French FinTech Payflows has raised $26 million for its all-in-one platform for finance teams.
The company announced the funding on LinkedIn as it emerged from stealth Monday (April 22), saying that its platform would “set finance teams free from boring manual work.”
In less than 18 months, Payflows said, “we built a suite of procurement, payments, cash management and cash collection modules which are best-of-breed in their category and combined into an all-in-one platform.”
“We are forever grateful to our first customers — amongst some of the best forward-looking European finance and procurement teams — for their belief in our big vision and our mighty team. Our number one motivation is to make their lives easier.”
And that’s something most organizations are looking for in 2024, as PYMNTS wrote last week.
“More and more organizations are recognizing the need to update and modernize what has historically been a manual, paper-based process — but one that’s also very mission critical to the business function,” Kat Battle, product manager for Complete AP at Bank of America, told PYMNTS in an interview last November.
Battle spoke of a client she had recently worked with who was “hand signing 7,000 checks per month and mailing them out.”
That situation had opened that company up to fraud, she said. Aside from the cost savings associated with accounts payable (AP) modernization, automating away legacy bottlenecks also helps make business payments more secure.
“AP automation solutions can automate 75% of the manual steps required for paper-based methods, leaving only the control pieces of the process behind like approving invoices, approving payments,” she said.
By making the streamlining of accounts receivable (AR) processes a priority, CFOs hope to unlock liquidity trapped in inefficient systems, thus putting their businesses on a more stable financial footing, PYMNTS wrote.
“And, ultimately, by addressing their top worries, CFOs can better position their companies to navigate the uncertainties of the global economy, ensuring not only survival but also the potential for growth and sustainable success,” that report said.
“Chief value officer, or CVO, might be a more suitable title in the future for this position where you’re looking at not just financial analysis, reporting and controls, but value creation and how to use those resources to drive value creation for the company,” LiquidX CFO Abhishek Khandelwal told PYMNTS.
“It’s critically important to strike a balance in being a financial steward of the company and at the same time supporting the innovation that can drive future growth.”
