OnPay Solutions: Payment Automation Made Simple

Suprisingly, in the digital age, 60 percent of the volume of accounts payable payments still involves issuing paper checks. In the middle market, this number is as high as 80 percent. The average paper check costs a company $3.50 or more depending on the size of the work force in Accounts Payable, making the payable process a heavy financial burden. Once inevitable errors are factored into issuing paper checks, the cost increases. OnPay Solutions is helping companies address this expense by providing business-to-business payment technology that simplifies the Accounts Payable payment process by making it electronic.

According to Neal G. Anderson, President and CEO of OnPay Solutions, their goal is to help companies migrate from paper checks to electronic payments for paying vendors. “Our value proposition is straightforward. When we convert a paper check to an electronic payment, we reduce the cost of that payment by 90 percent, lower the risk of check fraud, while freeing up the time it takes to produce checks per week, and we pay a cash rebate to our virtual credit card customers every month,” says Anderson. “Once the paper check is eliminated for electronic, it’s not going to go back to paper. Our system is at the forefront of making that change.”

Electronic payment options include traditional ACH, wire transfer, and a single-issue credit card called virtual card which is a number tied directly to an invoice or group of invoices, and for a specific dollar amount. The single-issue credit card number disappears from the system after it is used. This is one of the intense security features that OnPay Solutions has integrated into its payment platform. The company uses a tier five data center organization with an enhanced cloud structure, including hardware devices with firewalls, software firewalls, and encryption. Due to the sensitive data, utilizing the highest security measures is imperative.

OnPay Solutions platform greatly enhances the payment security concerns that are monitored or administer by a CIO, does not burden his/her IT staff with long-term projects with outside ERP consultants and does NOT involve major capital investment. With this solution, the server runs the payment application and the database. The ability to access information is simple. Anderson says, “The overhead that a CIO typically has to manage, we assume that responsibility through our cloud infrastructure.

Our system reduces a company’s risk of check fraud and frees up the time and money required to produce checks each week

CIOs and CFOs don’t have to worry about security, uptime, database management, redundancy, or disaster recovery.”

OnPay’s application also allows integration into existing systems without over burdening a CIO or CFO’s or their staff. In fact, OnPay Solutions simplifies their jobs and eliminates the need for a major capital expenditure to migrate to a more secure accounts payable platform or ERP. They do this by taking any check file that can be produced out of the existing accounting system, and then working with that file to create the electronic payments the company desires. CIOs with accounting systems that range from AS400-based to homegrown applications, to the largest, most sophisticated ERPs can get electronic payments going in less than 60-days, turning them into the company hero when the cost reduction and rebates earned on payments are factored in.

To further simplify things for the CIO and CFO, the application also manages the onboarding of vendors for electronic payments. When the vendors sign up to accept electronic payments, they choose the payment method that is most convenient for them.

By replacing the complex steps that highly-regulated and restricted banking systems use to onboard vendors by using a social media-like invitation from the paying company to their vendors, the vendors are likely to sign up. Because the large banking systems are so heavily regulated, they are built to last. Anderson adds, “Our solutions are designed to evolve, taking advantage of machine-to-machine data transmission that reduces human error processes and electronic data sharing between disparate systems that banks can’t do due to regulation and technology challenges.”

As for what OnPay Solutions is up to next, Anderson says, “We have a great roadmap full of innovative ideas. These include an enhancement of our cross-border payments. We also have a plan for global payment remittance processing and dynamic discounting.”