In an ever-changing economic landscape, optimizing BtoB accounts receivable management is more necessary than ever. To explore the key innovations and strategies in this field, we interviewed Olivier Garnot, Sales Director of Altisys, a pioneer in the publishing and integration of credit management solutions.

Altisys, part of the Recocash group, is a major player in B2B collections in France. In this interview, Mr. Garnot shares his experience, and introduces us to Altisys' EAGLE-ACT solution, designed to anticipate, communicate and effectively manage processes ranging from pre-recovery to litigation. He also discusses the strategic partnership with Ellisphere, highlighting how the latter enhances companies' operational capabilities in preventive customer risk management.

Context and issues

"First of all, a few figures about Altisys. Because of the link with Recocash, the servicing activity represents just over 5,000 managers who connect to the system on a daily basis. I'm leaving aside the players in the delegation, dispute handling or customer portal workflows, which number in the thousands of connections. By 2022, we will have managed just over €50 billion for all our customers.

A few more details about our EAGLE-ACT solution, which is based on three main pillars:

Anticipate
Communicate
Control

This solution offers management from pre-recording through to dispute handling, while including the dispute management process in all elements of the chain."

What challenges does the partnership with Ellisphere address?

"All companies generate invoices on a daily basis, which they are obliged to collect as quickly as possible for cash flow reasons, and more generally to optimize management. In the current context of rising raw material and energy costs, PGE reimbursement is still an issue for some companies. Now more than ever, it is essential to keep an active and effective watch on all your receivables, to prevent the risk of non-payment or even default.

What systems do Ellisphere and Altisys offer operational staff?

Altisys has set up two systems with Ellisphere.

The first is the automatic, daily integration of all the monitoring data that users of the solution wish to import:

scoring,
credit advice,
payment behavior,
procedures.

This automatic flow enables us to directly influence the collection processes that have been set up, and to re-prioritize a number of actions.

In particular, it enables us to work on weak signals, which are often overlooked by operational staff, even though they are a source of added value. The system will also make it possible to retrieve, on a daily basis, all the information sent to monitored customers. More precisely, it will send back to customer users the enriched information provided by Ellisphere in terms of sectoral payment behavior (see Ellisphere's D3 program) which, reloaded into the system the following morning, will provide users with a second, refined level of information.

The second concerns data quality, within the framework of the PDP (Partner Dematerialization Platform), the famous dematerialization of invoices. The quality of customer data will increasingly be a determining factor in the performance of finance departments.

In fact, non-compliant data will be rejected by the platform, which will obviously have an impact on management in the end. In the decision-making process, it is essential to have irreproachable data quality upstream, and to be able to automate processes as far as possible, to the benefit of managers, so that they can concentrate on high value-added files, and work more efficiently on the right files, at the right time.

What are the advantages and added value of this partnership?

For me, this collaboration with Ellisphere has two great qualities:

a pragmatic partnership that responds to very concrete challenges,
an operational partnership offering close working proximity between sales and technical teams.

This last point is particularly important. Just a few years ago, data and tools were separated. Nowadays, these two elements are intertwined, particularly within the framework of our partnership with Ellisphere, to the great benefit of finance departments who need to manage all their receivables with anticipation and risk prevention."