Solarisbank

Solarisbank, the leading Banking-as-a-Service platform in Europe, aims to change all that.

“Our mission is to empower any business to offer financial services and deploy innovative customer-facing products quickly,” says Maria Skoczowsky, Head of Accounting at Solarisbank. “We achieve this through our comprehensive Banking-as-a-Service platform, which allows clients to embed advanced digital capabilities into their product offerings via APIs.”

By providing commodity-like financial services that are cutting edge, compliant and cost-efficient, Solarisbank has set its sights on rapid growth. As well as forging new B2B partnerships in its domestic market in Germany, the company is expanding into new markets in the European Economic Area and the UK.

“In the long term, we want to build a wider ecosystem for our embedded financial services,” Skoczowsky says. “As our business volumes increase year-on-year, it’s crucial that our back-office processes stay lean and efficient.”

Solarisbank identified its accounts payable (AP) workflows as a valuable opportunity for improvement. In the past, two full-time equivalents (FTEs) would process inbound invoices by hand. Each month, the AP team manually rekeyed information from scanned and PDF invoices into an electronic invoice approval tool. After securing the necessary approvals via the tool, the AP team manually keyed the data into a second system for posting and payment.

“Because we were using two manual systems for approvals and posting, there was always the risk of human error creeping into the AP process,” explains Skoczowsky. “The old way of working made essential tasks, such as month-end closing and audits, very time-consuming. Our business is growing quickly, and we knew that processing invoices by hand would be unsustainable in the long term.”

To solve these challenges, Solarisbank decided to move to the next-generation ERP, SAP S/4HANA®. The new approach promised to automate core AP tasks, accelerate key processes and deliver deeper insight into cost centers. To unlock these benefits, the company looked for a way to digitize the processing of inbound invoices from end to end.

To build accurate and compliant AP workflows, Solarisbank has augmented its SAP S/4HANA solution with OpenText™ Core Archive for SAP® Solutions, OpenText™ Core Capture for SAP® Solutions and OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management for SAP® Solutions, hosted in the OpenText™ Cloud.

Selecting a proven data capture platform

“We had already begun scanning paper invoices during the COVID-19 pandemic, but we lacked an optical-character recognition [OCR] capability to bring data from scanned documents into the SAP solution,” Skoczowsky says. “OpenText offered us a highly robust and reliable OCR engine, combined with rich digital workflows for end-to-end invoice processing and an archive for long-term data retention missing."

“The OpenText Cloud was another big advantage for Solarisbank. By eliminating the need to provision, to manage and maintain our own on-premises infrastructure, we can optimize our costs and focus on our core mission: developing digital services for the financial services industry.”

Shaping automated AP workflows

Working with its trusted SAP integration partner XPACT Consulting, Solarisbank integrated the OpenText solutions with SAP S/4HANA and developed automated AP workflows.

“We aimed to switch over to the new AP processes at the start of the new financial year, which gave us just six months to complete our work,” Skoczowsky says. “The XPACT team pulled out all the stops to keep the project moving. Even though we had to perform the work remotely because of COVID, we went live with the new SAP and OpenText solutions on time. Throughout the project, we were impressed with the close collaboration between XPACT and OpenText—whenever we needed technical support, we received it straight away.”

By partnering with XPACT Consulting to digitize its AP processes using OpenText and SAP solutions, Solarisbank is minimizing the amount of manual work required to carry out core finance tasks: including processing invoices, preparing for audits and more. Thanks to the new efficiencies, Solarisbank can continue its rapid growth while keeping its AP headcount lean.

Enabling touchless data capture

Today, Solarisbank suppliers continue to email PDF invoices to the bank, while Solarisbank employees scan and send paper invoices to the same address. Behind the scenes, the OpenText solution scans the invoices, extracts the relevant data and sends it directly to SAP S/4HANA to trigger the AP approval process.

“We can now input around 70 percent of all inbound invoices into the SAP solution without much manual involvement,” Skoczowsky says. “Automation saves our teams significant amounts of time. For example, we have shrunk our payment run preparations from eight hours to just 1.5 hours and cut month-end closing by two days. Because all our financial data is now in a single system, we’ve also dramatically reduced the manual effort involved in preparing financial data for auditors.”

Ready for growth

By accelerating financial processes, Solarisbank can drive fast-paced expansion without sending back-office cost and complexity spiraling.

“In the last year, our monthly invoice volumes have risen from 300 to 400 invoices per month, and that figure will continue to increase as we move into new markets,” explains Skoczowsky. “We predict that we’ll be able to process up to 800 invoices per month—a 100-percent increase—while keeping our AP headcount flat.”

Skoczowsky concludes: “Thanks to our work with OpenText and XPACT, Solarisbank has built seamless AP processes that will support us as we bring the benefits of digital service innovation to financial services companies across Europe.”