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5 Questions for WAUSAU

By Kathy Strasser

1.   When you talk to prospects, what do they tell you is their biggest payments automation, distributed capture or document processing challenge, and why?

Virtually every receivables processor spends significant time manually processing exception items, therefore we find that their intent is to find ways to more efficiently handle them with more automation. Areas of improvement include recognition technologies applied to money orders, online check payments, and various form types; automating business logic applied to the workflow that handles exceptions, and additional complex decisioning capabilities including from databases, keyword criteria or Web decisioning interfaces for inter-departmental or external access.

The rising unit costs associated with the manual processing of exceptions is driving the investments specific to exception payment processing. As organizations begin to solve this issue by applying further automation, they are able to either drive significant expense reduction or higher margins when offering as a service.

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2.   What is your company doing to address this challenge?

WAUSAU is continually developing and expanding technology in our remittance solutions. Examples of this include integrated forms recognition for structured and semi-structured forms processing, improvements in our on-line decisioning suite in ImageRPS, and various add-on functionalityprovided through annual upgrades for our solutions. These upgrades allow our customers to stay current with the latest technology to meet their processing and compliance needs. WAUSAU also provides an ever-expanding business logic library through the continued addition of our customer data edits which are provided at no charge with each software upgrade.

Additionally, our Solution Education team provides customer training on all of our solutions, thus ensuring our customers are properly prepared on the applications in order to get the most value and efficiency for their investment.

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3.   What do you believe will be the major storyline in payments automation, distributed capture or document processing over the next 12 months, and why?

Electronic payment volumes will continue to set records each month while remote document capture will continue to grow rapidly to meet the needs of small business, strengthen banking relationships, increase an organization’s market share and provide customers with more products and options for processing receivables. Demands from vertical markets such as healthcare, brokerage and insurance will provide additional opportunities for solution providers capable of handling unique processing requirements such as Explanation of Benefits (EOB’s), other forms, and agent payments or complex fund allocation and collection.

In addition, ECM solutions will continue to gain momentum as more and more organizations look for better document management, long term archive solutions, Web access, workflow, proactive querying, and customized reporting needs.

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4.   Looking over the horizon, what do you believe will be ‘the next big thing’ in payments automation, distributed capture or document processing, and why?

At WAUSAU we feel a focus on integrated receivables processing will be an evolving trend yielding significant opportunity. Solutions that automate how accounts payable and accounts receivables intelligence are used for decisioning prior to posting, or how they improve billing efficiency and collection are key criteria in the new workflows. Any improvement in Day Sales Outstanding (DSO), accuracy of posting, and elimination of payment or billing exceptions will be the next drivers of transaction ROI. Processors who need to continue control of their payment environment will need to continue to improve on unit cost performance. Electronification of payment collection or electronification of billing are only tactics to solve paper-based problems and take the solution only so far. The need for integrating the two into a cohesive strategy combining all payment sources and business knowledge is the problem facing our clients long-term.

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5. What’s the most interesting thing in the payments automation, distributed capture or documents processing space that you’ve read about recently (that wasn’t put out by your own company)?

Many organizations are taking advantage of the ability to capture deposits and other documents, such as invoices, checks, and correspondence that needs to be centralized for archive or posting. Small businesses, as a niche, need access to a low-cost, deployable solution, be it an in-house or ASP solution in order to meet their needs and the scale of the opportunity in the market today. The need for integrated distributed capture and remittance processing is evident in financial institutions, small businesses and corporate environments. In all cases, more data from more places can be captured, resulting in value added revenue, lowered expenses for moving paper, improved customer service from centralized transaction archives, and lower clearing expense.

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Kathy Strasser is Sr. Vice President of Remittance and ECM Solutions at WAUSAU. She can be reached at 715-241-2117 or kstrasser@wausaufs.com.

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