PwC and Previse team up to accelerate roll out of cash-on-delivery for suppliers

Professional services firm PwC will become the preferred implementer for Previse’s AI-driven instant supplier payments programme for large corporates. The consultancy will offer Previse’s platform as part of its work helping clients to implement improved supplier payments processes and working capital optimisation.

Large corporates across the world have always struggled to deliver fast supplier payments and, with increased regulation and ever more complex supply chains, payments seem to even be slowing down. For example, the percentage of overdue invoices rose to 49% and 39% in the Americas and Western Europe respectively in 2017(1,2). Recognising the desire among large corporates to find solutions to the problem of lengthening payment terms, PwC will offer its clients the Previse solution and support them to implement and scale it rapidly as part of its supply chain consultancy services.

Previse’s machine learning driven instant payments programme enables businesses to ensure all their recurring suppliers, even the smallest supplier, can be paid instantly at a fraction of the cost of other finance options such as factoring. Previse is cheaper, easier and safer than alternates. In addition, Previse provides a meaningful new recurring stream of revenue for the corporate buyers which implement it, via a data access fee for access to the buyer’s invoice data.

Commenting on the deal, Daniel Windaus PwC said: “Clients value their suppliers highly and are very aware of the risks, reputational and legal, which slow payments place on their own businesses. However, payment processes cannot be transformed overnight. Firms still have to deal with the realities of existing technology, compliance and risk management.

“The Previse solution is particularly compelling because it circumvents many of these challenges and can reach all of a firm’s suppliers without requiring root and branch change within the large corporate. Companies choosing to implement Previse can, without significant cost and quickly become a fast payer in their market and reap the significant competitive advantages which come with that.”

Paul Christensen, CEO of Previse, said: “There are trillions of dollars tied up in slow payments across the world economy. Releasing that money back into small businesses will have a transformative effect on growth, innovation and employment everywhere. By harnessing the untapped value in invoice data, we have created the tools to enable large companies to do just that.

“Welcoming PwC as our preferred implementer will enable us to accelerate and scale our vision of a cash-on-delivery world and we the business to business payments.”