems and spreadsheet analysis can no longer reliably keep up. That’s the environment ACI Worldwide faced – and why it needed a completely new approach to transform its billing and invoicing processes. RecVue's capabilities included the ability to:

  • Integrate usage transactions into a single platform for contract management and billing
  • Automate the entire order-to-invoice cycle
  • Gain insight into usage data and billing transactions to identify revenue leakage and opportunities for new revenue
The Results: 

RecVue has helped ACI Worldwide to be in a better position for growth: the billing department now has the flexibility and scalability it needs to manage new pricing and billing models in a high-growth market. By implementing a standard process with RecVue at its core, the company has reduced the time required for the order-to-invoice cycle, increased operational efficiency by eliminating multiple systems and manual processes, and created a single source of cohesive data for advanced analytics and forecasting.

“There were two main business problems we needed to solve: automation of complex usage-based calculations and automation of the consumer price index application. RecVue’s versatility solved both issues and eliminated hours of manual effort!”

"The system is easy to navigate and has flexible and customizable reporting tools. In addition, the 1-click contract changes and cancellations feature has really helped us to eliminate manual proration calculations.”

"RecVue openly welcomes ideas that improve the functionality of the product and always make every effort to tailor the system to your individual business.”

Metrics: 
  • 1 Unified Platform: Combined 3 separate billing systems across 4 acquired companies. Manage contracts and automate billing across 100,000 pricing models.
  • 250 Million Transactions Per Month: Integrated 80-plus distinct usage systems directly into the billing engine. Standardized data for analysis and forecasting across millions of transactions.
  • 52% Reduced Time-to-Invoice: Anticipate extension to 99% invoice accuracy, up from 97% baseline. Improved invoice clarity with a single source for contracting and billing.
  • 73 % Less Manual Intervention: Automated complex usage-based calculations and CPI application. Reduced spreadsheets for usage collection and verification of billing.
The Technology: 

RecVue delivers the only monetization platform for billing designed specifically to address the unique challenges of managing recurring revenue for B2B enterprises. These enterprises need a solution to manage millions of transactions and a very high degree of complexity. RecVue’s solution includes data mediation, a 360 view into the entire contract lifecycle, attribute-based pricing, complete billing-to-invoice capabilities, partner management, and robust analytics and reporting.

Disruptive Factor: 

Start with thousands of customers, 100,000 pricing models, and frequent modifications. Add in multiple billing systems and more than 80 usage-tracking platforms – none of which were integrated with the billing systems. Recognizing that its legacy back-office tools were holding the company back, ACI initiated a multi-year finance modernization project aimed to help the billing organization to support company growth. They also recognized their needs would only grow (it was managing four different acquisitions with more expected in the coming months), the company nonetheless wanted to avoid adding to its accounting staff by achieving new efficiencies in all areas of order-to-cash, revenue, and other accounting tasks; by automating contracts to ensure billing reflects the latest terms and conditions (such as CPI calculations); and increasing the accuracy and timeliness of its billing and invoicing. That’s a tall order, which led the company to design a rigorous vendor-evaluation cycle.

After a comprehensive selection process, ACI selected RecVue's billing and recurring revenue platform to achieve these goals:

  • Scalability to more than 250 million transactions per month
  • Ability to accommodate a wide variety of complex contracts and pricing models
  • Integration with Oracle Financials Cloud
  • An intuitive user interface to keep training costs low
  • Ability to collect usage from multiple sources
  • Flexible reporting and analysis

 

Shining Moment: 

At the highest level, especially when moving to a new billing platform, make sure you provision for change management resources. Digital transforma- tion is a radical change and the change has repercussions through the entire organization. At the highest level have a plan for change management and put resources towards it. RecVue provides the flexibility to administer more complex commercial terms that we haven’t encountered before, enabling us to handle new revenue streams.

About Your Organization

ACI Worldwide, the Universal Payments (UP) company, powers electronic payments for more than 5,100 organizations around the world. More than 1,000 of the largest financial institutions and intermediaries, as well as thousands of global merchants, rely on ACI to execute $14 trillion each day in payments and securities.