JAGGAER Pay Case Study: Texas A&M University

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Finexio CEO & Founder Ernest Rolfson and Kristian “KO” O’Meara, SVP Global Strategic Accounts at JAGGAER discuss how Finexio’s embedded AP Payments as a Service is powering JAGGAER Pay and transforming higher education payments.

Tell us about Finexio - Ernest

Finexio is a business-to-business accounts payable payments as a service solution that's embedded with JAGGAER.

Tell us about JAGGAER Pay - KO

Our JAGGAER Pay solution is an offering to our customers that extends the former e-procurement, goes into invoicing, leads into the JAGGAER Pay program. The JAGGAER Pay program is really intended to help our customers de-platform off of as many as five to seven different solutions they have today to satisfy their payment needs. So we're adding a lot of modalities to the equation. We're adding different ways to pay - wire, check, things of that nature - to ensure that our customers have a way to service their supplier community fully and completely. And we offer opportunities for them to create a rebate scenario where they generate some revenue for their departments.

What are some of the benefits of JAGGAER Pay - KO

Sure. The benefits from JAGGAER Pay are quite clear from my perspective. It's intended to add efficiency for our customers. It's intended to add compliance and regulatory satisfaction for them. It's intended to add a rebate outcome for them where they can generate some revenues for their departments. It's intended to allow them to do a lot of automation with their processes, and it's something that is also helping to prevent fraud.

What are some of the benefits of Streamlined Operations & Efficiency? - KO

From a streamlining operations or efficiency perspective, today our customers often have very large AP and controller offices that are responsible for orchestrating and ensuring their suppliers are paid on time for the services or products they deliver to the organizations that we work with. In doing so, there's often a very time-consuming process, a lot of inbound queries from suppliers: "When are we going to receive payments? What should we expect in the form of payments?" Whereas today, JAGGAER Pay has transformed that into a streamlined software-enabled process whereby we engage with them from an outcome perspective and we try to find out the modality they're interested in paying in, the time frame they're interested in being paid in, and it adds a whole reconciliation aspect to things that allows it to unfold very quickly and efficiently for the organizations.

What are some of the benefits of New revenue streams & Cost Savings? - Ernest

The customers are benefiting financially in a number of ways. Significantly, and firstly I would say, are the cost savings. We're transforming customers' accounts payable payment supplier interaction standpoint that largely was phone call and paper-based and driving that towards digital and through software right through JAGGAER. So that's hard dollar cost savings in terms of paper elimination as well as time. On the revenue side, there is significant cash back that could be generated by unlocking demand across the supplier base for payments on payment methods like card that are fast, secure, and predictable that certain suppliers really appreciate.

What are some of the benefits of Real-Time Insights & Financial Control? - Ernest

Prior to a customer perhaps using JAGGAER Pay, as KO mentioned earlier, they're using a plethora of solutions - that is a mix of digital, bank, manual workflows disconnected from a financial control center or one place where they can reconcile this information. So the beauty of leveraging a tightly integrated system like JAGGAER is that you can have all of these insights around payments, suppliers, invoices in one place in one screen where you're able to get actionable insights and take action on driving your business without having to go the old way.

What are some of the benefits of Stronger Supplier Partnerships? - KO

One of the key benefits of the JAGGAER Pay program is to increase or enhance the supplier relationship with our customers. So they're interested to understand when they're being paid, how much they're being paid. They want a portal to do that digitally so they can engage with it 24/7 as their business needs arise. They don't want to rely on manual processes, phone calls to engage with the customers. They're keen to get paid in an efficient fashion in the mode that they choose to get paid, whether that's via wire, whether that's via check, whether it's via the virtual card that Ernest talked about earlier. They're really trying to enhance the relationship so that we can offer a maximum outcome for them from a working capital perspective to ensure they have the mechanisms needed to continue to grow their businesses to continue to provide the services or products to our customers that they're so keen to offer.

What are some of the benefits of Enhanced Compliance, Regulatory & Security - KO

So one of the major benefits across the entirety of our JAGGAER One platform is really a strong compliance posture. Our customers are expecting SOX compliance. They're expecting regulatory compliance, ISO compliance. We've recently gotten our AI compliance ISO certification 42001. That compliance posture continues into our payment program and offering by helping them automate some of the processes that are regulatory controlled. So there's a "know your supplier" type of program. There's an anti-money laundering (AML) program in which the service providers as part of JAGGAER Pay are essentially extending that benefit and automating those on behalf of our customers as part of the payments as a service.

What are some of the specific services that Finexio offers within JAGGAER Pay? - Ernest

The service is quite robust and starts even before a payment is made. We're leveraging artificial intelligence to help identify and predict with over 90% accuracy which suppliers would prefer certain of the payment methods that KO talked about earlier. So it's around a predictive asset. It's around software and portaling that helps suppliers be able to enroll and self-service and engage with the offering. It involves managing the execution and distribution of payment methods, both physical and digital. And I think perhaps most importantly, it automates all of the exception workflows and the manual work that the JAGGAER customers would be doing over the phone or email that the software can digitize for them after a payment has actually been sent.

Where is JAGGAER Pay headed next? - KO

As to the future of the JAGGAER Pay program, we're excited. We have three major releases a year where we extend and enhance the software and the services provided underneath that. So we recently added a payments on purchase order capability with our most recent release that's coming out in a couple of weeks that's in our customers' UIT and prep environments. And then this fall in our 25.3 release, we are adding a quick pay feature where we have the ability to pay individuals or pay small contractors or sole proprietors and ensure that they get paid very effectively and efficiently with as little overhead as possible. Some of our higher education customers in particular have a high volume of payments that go out to individuals - honorariums, folks that are speaking, folks that are participating in research on the campuses - and we're extending the platform to include the ability to pay them quickly and pay them efficiently. Card to wallet and things of that nature will be added to the program, which is one of the things that customers have asked for as one of their highest areas of interest.

Is there a case study you can share more about? - Ernest & KO

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In terms of case studies and results, we've been working with JAGGAER now as a partner for three years. One of the first and largest customers we've been working with is Texas A&M that still had hundreds of millions of dollars of paper checks that they were printing and sending out of more than 20 different facilities across the state of Texas, spending easily dozens of hours a month on manual tasks. And so we're pleased to say that they're no longer in the check printing and mailing business. We've digitized that spend. We've rolled that out across all of those 20 locations to significant cost savings, and then additionally found tens of millions of dollars and growing of spend that can be paid on a card which is generating cash back to help further fund their investment into JAGGAER Pay and other JAGGAER services, lowering their total cost of ownership across the entire suite.

From my perspective, I just want to express a level of gratitude for Ernest. I was introduced to him some four or five years back by a mutual acquaintance, and through that process we've been able to deliver and create great value for our customers. We're super excited about the partnership. It's really one we're looking forward to expanding and continuing far into the future.