Founded over a decade ago in 2013, PaymentWorks is still a relatively unknown player in the Source-to-Pay space and the Supplier Management (and more exactly, Supplier Assurance) space in particular. Founded to solve a particular problem in the financial services industry (namely, ensuring the supplier is who they say they are; is not sanctioned, debarred, uninsured, or non-compliant; and the accounts they give you do belong to them), they have found their niche in the mid-market in any services or indirect industry where supplier assurance is key to supplier selection, onboarding, award, and payment.

In the average mid-sized organization, the average Procurement team spends too much time finding vendors, verifying their validity, verifying they aren’t on a prohibited list, onboarding them, maintaining their information, and constantly answering questions from the employee that wants the vendor onboarded, the vendor, and managers on both sides as to where Procurement is in the process. All of this takes time, a lot of time, and, sometimes, so much time that shortcuts need to be taken to meet deadlines and key information is missed, verifications are not done, and, sometimes, fraudulent invoices and payment instructions slip through.

And this doesn’t even consider the data management issues when supplier-related data is stored in the ERP, the procurement platform, the accounts payable platform, the compliance platform, and nothing is ever synched. The data nightmares compound problems, compound risk, and compound loss. Much of it is preventable, with the right data, processes, and verifications.

PaymentWorks was founded to be the digital supplier platform for organizational vendor master data management in a manner that ensured that supplier data was always complete, accurate, and verified before any supplier selection, award, order, or payment was made. And that’s what they’ve built, for the mid-market. And while there are a number of modern onboarding solutions that solve the data management nightmare, there are few that do critical verifications still, fewer still that do bank verifications, and almost none that do indemnifications against ACH fraud risk. (In fact, among the 100+ Supplier Information Management players, the only real competitive technology capability in this aspect is Apex Analytix, but their focus is entirely on the Large Enterprise [and not the mid-market].) And we haven’t even mentioned the fact that they actually understand the vendor side. But we’ll get to that.

The Buying Organization

The PaymentWorks platform sits in front of the ERP (or another back-office system that serves as the back-office system of record if it’s not the ERP), and works by intercepting all data requests (pulls) and data updates (pushes) and ensuring that the data retrieved is authorized and up to date and the data pushes are always verified. It also handles the synchronizations between the ERP and all of the systems that handle supplier data. And, of course, it has a fully fleshed out portal that enables the administrators, the buyers, and the organizational employees who need to interact with the vendor and/or purchase their products or services.

The platform has five main components:

• Vendor Master
• Supplier Portal Management
• Messaging
• Reporting
• Payment Process Management

Vendor Master

The platform collects four main categories of information:

1. Business and Tax Information: contains business name, tax and registry identifiers, and related information — the baseline is common to all client organizations and clients can add additional configurable fields
2. Addresses and Contact Information: HQ office and primary contacts, common to all client installations, and additional address and contacts as desired by the client
3. Banking and Payment Information: bank account information, which can be tokenized for security, preferred payment method, and any additional (security) fields the client wants
4. Additional Compliance Information: any insurance, compliance, diversity, and related information desired by the client, configured on a client by client basis

When a supplier enters this area of the application, they see a dashboard which displays the status of all vendors (along with a visual progress bar) that can be quick filtered on key fields in the side bar. They can select any visual display to drill into a vendor, or search for a vendor to drill into. They can also upload supplier files from the ERP, and this data is used to alert the buyer if the information on a form conflicts with any data in their ERP. The buyer can then choose to reject the form/supplier (if they determine it is a fraudulent submission), override the information in the ERP (if the ERP info is wrong), amend the information (if the ERP information is partially right), add a parent/child relationship (if the supplier is a child organization), or add a new record (and possibly archive or delete the old one). (They can also configure the invoice file processing rules for invoice status files they will be pushing to the platform from the AP system.)

From here, the client can also access, review, pause (for more information), accept, or reject any and all registrations and updates to all vendor information. (Rejection can be final rejection or temporary, returning the registration to the vendor for updated information.) For each vendor, they can access the organizational status of the vendor (onboarding, approved, banned, etc.) at all times as well as the status of all information. They can also quickly jump to associated invoice and payment information tracked by the system (from P2P / AP pushes).

The key aspect of the vendor profile management is the automatic validation of business and banking information and the automatic search against all relevant sanction/debarment lists. In addition, the platform can collect compliance and diversity certificates, appropriate metadata, and configure rules for notification upon impending expiry. Not only are all of these validations automatic, but the platform will immediately inform you if key information is missing or in an invalid format, and if it’s verified or unverifiable (and likely invalid) if in an incorrect format.

A powerful feature of the platform for US clients is that it can auto-generate W-X forms for vendors required by the client organization, and save the vendor a lot of manual effort.

Supplier Portal Management

This is where the administrator can control the optional information collected during the supplier onboarding (core information common to all vendors is always collected and cannot be changed), and buyers can invite new vendors for onboarding, that get their own custom invite link and custom sub-portal. (Yes, sub-portal — each vendor on the PaymentWorks platform has a single portal where they provide the information common to all buyers they interact with, and sub-portals where they specify the custom information requested by each client and interact with that client — more in the vendor section.)

Messaging

This is where the buying organization can communicate with a vendor securely and all messages are logged, secure, searchable, and auditable as they are unalterable once logged.

Reporting

The platform comes with about two dozen built-in reports that can be selected from the reporting screen. These reports include, among others:

• Uploaded Suppliers Report (which suppliers uploaded from the ERP were found in the existing network)
• (Vendor) Invitation Approval Audit Report (all invitations and associated status info)
• Returned Registrations Report (all vendors who have had their submission returned, for what reason, and how many times)
• Registration Approval Audit Report (all decisions and by who)
• Vendor Onboarding Report (all records and status)
• Custom Field Report (custom information collection)
• Payer User Role (for all users)
• Delivered Payment Reports (all data from P[ayment]I[nstruction]F[ile]s sent to the bank)
• etc.

And all can be fully filtered on every reporting dimension. These reports are in addition to (custom) dashboards that can overview information of interest (for the specific client organization) at a glance.

Payment Process Management

The platform, which accepts invoice status and payment record pushes from ERP systems, tracks all invoice and payment statuses, pushes those to the relevant vendors, and allows a buyer to quickly determine the status of an invoice or payment. Once verified, it will also push PIFs to the bank.

The platform supports virtual cards, ACH, accelerated ACH (early payment discounts), and checks and can verify domestic bank accounts accordingly. In addition, as mentioned before, they can tokenize/mask the bank account information and make it so that all the buyers see are the tokens while the actual bank account information is securely stored only on their systems (and capable of being unmasked only by an authorized administrator) to heighten payment security and help the organization prevent internal / collusion fraud. Finally, if the client uses their system with the appropriate security protocols in place (such as tokenization), they will indemnify the client against domestic ACH fraud as they stand behind their verifications and security.

The Vendor Portal

As mentioned above, a really cool feature about the PaymentWorks platform is they get it right and a supplier only has to register on the platform once, only ever has to remember the login for, and access, one portal, and onboarding for a new client is limited to additional non-common information required by that client. But let’s step back a bit.

The first time a brand new supplier is invited by any client of the PaymentWorks platform, they ware walked through the onboarding process in a guided step-by-step manner that asks them questions about their business type, locations, banking, insurance, and diversity information in a manner that ensures they are only asked to provide the appropriate, relevant, information to their business type. (For example, businesses need different information for corporations and for individual / sole proprietorships.) Mandatory and optional fields are clearly delineated, formats clarified, and key identifying information confirmed.

Once they are onboarded by at least one client, they gain full access to their vendor portal where they can see all of their customers, and click into each to see information specific to that customer or complete a registration process or update. They can also see all of the invoice status information provided to them by their customers, all of the remittances made by the customer along with correlation of those remittances to their individual invoices, any messages from their customers, their core profile business & banking information (which they can submit updates to, which will be verified by PaymentWorks before they will be allowed), and any relevant PaymentsWorks news or updates.

Validations

As indicated above, a key capability of the platform is all of the automatic validations designed to ensure all relevant supplier business, compliance, and payment data is valid at all times. These include, but are not limited to:

• IRS TinCheck (provided tax id matches provided legal name)
• StreetySmarts USPS address validation (real address that can accept mail)
• Early Warning System + Proprietary PaymentWorks banking verifications combined (account is owned by the tax id you intend to pay via EWS); for those bank accounts not covered by EWS, the PaymentWorks platform assesses risk and will verify (or not) based on our data.
• Choice of more than 800 federal and state sanctions lists to continuously monitor, including OFAC, Sam.gov, debarment, etc.

If you want to know whether a specific list is monitored, or can be integrated, or want more details on the integrated lists and verifications, PaymentWorks will be happy to provide this information to you. Simply reach out directly.

Summary

PaymentWorks is a relatively unique Supplier Management offering in the compliance and payment verification space whose only competitor you would have heard of is Apex Analytix (a heavyweight with the price tag to match), and the only platform of its kind designed with a focus on the vastly underserved mid-market in entity verification, banking verification, and vendor compliance. And while we’ve covered a few good providers as of late for vendor diversity / compliance in general in the mid-market, if your organization’s greatest need is verification and compliance around business legitimacy and payments, then PaymentWorks is a vendor that should definitely be on your shortlist. This also holds true if you are a large enterprise with a good supplier management solution in place as part of your Source-to-Pay suite that doesn’t do these compliance verifications, as it can be easily plugged in (since it sits on top of the ERP and can intercept all the relevant traffic) to allow Finance and Risk to do compliant on-boardings and key profile maintenance, and then all of the day to day supplier performance/[other] compliance/risk/development management can be done in your existing solutions.