Crown World Mobility Moves Payment Mountains with Kyriba Citing a 20% Productivity Increase

Crown required a secure, scalable and efficient solution that would enable them to offer an innovative and professional service to clients, reducing the nonproductive global mobility costs of delivering payments worldwide.

Optimizing the Outsourced International Payments Process
A rapidly expanding part of Crown’s service is outsourced expense payment and treasury solutions. When Crown World Mobility first offered this service it executed payments largely through manual processes based on spreadsheets and web-based electronic banking systems. This created a number of risks and compliance challenges and was insufficiently scalable in meeting client demand as well as the growing complexity of managing client funds across multiple geographies, currencies and payment products.

Identifying the Right Solution
Crown met with SWIFT and attended a workshop on cash and treasury management technology. It was decided that the payments and cash management team required a solution designed to support the needs of a payment factory, to align with how the function was developing. So in evaluating multiple vendors for security, scalability and efficiency gains, Crown also sought to implement a solution with a local presence in Hong Kong and without large technical overheads – Kyriba was deemed the only supplier to meet these needs and provide a truly cloud-based solution which met European data privacy storage compliance requirements.

Achieving the Vision, Measuring Success…
The Crown World Mobility team first completed a pilot implementation for a single entity and has since rolled out the solution to three further clients. The most immediately tangible result was the reduction in time and resource required to execute payments. For example, the time taken to prepare, approve and transmit payments has dropped from 3-4 hours to 20 minutes; reconciliation has been reduced from 4 hours daily to around 30 minutes.

Altogether the team has achieved a 20% productivity increase, saving 1 full-time headcount whilst improving quality and accuracy. Previously additional staff were required for each new client, whereas now they have the capacity to support both existing and additional clients without further recruitment.

There have also been notable improvements in control. As part of the Kyriba project, Crown implemented host-to-host connections with three payment banks, providing straight-through-processing of payments from initiation to transmission with no manual intervention required. Transaction controls, such as authentication and approval take place in Kyriba before release to the bank, without users requiring access to the banking system directly.

Through the automatic selection and set-up of optimal payment methods predetermined by Kyriba, including SEPA and Global Disbursement ACH, Crown has been able to achieve payment cost savings exceeding USD$80k per year for its clients, reducing the cost of some payments by 65-95% without additional labour overheads.

Moving Forward
The Crown team will be exploring how the solution can support a wider range of services to customers, including funding linked to overdrafts. Kyriba is a strategic and essential platform on which to grow the business; It will continue to be a catalyst for further optimizing the payments and cash management processes, making better use of the data to create more sophisticated and informative business intelligence.