How Liberis saved over 15 days annually with Modulr's payments automation
To date, award-winning business finance provider Liberis has advanced over £1billion in funding to more than 30,000 SMEs, creating nearly 100,000 jobs. A core part of this success has been its ‘Business Cash Advance’ offering.
However, this required a lot of manual reconciliation which was slowing the team down. Through Modulr, they embedded a payment solution designed for their needs - reducing costs, errors and saving days of admin work each year.
90% funding process
15+ days
<1% error rate
Simplifying business finance using automated payment splitting
Using Modulr, Liberis adopted an automated payment splitting solution.
Powered by Modulr’s innovative automated rules engine, Liberis can now segregate inbound payments as they arrive providing each customer their own settlement account. Furthermore, Liberis integrates settlement accounts into the back end of their customers' business card terminals so that payments can be automatically taken at the point of sale.
“We’ve had brilliant feedback both from the Liberis team and our customers too.”
Modulr's API platform also allows Liberis to configure automated payment rules for each customer account so that an agreed percentage is sent directly to Liberis, while the business owner receives the rest.
“If we didn’t have that automated splitting capability, then our funding would look very similar to a standard high-street funding option and give very little benefit to the end business. It’s just made that customer journey a lot slicker, smoother and faster, which has allowed us to invest more in customer experience, customer service, and hopefully, continue to grow the business.” - Rob Straathof, CEO at Liberis
This approach eliminated the need for monthly manual reconciliation, simplified the payment process for Liberis’ customers and reduced the time needed to access funds. Within the space of a year, this had saved Liberis staff over 15 days in manual processing, enabling them to focus on growing their business.
Preventing manual errors and reducing payment processing costs
Before working with Modulr’s payment platform, Liberis had a highly manual, overnight process for setting up customer accounts, which meant the funding process took a lot longer. But, via its integration with Modulr, a two-day funding process was reduced to just ten minutes, with the customer journey becoming just four clicks. Liberis found that Modulr's solution was 90% faster than comparable solutions on the market.
The error rate was also reduced to <1%, improving customer satisfaction and saving teams more time through not having to correct mistakes.
“They’ve provided us with a quick and easy scalable solution for automatic payment processing which enables us to offer ‘four click funding’. The platform is user-friendly, allowing us to give our customers a better, seamless experience and saving the team time manually processing payments.” - Rosie Baker, Head of Treasury, Liberis
“It’s just made that customer journey a lot slicker, smoother and faster.”
Strengthening scalability
Beyond economic and efficiency gains, Liberis was also able to enhance their access and visibility of cash flows, enabled by same day payments, further strengthening scalability opportunities.
By engaging with Modulr’s platform, Liberis revolutionised their offering with a simple automated solution, delivering major benefits to both the company and their customers. Now, over 50% of Liberis’ UK business is concluded through automation, enabling them to service more SMEs at a much faster rate.
“Small businesses are the real heroes of the UK economy, yet many still struggle to get much needed financial support from traditional lenders. At Liberis, we’re on a mission to fund as many small businesses as we can to help them achieve their ambitions — and Modulr’s payment technology has been integral to this goal. With their API we can seamlessly split payments for our customers, making the Business Cash Advance process even smoother. We’ve had brilliant feedback both from the Liberis team and our customers too.” - Rob Straathof, CEO at Liberis
Why Liberis came to Modulr
While Liberis’ Business Cash Advance was popular, originally their business finance service required monthly manual reconciliation, and this was often time consuming and inefficient.
These logistical challenges meant resources were often invested in following up payments and made the service very difficult to scale. Additionally, customer onboarding took up to 48 hours and this unnecessarily delayed access to cash flow, limiting the value Liberis could offer.
To overcome these challenges, Liberis turned to Modulr for an automated payments solution that could simplify the finance process for its customers.
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With Modulr's industry-leading service-level agreement guarantees, the majority of payments reach customer accounts in 90 seconds. Based on the previous day's card transactions, money is typically in the businesses' account before they wake up the next morning.
Providing the tech behind the tech, Modulr helped Liberis deliver a better quality service that is not only fully scalable and reliable, but also operates at a much reduced cost.