Digital Payments: A ‘Nice-to-Have’ To The Only Way To Do Business

Covid-19 has sent the world into a panic. This is particularly true for businesses, with companies of all sizes being sent into survival mode. If cash flow wasn’t the priority before, it certainly is now.

A survey conducted by SME Malaysia found that only 33% of Malaysian businesses had just enough cash flow to pull through in March, while another 37.8% can sustain themselves until April 2020.

The fallout from this pandemic for businesses is clear for all to see. Initiatives such as going digital, which we previously viewed as “nice to have” pre Covid-19, have quickly accelerated overnight to becoming the only way to do business. This is particularly true when taken against a payments perspective – when there is no cash, no cheques, no over-the-counter transactions, then digital payments are a must.

Here at Curlec, we provide an online platform that helps businesses collect recurring and one-off payments, and ultimately puts them in control of their cash flow. In this article, we will explore how solutions such as ours can help mitigate the short term impacts that we all currently face right now, as well as what can be done longer term to weather the next potential storm.

Make it as easy as possible for your customers to pay

In the midst of the global pandemic, it is more important than ever for businesses to offer convenience and flexibility to their customers. The last thing you need is having your remaining prospects cancel their purchase or subscription due to restricted payment options, especially when sales are at a premium.

Relevance remains the key currency for business owners to scale up their operations effectively, and there has never been a more important time for businesses to become truly digital. To address this issue, Curlec enables business owners such as yourselves to not only manage your payments digitally and remotely, but ultimately the power to design your own payment plan to dictate when to bill, how much to invoice as well as when to collect.

Being truly digital means having to be closely attuned to how your customer wants to pay, or in the case in a lockdown, how they can pay. So, when making payments by cheques or over the counter is out of the question, have your customers complete their transactions directly through your website using Curlec’s API, or utilise our Request-To-Pay feature via email or WhatsApp. Here payment links with pre-filled forms can be sent to your customer, where they can simply authorise within a few clicks.

When payment becomes real-time and instant, all the customers need to do is authorise forms online or approve requested payments in real-time, without even making a trip to the store. This means that you can get paid instantly!

Have full visibility over your payments process

While some perceive going digital as just a requirement to engage with new customers, being digital actually requires you to be open to re-examining your entire way of doing business and understanding where the new frontiers of value are.

The Curlec system easily integrates with accounting systems, meaning that collecting payments become automatic when invoices are due, and reconcile these payments automatically so that you will be able to know what has been collected as well as how many payments that are due or outstanding. Having all this information at hand meant that you can easily manage your projections, as well as having the ability to act on certain issues quicker to avoid any disruptions to your cash flow.

In addition to that, one of the major benefits of going digital with Curlec is its mobility. The cloud enables you and your team to have a consolidated view of all your payment records in real-time, while offering the flexibility to work from any location remotely. Aside from improving the level of productivity and efficiency, this saves you having to deal with stacks of invoices and worrying about payment notices getting lost. You can spend less time worrying about who has yet to pay you and focus more on growing your business.

Widen your collection strategies

Collecting funds, especially recurring payments should be easy. And for most businesses, using Direct Debit puts you in control of when you get paid.

But what happens if the collections fail? Every failed transaction will negatively impact your cash flow, increase churn rates as well as require heavy admin work to be rectified.

So, how does one expand and diversify their debtor strategy when this happens?

With the Curlec portal, you get instant notifications of any failed transactions as well as the ability to automate retries to improve your collection rates accordingly. The system provides a variety of automatic notifications which includes mandate set up, transaction status and failures that encompasses the entire collection process so that you are notified and are able to rectify any related issues instantly. Having full visibility of your collection status using the Curlec portal means you can act on this a lot quicker and strategically.

And if the retries for Direct Debit still don’t work, you don’t need to worry. Curlec gives you the ability to combine your regular collections with our one-off Instant Pay (FPX) tool. As a result, your customers can pay off what is owed for a one-off period while you sort out the recurring issue. So, whether you collect monthly subscriptions, instalments or one-off transactions, collecting payments with Curlec has never been easier.

In a time where cashless methods are the safest and most practical way to conduct your business, it is now mission critical to be able to make the change quickly and become truly digital. So while you work on what needs to be done to sustain and grow your business, Curlec will be right behind you to handle all of your collection needs.

To find out more on how Curlec can help you collect payments remotely, connect with us today by filling in the contact form below.