Trends in Credit and Accounts Receivable Technology for 2025: Part 2

Access Intell partners with businesses of all sizes, across a range of industries, and addresses a wide range of challenges, limitations, and restrictions within its diverse client portfolio. This broad experience gives them a unique perspective on industry trends.

Access Intell’s CEO and Founder, Lynne Walton, finds it no surprise that top-performing credit and finance teams are embracing highly connected, integrated solutions that prioritise data configuration, information flow, interpretation and automated action to streamline processes and enhance controls.

In this three-part article series, Lynne delves into some of the solutions being adopted and discusses some key considerations required before installing systems to automate processes. Part 2 focuses on the second stage of a customer journey — PPSR Processing and Risk Monitoring — and outlines the innovative solutions driving improvements in productivity and efficiency.

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PPSR – cost versus benefit

Not every business sees value in registering on PPSR. For service businesses there probably is little value but for all others there are benefits– some significant. For equipment finance, hire or rental businesses, there is considerable risk which needs to be mitigated by registration or by imposing operational restrictions. For suppliers of goods subject to retention of title (‘ROT’), the decision involves measuring the cost (and not just the monetary outlay) of compliance against the benefit derived from becoming a secured creditor.  

First, let’s look at the benefits. The PPSA greatly improves the position of suppliers who use retention of title as part of their risk management framework. As a secured creditor, suppliers of goods can expect to have:-

1. Legal priority rights to goods delivered which have not been paid for,
2. Rights in manufactured goods, co-mingled goods or goods affixed to other personal property,
3. Priority rights to proceeds derived from the sale of goods,
4. Defence against a voidable preference claim by a liquidator, and,
5. A solution to prevent ‘absconding’ debtors selling their business and leaving your debt unpaid.
   
   

PPSA can be of tremendous benefit to ROT suppliers, but the benefit must be considered alongside the cost.

The cost to a business of registering on PPSR is rarely just a monetary one. There is administrative time likely to be spent in processing registrations, dealing with queries and in enforcing rights as a secured party. There may also be legal fees associated with the process.  

Having considered all this and made the decision to register, suppliers are then faced with the challenge of processing hundreds and often thousands of registrations to PPSR. Many falter, finding the task arduous, but it need not be. Technology to minimise the initial upload task is available. A word of caution– make sure the data is being cleansed to append the correct PPSR grantor identifier and that the upload profile is correct to avoid a costly error. Once the initial upload is completed, many systems can process registrations automatically upon new account approval to minimise the ongoing work involved.

Having taken the decision to register, there are PPSR portfolio management tasks that need to be undertaken including processing renewals as registrations move towards their expiry date.

Advances in PPSR technology

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Two advances in PPSR technology in recent times have been in:-

• compliance monitoring – ensuring registrations processed are correct and enforceable, and
• automated active account renewal processing – digitally ensuring accounts are active before automatically processing PPSR renewals.  

To further explain, the most common PPSR errors found are for serial numbered goods (errors in VINs), profile errors (ticking the incorrect boxes) and grantor identification errors. One PPSR system is now able to identify and flag errors in registrations to enable users to correct the registration (where PPSR allows) or take alternative action to restore security in another way. This revolutionary advancement will make PPSR errors a thing of the past.

Monitoring customer risk

Monitoring customer risk to many means the receipt of hundreds and sometimes thousands of ‘alert’ emails into an inbox every week signifying that ‘increased risk’ exists. These could be triggered by significant events such as the business becoming reportable under the ATO Disclosure of Business Tax Debts regime or an external administrator being appointed. However, they are more likely to be insignificant e.g. the business has lodged an annual return, or a director has changed their address.  

Credit professionals are demanding much more advanced solutions than this and technology providers are listening and innovating.

Advances in Risk Monitoring technology

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Three areas where risk monitoring technology has advanced is in:-

• Configuration and choice – gone are the days when businesses chose one source of information, such as a credit bureau, to make decisions. Potentially missing out on critical information held by another bureau. Today’s credit professionals are demanding choice and configuration alongside automation. When it comes to deciding what information is relevant to its industry sector, customer type or exposure values and what can be ignored, technology providers are putting the control where it belongs.

• Visualisation– fragmented information delivered into email inboxes is no longer acceptable to forward focussed credit teams. They want to see where their risks and opportunities lie in their debtor book, and they want to see why.
• Action – historically, customer risk monitoring systems stood alone. Their job was to notify users of risk in a fixed customer list and their task ended when they sent the alert email. Advancements in system integrations mean that risk detection can be dynamic and can trigger action steps to flow into diaries, CRMs, ERPs, finance systems, credit officer workbenches, external providers and many others. These can be customised to suit the customer group, be automated or manual and sit inside or outside a dunning cycle.  

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In summary, technology and automation in trade credit management is advancing at great speed.  Credit professionals can take advantage of these developments in modular form –meaning they can implement solutions needed today (for example PPSR and monitoring) to suit urgent needs and plan what is next in a staged approach to meet the future aspirations of the business. These are exciting times to be in credit.

Don't miss part 1 of this series, on customer onboarding. Stay tuned for Part 3, covering Payments, Cash Allocation and Collections, coming soon.