THE CHALLENGE
Initiating payouts and monitoring account balances manually ate up the team's time
Like many early-stage companies, when Hedda and team founded Lassie in 2020 they soon started building out a finance team to help manage incoming and outgoing payments and manage liquidity. Lassie's key payment and treasury operations include:
- Paying out insurance claims from the company's bank accounts
- Monitoring account balances across multiple banks
As Lassie grew to insure over 20,000 pets in a matter of months, handling insurance claim payouts became a major headache. The finance team found it was spending a majority of its time manually initiating and tracking payments in online bank portals. This wasn't only time-consuming but also prone to human error, with the slightest mistake resulting in a huge amount of friction for the customer.
Lassie has two types of payout flows. Payments are either sent directly to the customer, provided Lassie has their account details, or settled to a veterinarian clinic that the customer visits. Both processes were highly manual. After a claim was approved in Lassie's back-office system, the finance team would then have to initiate each payout individually. This meant team members logging into the relevant online bank portal, manually entering the payment details, checking the details again and again, and finally reconciling the transactions in their internal bookkeeping system. A painstakingly long process that weighed the team down.
To make things worse, the clinics Lassie works with often didn't have the tools in place to track and reconcile payments themselves. If a clinic believed it was missing a payment or couldn't identify all the payments on its books, Lassie's finance team would have to spend hours manually searching bank statements in a legacy interface to locate a transaction. With ambitious growth plans and more clinics being onboarded in more markets, the team could see that its reliance on manual processes and legacy bank systems was unsustainable.
THE SOLUTION
Automated claim payouts with user-friendly approval workflows and fast search tools
Lassie partnered with Atlar to remove all manual work in its payout process, integrating the Atlar API with its internal systems and building automated workflows to easily orchestrate the different money flows. This enabled the Lassie team to automatically reconcile outgoing payments, receive notifications about a payment's status in real time via webhooks, and set up approval chains that adhered to the company's strict four-eyes approval policy.
Impressively, all of this was achieved in under one week. In fact, the integration took Lassie's engineering team only four days. “The Atlar API and supplementary documentation are very intuitive," said Henric Sikström, Software Architect at Lassie. "It took me a matter of days to integrate it into our internal services and automate our money movement.”
With all of Lassie's transaction data consolidated in the Atlar dashboard in less than a week, the finance team no longer needed to fear clinics reporting a payment as missing. All payments are now centralised in one single place with the ability to quickly drill down into the full transaction details, cutting the time spent on manually looking up payments down from multiple hours each week to minutes.
THE RESULT
Scalable processes, painless bank integrations, and faster international expansion
Having initially selected Atlar as its partner in Sweden, the Lassie team opted to expand the partnership alongside its own international expansion, starting in Germany.
The finance team were introduced to key local banks and, when the time came to kickstart operations in Germany, their chosen bank was connected to the Atlar platform inside three weeks. This meant that Lassie's launch timeline could be dictated by business needs and priorities rather than back-office payment and treasury work.
Today Lassie simplifies insurance for pet owners in multiple European markets, with fully automated payouts and reconciliation giving the finance team a scalable foundation for future growth.
If your business handles incoming or outgoing payments, like Lassie, or runs complex treasury operations then reach out to book a demo.
