THE CHALLENGE
Highly manual payments and cash management processes consumed team resources
Loomis Pay, the payments arm of cash handling giant Loomis, combines cash and electronic payments in one point-of-sale system to help merchants simplify operations and improve cash flow. Their key payment and treasury operations include:
- Running the daily payment cycle across banks in multiple European countries and currencies
- Reconciling incoming payments from partners and matching to bank statements
- Managing cash at multiple banks, including monitoring balances and making transfers as required to ensure adequate liquidity
The finance team at Loomis Pay found their operations were slowing them down after the business grew to support over 600 merchants in a few short years. Incoming and outgoing payments were manually tracked and reconciled, turning the AR/AP process into a daily struggle that weighed team members down. As a lean team that strives to be efficient, Loomis Pay’s finance function saw that its legacy workflows and tooling were unsustainable as the company’s rapid growth continued.
Keeping track of balances and managing liquidity across banks was another source of friction. Instead of one central place from which to manage cash and make one-off payments, the team had to manually take action in separate bank portals and lacked a single source-of-truth for cash and liquidity. This ate up time but also led to human error – a major pain point for a finance team at a regulated and publicly traded company like Loomis where secure, reliable reporting is key.
As Loomis Pay grew and payment volumes increased so did the number of errors and returns. Tracking and troubleshooting these returns consumed even more of the team’s time, especially during the month-end close. Finance and support teams couldn’t access the right information quickly since it was scattered across different systems.
Taken together, these bottlenecks meant the Loomis Pay team spent more than 100 hours each week on back-office treasury and payments work: managing and reconciling payments, initiating payouts, and tracking cash balances. Ultimately this started to impact their ability to help the business scale quickly and prepare it for the next stage of growth.
THE SOLUTION
From siloed systems and spreadsheets to one single source of truth
Loomis Pay partnered with Atlar to simplify payment initiation, automate reconciliation, improve cash and transaction visibility, so the team could focus on enabling business growth instead of manual operational tasks. Valuable engineering resources were saved too, with the days of maintaining connections to multiple banks and finance systems in-house in the past.
‘Before Atlar, the finance team spent too much of its time on simple payment and treasury tasks like looking up specific transactions and manually reconciling different systems,’ says Nils, CFO at Loomis Pay. ‘Now we have all the data from multiple banks and systems in one dashboard, ready at our fingertips, and the team has more time to focus on finance work that supports actual growth.’
The finance team now uses Atlar to automatically reconcile all incoming and outgoing payments, radically reducing the time spent on payments, and can manage its cash in one place. Accessing information on cash balances and liquidity is that much easier and the team is notified in real time about incoming payments and can make one-off payments in a few clicks. This simplifies things for the accounting team too, since all money movement is reconciled end-to-end and tied to bank statements.
Returned payments used to be a huge time sink for the finance team too, but are now fully automated through the Atlar platform. When a return does require attention, the right people can access the right information quickly with all transaction data consolidated in one clean, easy-to-use dashboard with user management tools built-in.
THE RESULT
Over 120 hours saved, easier reporting, and a stronger base for growth
Implementing Atlar has proven the finance team’s commitment to streamlining treasury and payment operations for the wider company and set Loomis Pay up for the next phase of growth. It saved the team countless hours on menial tasks while making life easier for accountants and support agents too with streamlined access to payment and treasury data fully synced from all their banks and PSPs.
‘The administrative work was a distraction from what we do best as a team – positioning the company to help stores and restaurants run and grow their business most effectively,’ adds Nils.
The partnership with Atlar has brought full visibility over incomings and outgoings, centralised cash management tools, and an almost fully automated payment cycle. This saved valuable team resources and unlocked real-time insights into the financial health of the business – setting the team up to focus on higher-value work as the company expands.
Plus, it turned what used to be a headache into an affirming experience for employees across the business. ‘The feedback from the teams using the dashboard couldn’t be more positive,’ says Nils. ‘Everyone loves the experience.’
Keen to see what the Loomis Pay team are working with? Book a demo and see Atlar’s modern treasury platform in action for yourself.
