Emburse and Finexio Partner to Add AI to Accounts Payable

Expense solutions firm Emburse has teamed with accounts payable (AP) company Finexio.

The partnership lets Emburse customers shift to Finexio’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform, trading manual processes for a digital ecosystem, the companies said in a Tuesday (July 30) news release.

“Our customers are increasingly looking for payment options that can help them deliver greater value for their organizations,” said Emburse CEO Marne Martin. “Finexio’s payments-as-a-service will help them do exactly that.”

Martin added that many of Emburse’s customers have already begun using virtual cards for travel and expenses to control employee spending. Adding this capability to B2B AP payments, she said, could drive significant financial benefits to companies while helping them better plan corporate cash flow.

“With this new alignment with Finexio, we are also deepening Emburse’s ties with the Mastercard partner network, which will give even greater payment benefits to our customers as we continue to scale embedded payments and virtual wallets alongside our Emburse cards,” the CEO said.

PYMNTS explored automation in AP and accounts receivable (AR) processes in a report last week, noting that one of the most compelling reasons for businesses to embrace automation in these processes is the potential to reduce costs.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence finds that AP staff have been working extra hours as they turn to legacy and manual procedures to handle an increasing number of invoices, with 75% of AP teams saying that they processed more invoices in the last quarter.

“There’s a lot of messiness around payments, particularly very large B2B payments that might house hundreds or thousands of invoices with hundreds of associated line-item details,” Boost Payment Solutions founder and CEO Dean M. Leavitt told PYMNTS. “Large enterprises on both the AP and AR side are looking for ways to automate those processes, digitize them and reduce their cost as well.”

That’s because automated systems can take care of large volumes of transactions with speed and accuracy, giving workers more time to focus on more strategic activities.

“You’ve heard the expression better, cheaper, faster,” Ben Lamm, chief operating officer at Capital One’s Trade Credit Business, said in an interview here last August. “I think automation really helps with faster and cheaper.”

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