Increasing revenue visibility and reducing leakage

A large telecom merchant in the United States faced revenue leakage challenges while reconciling customer payment transactions. In addition, there was lack of transactional-level order-to-cash traceability across their billing systems, financing system, payment gateways, acquirers, networks and bank accounts, resulting in auditing and customer dispute challenges.

The challenge

The telecom merchant experienced 150 payment incidents impacting more than two million customers and payments totaling $200M in a single year. They were tired of costly write-offs due to unaccounted payment transactions amounting to $32M. They needed a solution to better track transaction discrepancies and resolve them quickly.

The solution

ACI’s revenue optimizer can streamline finance operations with automated workflows to track, manage and account for money end-to-end. It was ultimately built to improve financial accuracy, track money movement, reduce revenue leakage and lower operational costs.

The telecom merchant implemented the automated reconciliation solution to optimize every step of the payments back-office, creating a unified experience across payment, finance and operations teams.

The results

Within the first month of going live, the following transaction discrepancies were
discovered and remediated:

• 850+ transactions amounting to $900K were posted to customer accounts but not sent for settlement
• 350+ transactions amounting to $60K were not sent for settlement
• 110 transactions posted on billing system but not updated by gateway

Service levels and turn-around times for various processes improved significantly due to the newly implemented solution. The average time to ingest one million records was just 50 seconds. Implementation time for new channels was reduced by 80 percent and there was a 75 percent reduction in staff hours on transaction matching, data setup, exception research, etc.

In summary, this particular merchant dramatically reduced revenue leakage and improved operational efficiencies.