Q&A With RecVue’s CEO

Nishant Nair, Founder and CEO of RecVue, recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Global FinTech Series, which covers top finance technology news, insights and digital marketing trends. Topics included the future of order management, the pandemic’s impact on Order-to-Cash trends and his company’s approach to data privacy and cybersecurity framework adoption. Provided below is an abridged version of the interview, which can be viewed in its entirety here.

Global FinTech: How does RecVue fit into the modern fintech ecosystem?

Nair: Order-to-cash (OTC) is undoubtedly amongst the most critical and complex processes in an organization, yet fewer companies paid real attention to it before the pandemic. The OTC process is the collection of activities—everything from receiving an executed order to fulfilling it, billing as per contract terms and recognizing revenue as per ASC606 rules. Although it seems to operate in the back end, the order-to-cash process optimizes almost every step of the customer journey.

RecVue modernizes and automates the OTC process by creating a digital platform that delivers billing, revenue and channel partner compensation—key elements of a modern OTC process in a single solution. Thus, enabling businesses to reduce costs, boost sales, enhance customer satisfaction, and strengthen relationships with all stakeholders.

Our customers will validate that modernizing the order-to-cash process and deploying RecVue’s OTC solution boosts revenues by 5-10% every year.

Global FinTech: Tell us about the recent trends in Order to Cash platforms that you are most excited about. How did the pandemic push for new standards in the industry?

Nair: As mentioned, Order-to-Cash (OTC) is one of the organization’s most critical processes.

However, during the COVID-19 crisis, companies all over the world realized the importance of having recurring revenue business models. Additionally, they concluded that in order to generate liquidity and conserve cash for their very survival, they needed to minimize the risks and maximize the returns from all parts of their business operation—and more specifically, from the OTC processes.

Today, most order-to-cash processes are supported by siloed systems owned by disparate functions. The finance function manages invoicing, billing, and collections, while operations manage distribution and shipping systems, and order processing and sales is managed by the commercial function. This results in a complex and tricky system, often with limited exchange of information and employees having to manually switch between different systems and applications to transfer data. That means unnecessary errors, stress, inefficiencies, time, and costs. Ultimately, adversely impacting customer service and the bottom line.

Post pandemic, we predict that companies will integrate these disparate systems into a single platform solution. This will be a comprehensive OTC platform that will streamline and facilitate all of the exchanges between the relevant functions in the buyer and seller organizations for every transaction. A set of modular infrastructures and applications will support this unified platform that can rapidly evolve to meet the increasingly changing customer and organizational requirements, giving them rapid scale and speed.

Global FinTech: Could you tell us about the various B2B integrations that you offer with Enterprise Applications?

Nair: RecVue’s integration framework allows seamless data and business event connectivity with CRM systems such as Salesforce, Zoho, Microsoft Dynamics, and Workday, as well as all ERP systems including Oracle, Oracle Netsuite, SAP, and more.

Our API integrations support the sharing of master and transactional data with both upstream and downstream business applications, which allows near-real time exchanges of information critical to business processes, and shares large data sets with reporting and analytical systems.

We also provide highly optimized Open APIs to modules like Order, Billing, Revenue to post/release billing events, and enable Webstore integrations from customer’s websites—scheduling and maneuvering for RecVue’s object model.

Finally, RecVue also provides a data mediation layer which is designed to handle multiple data sources, formats and delivery sources. It provides the importing of data using API connectors while supplying a robust exception framework.

Global FinTech: Tell us more about your approach to the adoption of data privacy and cybersecurity frameworks? How do such steps benefit customers?

Nair: Our technology has adopted the SOC2 framework, the standards that have been established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The purpose of this framework is to enable organizations that collect and store personal customer information in cloud services to maintain proper security.

Customers’ data privacy is of utmost importance, which is why it’s imperative to conform to the security requirements and conduct both external and internal threat analyses to identify potential cybersecurity threats and take corrective and precautionary measures.

RecVue subscribes to the SOC2 compliance requirements, which are amongst the most challenging frameworks to implement. The implementation of procedures for destroying confidential information, monitoring systems for security anomalies, procedures for responding to security events, for example, have been taken care of.

RecVue has received certification for SOC 2 Type II and SOC 1 Type II compliance.

These steps help establish our credibility with our customers and reassure them of our commitment to uphold their data privacy and protection. Similarly, our content evaluation of the cybersecurity threats, both external and internal, helps prevent data breach risks and strengthen security.

Global FinTech: Your predictions on the future of Order Management, especially in the pandemic-hit regions.

Nair: Order management touches virtually every system and process in an organization. Well-governed order management also has a direct impact on how a customer perceives a business or brand, especially for those expecting a seamless experience in an omnichannel environment.

Given that enterprises today need best-in-class order-to-cash solutions to be successful, I predict that the future of Order Management will need to provide the following:

1. An intelligent Billing Platform (IBP): With evolving economic dynamics and changing customer behavior, organizations will need an intelligent billing engine that can help business leaders quickly react and pivot their time and investment. 
2. Scalability to meet business demands: The future demands a billing infrastructure that has the ability to be agile and adjust to demand peaks and troughs—which ultimately defines a company’s competitive advantage.
3. Customizable business and contract rules: Businesses adopting innovative models and complex revenue streams will need an order-to-cash system that allows rules-based pricing and unique customizations, upgrades, upsells, contract changes, with multi-currency and geo aspects factored in. 
4. Looking beyond the ERP: ERP systems were not designed to handle the complex order-to-cash challenges of the modern economy—specifically one impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. Today’s complex billing models, including subscriptions that factor in everything from quoting to ordering and fulfillment, are unable to be contained within such a linear process.
5. The growing gap between front office (CRM) and back office (ERP): With the increasing business complexities, there is a growing gap between front and back-office processes. Data silos, manual processes, and custom-built applications force many enterprises to do complicated data integrations and process changes to make CRM and ERP systems work together. This makes it much harder for them to embrace innovation, agility and adopt new business models and revenue streams if needed. 
6. Agile billing is becoming a reality: The time for agile billing has come! Organizations need to move from isolated billing solutions to complete order-to-cash solutions which offer organizations the freedom to scale from one-time charges, subscriptions, unlimited usage-based models, to whatever billing model they need. This billing flexibility is what will take both customer satisfaction and innovation to the next level and eventually boost a company’s bottom line.