THE CHALLENGE
Manual processes and delayed reporting drained the team's energy supplies
The user-centric tech company and electricity provider Tibber has made impressive progress on its mission to transform the energy market. Since its launch in 2016, Tibber has reached more than one million users in four countries – helping more and more people power their homes more efficiently, track their consumption, and lower their bills. A clear win-win for everyone involved, including the planet.
Inevitably with this pace of growth, the business started to face operational headaches. Collecting payments and managing cash in Germany, Tibber’s fastest-growing market, was a pain point. There was no single overview of inflows and outflows and reporting was highly manual.
‘The previous setup was manual and time-consuming,’ says Martin Warholm, Product Director at Tibber. ‘One bottleneck was that, due to bank restrictions, only specific team members could access payment-related data.’
For a forward-thinking team set on revolutionizing an entire industry, file-based processes and siloed bank data just wasn't acceptable. The lack of access to bank data threatened the all-important customer experience too by extending resolution times for support issues. Customer satisfaction being highly prioritized at Tibber, this was taken seriously.
'One way we keep prices as low as possible is by removing inefficiencies in the market and passing those savings onto our customers,' adds Martin. 'Using legacy systems with delayed reporting and poor visibility simply wasn’t aligned with that focus on transparency and efficiency.'
THE SOLUTION
Lightning fast payment runs, consolidated reporting, and automated reconciliation
It quickly became a priority for Martin and his team to modernize their payment operations, and in the process simplify the workflows for customer support.
The team was able to hit the ground running. Atlar’s ease of use and out-of-the-box bank connectivity meant the implementation process lasted less than six weeks. ‘We’re delighted with how quickly we were able to kick things off,’ says Martin.
Now all money movement is centralized through the Atlar platform and the bank headaches in Germany are fully resolved. Transactions are automatically tied to original instruction, simplifying reconciliation, and the team can locate payments in seconds as opposed to waiting days.
Leveraging Atlar’s pre-existing bank connectivity allowed Tibber to preserve the company’s engineering resources and means that new banks can be added in weeks instead of months, supporting the team’s future growth plans.
THE RESULT
The ability to manage payment processes in one central place at the flick of a switch
On a day-to-day level, Martin and team were able to eliminate countless hours of manual work and delays, ultimately bringing a new spark to their team’s operations and ability to focus.
‘All transactions that were previously file-based and manual are now automated,’ says Martin. ‘And with all our data and reports in one single place, we find new ways to regain lost time on a daily basis.’
Both the product and finance team are accruing benefits and time-savings. Automating payments means there’s no longer a need to traverse between bank portals and handle large files. And the finance team can now access a steady stream of data on cash balances. That’s a big improvement from the previous reporting process that came with a minimum one-week delay.
Finding a solution that could scale in parallel to the company’s rapid growth was key for Tibber, which operates in Sweden, Norway, Germany, and the Netherlands today but is openly focused on expansion. Being able to consolidate multiple banks across Europe through Atlar removes a potential bottleneck going forward.
For Martin and team, this is just the beginning. ‘We’re always looking to cut out ineffective processes and evolve how we do things. Having a platform like Atlar as a foundation encourages us to keep optimizing. It’s good for the team, and it’s good for the business.’
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