Transforming Procure-To-Pay Process With Hyperbots Payment Co-Pilot

Michael:
Hi, everybody! Thank you for joining us. Today, I'm Michael Van Patten. I'm the CFO of Summetry, a management consulting practice. My prior position was the CFO of True Influence, which is now Tyriad—a global marketing intelligence company—where I successfully merged two similar companies. 

I've held multiple leadership roles at Blackbaud, Elastic Networks, NetMotion Wireless, IceWeb, and more. I bring industry experience in technology, manufacturing, software, and SaaS.

Today, I'm here as a partner with Hyperbots, learning more about their journey and their AI-enhanced financial software products. 

I’m also joined by Ayo Fashina, one of their founding Design CFO partners of Hyperbots. Let's let Ayo tell a little bit about himself.

Ayo Fashina:
Thank you, Michael.

As Michael said, my name is Ayo Fashina. I'm a strategic partner to Hyperbots, and I've been with them for over two years. I started early, supporting them in designing the co-pilots that are now rolled out.

My background is in finance, specifically corporate finance, project finance, and internal finance, and I’ve explored various aspects of finance over my 25 years of experience.

I currently serve as one of the Directors at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Before that, I was the CFO at a scale-up called Kobo360, which operates in seven African countries. My startup experience there helped inform my support for Hyperbots, because we experienced all the pain points CFOs and finance teams face globally.

Startups are like babies—everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and your job as CFO is to fix it. I'm glad to be here today to discuss how Hyperbots can ease some of the pain points of CFOs.

Michael:
Great, thanks for joining us today. This session is all about the Hyperbots Payment Co-pilot, and how it is transforming the last mile of the procure-to-pay process.

Ayo:
Glad to walk you through it today. When you think about it, automating payments—and the timing of decisions and execution—has delivered benefits we never thought possible. That’s the consistent feedback I hear from CFOs who’ve adopted Hyperbots. I'd like to unpack this a bit so our audience understands what we’re talking about.

Michael:
Why is outbound payment processing still painful?

Ayo:
It is painful for many reasons. There are many mundane and tedious tasks involved in payment processing. There are often missed early payment discounts—opportunities that go untapped if you’re unaware of them or unable to act in time. 

So, analysts in the current reality key in invoices into a calendar and hope that the CFO signs on time. They say, "I’ll put all the payments and send them to the CFO", and hand it over. Now, discounts are forfeited because they’re not actively looking for this invoice. If we pay 10 days earlier, we get a 5% discount. Because of the volume of work they have to manage, they can’t always focus on that.

Another issue is late payments and the penalties that come with them. The reason for this is the same as what I mentioned before — analysts enter the invoices and then wait for approvals from different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Approvals often stall in email chains. 

CFOs or whoever is responsible for approving payments receive a large volume of emails, so approval requests can get lost, and you don’t get to approve them on time. As a result, payments are delayed, and extra fees have to be paid, causing friction with your vendors because they say, “This person doesn’t pay on time. I’m not sure I want to continue working with you”.

Another pain point is the bottleneck itself, which creates many of these initial problems I mentioned. In some organizations, only the CFO can approve payments. This means if the CFO is busy or traveling, nothing gets done, and then issues arise. When everything is stuck waiting for the CFO’s approval, there’s also the challenge of multiple payment methods.

Some companies, especially those that have been around for a while, use different types of payments. Newer, more modern companies tend to rely on electronic payments. But older companies use ACH, checks, virtual cards, and more, and these are siloed across different bank portals. 

They lack API connections with their banks that would allow them to send payments directly from their system and automatically communicate with the bank to complete transactions. Because of this, there is a significant amount of manual effort involved in reconciling all the bank accounts.

Due to this, issues like duplicate or fraudulent payments arise, reconciliation is slow, and audit trails are weak when it comes time to audit and try to determine what happened. You then have to search through Excel files, Outlook approvals, and various other records to piece together the audit trail for internal or external audits.

These are some of the pain points that the Hyperbot Payment Co-pilot has helped ease for finance professionals.

Michael:
That’s great. So what exactly is Hyperbot’s Payment Co-pilot?

Ayo:
The way I would describe it is - the Co-pilot is a 24/7 agent and controller that’s always working in the background, processing all these payments. First, it recommends the ideal payment date by analyzing the invoice, checking for early payment discounts, and weighing that against the company’s cash flow. Because just taking the early payment discount isn’t always the best move, cash is king, and cash today is more valuable than cash tomorrow.

So you need to do the math, and the AI does the math for you to see—if I pay sooner and get this discount, is that better for me?

Another thing the co-pilot does is drive approval through a flexible workflow. So, whether it's Slack or Teams you're using, it can be set up so the approval workflow progresses automatically. It moves to the next approver as the previous one approves it. You don’t have to chase people down—it automatically sends reminders to anyone holding up the process.

The co-pilot also executes the payment. Once the final approval is given, it connects to the bank via API and sends the payments directly to the vendor. You don’t have to log into your bank account to do it manually—it’s fully automated.

It can also post the transaction to your general ledger (GL) automatically, eliminating that extra step. What I like is that it reconciles in real-time. It matches the bank data to the invoice and flags any discrepancies, closing the loop. It’s self-learning—the more invoices it processes, the better it gets. Like a 24/7 agent that’s always learning. Just like the rest of us—we're always learning, right?

How does the co-pilot work end-to-end? Let me walk you through it:

1. Invoice Capture:
   The invoice from the vendor is scanned by the co-pilot, which extracts all critical information.

2. Terms & Cash Analysis:
   It analyzes cash position and invoice terms to determine optimal payment timing—early or on due date—based on calculations like early discounts vs. interest gains.

3. Payment Timing Recommendation:
   It recommends options: Pay now, pay on a specific date, and pay on the due date.

4. Approval Workflow:
   Based on roles and limits set during configuration, approvals happen in Slack, Teams, etc., with one tap.

5. Bank Integration:
   Payment files or APIs connect to your bank to send payments via international wires or ACH.

6. Remittance & Vendor Portal Update:
   The vendor receives a branded email and portal notification with invoice and payment references.

7. Bank Reconciliation:
   Since the co-pilot initiates payments, it also tracks them. It enables one-click reconciliation and auto-clears data for the ERP.

8. Fraud & Duplicate Checks:
   It detects duplicate or fraudulent payments using fuzzy logic and vendor history, flagging suspicious ones for review.

9. Hash chain / Audit Log:
   Every recommendation, approval, and reconciliation step is logged using hash-based tracking. It’s searchable for audit purposes, so you can trace decisions and resolutions easily.

Michael:
That’s great. We’ve got to keep the auditors happy, right?

What measurable value does the Co-pilot deliver?

Ayo:
So, as I was saying, when we started speaking with some of the CFOs who have adopted this Co-pilot, some of the gains they mentioned relate to capturing early payment discounts. Before, they were only able to capture about 23% of those discounts manually. But with the Co-pilot, they can capture 78% or more.

Michael:
Of those early discounts?

Ayo:
Yes, that’s more than three times the amount of early discounts you can take advantage of by using the Co-pilot compared to the traditional manual process of checking everything. Then there’s also penalty avoidance related to late fees and late payments.

One CFO, on average, saves about $68,000 from late payment penalties because they adopted the Co-pilot. Previously, things would fall through the cracks during the approval process, resulting in late payments and penalties. Since vendors are important, maintaining a good relationship with them is essential.

Then there’s the processing cost itself. When payments are processed manually, the Accounts Payable (AP) effort per payment is high compared to AI-automated processing. For baseline reference, let’s assume manual processing effort is 100%. What we’ve seen is an 80% reduction in processing costs based on full-time equivalent hours.

Then, there’s the speed of reconciliation. Previously, bank reconciliation and cash position visibility used to take five days. Now, with a click of a button, the information is pulled immediately, someone reviews it, and it’s done the same day. So you gain five days in reconciliation speed.

And then, when you talk about the fraud I mentioned earlier — fraud, duplicate payments, and all those things — you have to do annual write-offs. One CFO was telling me that $30,000 is what they used to write off annually around duplicate payments and fraud. But now it’s zero because the co-pilot catches everything or flags it for someone else to check.

Some of the intangibles are: the auditability has improved because of the audit trail, overall satisfaction and morale of the finance team are better, and it allows the finance team to think more strategically instead of always doing mundane tasks. So the month-end stress level is a lot lower when closing the books because everything is captured by the AI, and closing the books is a breeze.

Michael:
That’s great. Yeah, I think we could all use the savings in dollars and time going forward. How has ownership of payment tasks shifted?

Ayo:
Okay, I’ll go through some of the tasks that are in typical invoice processing. 

When you think about identifying the discounts and payment windows, that’s typically done by analysts with spreadsheets, checking where to get discounts on invoices. Now, AI runs through all this in seconds and makes recommendations. For example, it might say, "You can get an XYZ discount from them. Why don’t you take it?"

Regarding the launch of the payment run, an AP clerk was responsible for that before. Now, using Co-Pilot, AI can trigger it because there’s an API connection for payments. Routing approvals used to be: “I’ve done this, now send an email to your boss or next in line,” or a paper trail where you had to get someone to physically sign and approve. But now, Teams workflow or Slack workflow can be used to do the approval process, with automatic reminders sent to whoever is holding up the workflow.

When you talk about payments generated, like ACH or check files, it used to be a bank portal export — you’d batch invoices you wanted to pay, export them to the bank portal, and then start processing payments. Now, you can have an API plug directly to the bank, and payments are sent instantly.

Regarding payment advice that goes out to vendors, there was an Outlook template that did this historically. Now there’s an automated process with the invoice list that goes out when the advice is sent.

When reconciling bank transactions, historically, you downloaded Excel sheets from the bank and created VLOOKUPs and HLOOKUPs to match things to invoices. Now there’s a real-time agent matching continuously, so you just push a button and it outputs the results.

When posting to the general ledger, it used to be manual journal entries. But now, if you use the payment co-pilot from Hyperbots, auto-posting and validation are options you can use, and it happens instantaneously.

Michael:
That’s great. I’m always nervous when I see a lot of manual journal entries on the books — those blue arrows. What are some of the key functional capabilities that power those gains?

Ayo:
Some of the things I mentioned earlier include early discount algorithms that run the math behind whether you should take early payments or not, penalty avoidance logic, flags for payments about to be late, and ensuring approvals are processed with an ACH connection to avoid late payments.

There are flexible approval processes: multi-level, single-level, amount-based, and mobile phone approvals. Busy people approving payments don’t have to sit at a laptop; they can approve on the go. 

The Hyperbot Payment Co-pilot makes it easier to get approvals done. There are ACH and check payments with API connections to banks, partial payment handling to support retention amounts when there’s a dispute on an invoice, and bank and GL reconciliation, where the co-pilot helps with both bank and ledger reconciliation by posting directly to the GL.

Then there’s a fraud prevention layer that flags duplicate payments, sends bank charge alerts, and even tracks changes to approved payments.

You also get rich notifications to the vendor portal. Vendors can log into the portal to check payment status or invoice status, see the purchase order, and follow the payment path. This reduces calls to finance analysts asking, “What’s going on with my invoice?” because the supplier can just check the portal.

There’s a comprehensive audit trail built into the co-pilot to ensure internal and external audits are seamless. It also supports multi-entry, multi-ERP interfaces, so this co-pilot can work with your existing ERP without needing to change it. It’s compatible with many commonly used ERPs globally. If you use something uncommon, they can design a way for the co-pilot to integrate, typically within weeks. These are some of the key differentiating functionalities of the co-pilot.

Michael:
Great. I’ve used NetSuite, Dynamics, and some others, and they seem to have some of these functions, but not all. What is the competitive differentiation for Hyperbots?

Ayo:
I’m glad you asked. Those ERPs have been around a while and have added AI to do some of these functions. But Hyperbots’ difference is that AI is built from the ground up. It’s not a retrofit; it’s purpose-designed to use AI for this process.

When Hyperbots developed this, they didn’t just have tech guys in a lab guessing what finance people would want. They engaged with many CFOs, including me and others, to help design and develop the use cases for the co-pilot. This ensures it solves real issues faced by finance and accounting professionals, rather than some programmer deciding how to fix problems.

To summarize some differentiating factors: there’s decision intelligence in Hyperbots’ payment co-pilot, which includes AI timing and recommendations on payments. Normal ERPs require you to batch payments manually and send them out, but Hyperbots has a more flexible user experience that fits whatever workflow you use in your organization, whether Teams, Slack, or others.

You can plug into it and create a workflow using the tools your staff is already familiar with, instead of having to go into a separate web portal. Some of the AI payment systems people use require logging into a separate site, where you have to figure out how to run your payments and upload all your processes manually.

What Hyperbot does is integrate seamlessly with your existing system, so you don’t have a separate portal for approvals, workflows, or any other actions within the Hyperbot Payments Co-pilot.

There’s also rail convergence, where ACH, check, card, and wire payments are all managed within the same workflow, rather than separate workflows as you would normally have with traditional ERPs that only handle a single payment rail.

Additionally, Hyperbot offers integrated reconciliation — a real-time, agent-based reconciliation process that continuously checks and ensures everything matches.

Historically, existing tools in the market provide next-day bank files for download, and then you have to manually perform matching with VLOOKUPs and HLOOKUPs to ensure everything balances. With Hyperbots, this manual work is replaced by an agent doing it for you.

There’s also built-in fraud deterrence that I was talking about before, duplicates. Bank charges are all built into these AI guardrails. And then, historically, what we do is you have the basic positive pay only. And then it's later on that you're checking and doing reconciliation that you catch all these duplicate things, which are most of the time too late, and you have to write them off.

Pricing involves paper payments with no seat fees, unlike a large license fee that you pay regardless of usage, which doesn't really matter. Additionally, you still have to pay for the seats. How many of your analysts can log into the app you're using? However, you don't have to pay for that. 

It's solely based on your paper payments, which is a small fee compared to the significant relief it provides to the finance team. Moreover, the implementation of the payment co-pilot is very quick – 4 weeks rollout, no custom codes, and you're good. 

Then you're in business with all those other ERP systems for a 3 to 6-month IT project. When it doesn't work, you have to deal with issues for another year before people get used to it. You have to also train your professionals in how to use it. Some people know how to use it, while some don’t. That's why a lot of finance teams don't like changing their ERP, because it's just a lot of work, time and cost.

Hashing ledger is used to make sure that you have an audit trail. In the existing ones, you have the scattered document, because different things are processed in a different silo, after which you have to start matching it. 

So, in summary, Hyperbots does not just move money. It decides, executes, reconciles, and proves that every payment that's going out of your organization has been cleared. 

Michael:
Great. I appreciate that, Ayo! Give me a real, brief summary takeaway for the audience.

Ayo:
So, for our audience out there – finance professionals with pain points around payments –  I would say that Hyperbots Payments Co-pilot turns the last mile of procure-to-pay into an autonomous, discount-optimized, fraud-proof workflow that cuts costs by over 80% and captures nearly all the early pay value that you can think of. 

It gives us live visibility of everything that's happening with our dollars. Because at the end of the day, when you think about it, cash is king for any organization, and having clear visibility on the cash going out of your organization is what everybody can dream of.

Thank you, Michael.

Michael:
Wow! That's great. I really appreciate it. It's been very helpful. Thank you for sharing more about Hyperbots, their functionalities, and your experience using them. Thank you so much, and have a great day.

Ayo:
You too, Michael. Thank you.