Long before the disruption and devastation caused by COVID-19, IP firms were dealing with significant challenges relating to the cost and complexity of managing the payments and being paid by foreign agents from around the world including:
By using Billtrader, our global clients are able to pay into a local account in their own country thus avoiding international bank fees. Billtrader is also able to consolidate multiple invoice payments to us into one lump sum, avoiding the usual international transfer fees on every transaction. We are also getting paid much quicker, which in return allows us to forward plan our cashflow more effectively and avoid the liquidity trap when financing (sometimes high) official governmental fees.
Billtrader integrates seamlessly into our native digital environment, enabling us to offer a streamlined payment process, delivering operational efficiency and cost savings for our clients and our business. While the real value lies in creating a win-win for both our clients and the firm, the financial gain is savings of around $50,000 a year in bank fees.
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Junior Partner, Moeller IP
The Billtrader platform was designed to help IP firms solve the cost and efficiency challenges related to making payments and being paid by foreign agents. How do we do this? The FinTech innovation is delivered in four key areas:
When you need to pay a bill from your foreign agent, your local bank charges a fee for each international transaction. At the receiving end, your foreign agent’s bank also takes a fee from the payment, leaving your agent with a shortfall. We estimate that bank fees alone cost the IP industry over $50m every year.
Because we have bank accounts around the world, we can eliminate international wire transfers.
Another factor that eats into firm profits is the sheer administrative burden of manually entering the volume of invoices from multiple countries and then making and reconciling the payments against each client account.
We’ve adapted the latest data capture tools and artificial intelligence to digitally capture all the information from foreign agent bills, and to push that information seamlessly into any accounting system. Billtrader eliminates the need for manual data entry, saving time and staff costs.
Prior to 2020 it was very common to wait three to six months to get paid by overseas agents with many firms regularly holding up to half of their annual revenue in unpaid bills.
We use best-of-breed supply chain finance solutions to allow us to pay IP firms right away. IP firms can get instant credit for their outstanding bills and can use that credit to pay any foreign agent’s bill or simply get paid in cash.
The IP industry exchanges billions of dollars in foreign currency every year very
inefficiently, using outdated technology. The impact to firm profitability can be
significant.
Billtrader uses FinTech to generate forward currency rates, which allows us to give an IP firm the guaranteed price it needs to pay in multiple currencies. We take the guesswork out of the amount firms need to charge their local clients and protect them from coming up short.
Contact our global sales team to discuss how Billtrader can help you transform your foreign agent payments and receivables.