AI-powered spend auditing
in Financial Services

Audit 100 percent of spend before you pay. Stop spend leakage. Find fraud. Comply with regulations. And pay people and vendors on time.

In Financial Services, there’s no room for spend leakage

Financial Services organizations are under more pressure than ever before. The industry is facing massive transformation, the adoption of new, technology-enabled business models, and an increasing amount of regulation — seemingly all at once. Financial Services is incredibly dynamic and lucrative, but your company faces a lot of change and a lot of risk. As a finance leader in a Financial Services organization, the burden is on you to make your firm as efficient and profitable as possible, mitigate as much risk as you can, and protect the firm’s reputation.

When it comes to business spend in Financial Services, you have a lot to tackle. Your firm spends a lot, both on employee travel and entertainment, as you have many knowledge workers, as well as for supplies and contractors in support of your business operations. At the same time, your spend profile and vendor line-up have gone through massive changes as you adopt cloud applications, allow the purchase of personal and workgroup productivity apps for employees, facilitate the purchase of mobile technology to keep users efficient and productive, and use contractors to get work done. With more money spent and an increasingly fragmented set of vendors, it's difficult to keep up.

Adding to the complexity of dealing with shifts in the purchasing process, Financial Services firms also maintain a tangle of back-office systems — the result of industry consolidation and the formation of business ventures with other large firms, as well as startups. These systems range from mainframes to cloud applications and address everything from expense management to contract management to invoice automation to ERP. Many systems don’t integrate smoothly with each other, so in order to prevent spend leakage and ensure compliance, you need to dedicate resources to the problem. In a tight employment environment in which strong employees value meaningful work, the last thing you want to do is deploy people on rote tasks that can and should be solved through automation.

3/5

Top global financial services firms use AppZen

$100K

Median cost of an invoice fraud scheme

Key capabilities

Audit 100% of spend, pre-payment

Validate and audit 100% of your expenses and invoices before any money is spent. Finance AI auto-approves low-risk items so you can focus on high-risk spend, saving time and ensuring policy compliance.

Maintain 100% regulatory compliance

Review expense reports, merchant receipts, corporate/P‑Cards, invoices, and payments against information from thousands of regulations and sanctions databases.

Reimburse employees in one day

Delight employees by auto-approving low-risk spend, erasing complexity, and cutting reimbursement time from weeks to hours.

Find all errors, waste, and fraud

Detect duplicates, mistakes, wasteful spending, and corporate fraud across all of your AP and T&E spend in minutes.

Eliminate manual invoice processing

Automatically process all non-digital invoices in your AP inbox. AI extracts and validates data, applies PO and accounting policies, and checks for duplicates.

Track team spend and compliance

Pinpoint areas for managers to focus on behavior change, using key metrics from team analytics to identify non-compliance and wasteful spend trends.

Why Financial Services companies need automation in their back offices

Fragmented back-office systems also leave your organization vulnerable to errors, waste, and fraud. With all of the acquisitions and business combinations your firm has undergone, reaching a steady state in your back office seems impossible. Clean approval workflows and invoice matching processes that are workable in theory aren’t fully operational. Once a process is defined, it’s upended in your next corporate business combination or executive reorganization.

What is required is a smart spend audit process that automates reviews of all of your expenses and invoices. It should understand and keep track of your corporate policies, and all spend-related laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or the UK Bribery Act, so you can remain compliant and stay out of regulatory hot water. It also needs to protect your organization from overpaying, double-paying, or becoming a victim of fraud.

AI-powered spend auditing from AppZen is imperative for Financial Services firms. Our platform helps modern finance teams reduce spend, comply with policies, and streamline processes.

“AppZen is doing something no human ever could.”

CFO
FINANCIAL SERVICES

Three of the top five financial services firms audit spend with AppZen.

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ROI calculator for AI spend auditing

Calculate your ROI on auditing 100 percent of expenses and invoices, prior to payment, with artificial intelligence.

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