With more than 175,000 users across 44 countries, Acubiz is a digital platform that automates and streamlines the expense processes for businesses and employees. Acubiz recently teamed up with our open banking platform to enable all businesses to reimburse employees for expenses instantly by using bulk payments.
We sat down with Acubiz CEO Lars de Nully and CCO Anders Friis to discuss how the company started using open banking to make sure all businesses can instantly repay its employees for outlays.
Instant reimbursement with open banking
With its smart features for expense reimbursement, time registration and invoice management, Acubiz is a recognised solution that’s used by major companies such as Pandora, UNICEF and Louis Poulsen.
To make it even faster for businesses to reimburse employees for outlays and expenses, Acubiz looked for an open banking partner that could deliver bulk payments directly in Acubiz. Put simply, bulk payments are a one-to-many payment that can be used by a company to pay several employees at once. Most importantly, these payments can be done in real time, which makes them perfect for reimbursements. CEO Lars de Nully explains:
“We’re always keen to explore how we can continue to streamline tasks for our customers and their employees. We see open banking as an important next step for our reimbursement feature as it allows our customers to make reimbursements in real time – and in that way, employees don’t have to wait days or weeks to get paid back for their expenses,” he says and continues:
“It was important for us to find an open banking partner that’s similar to us in terms of values, strategic approach and geographical focus. On top of that, we found that Nordic API Gateway has some really good references from other customers, which made it easy for us to decide.”
Closing a gap for smaller businesses
The new solution is a great alternative for smaller businesses and organisations that don’t have the resources or need for company credit cards for every employee or associated workers, says CCO Anders Friis:
“If an employee uses his or her personal credit card before 2PM, the expense will be reimbursed the same day. If it’s after 2PM, the employee will receive the reimbursement the following day. That’s a low-cost and efficient alternative to having to issue company credit cards to every employee in a business, if you’re a smaller company or organisation.”
According to Acubiz, there are around 100,000 associations in Denmark that haven’t yet automated the process of reimbursing their employees or volunteers:
“If you’re a member of a small association or organisation, or employed in a small business, and you have an outlay that you’re entitled to get reimbursed, our new feature offers a smart and low-cost way to do so,” Anders Friis explains.
From digitisation to automation
There’s no doubt that Acubiz is a part of an industry that moves at a fast pace. To keep up with the customer demand, Acubiz is constantly pushing for new features. Lars de Nully shares more:
“We’re always looking for new opportunities that can help our customers create more value when we spot a gap in the market. Open banking is one of those opportunities,” he explains and continues:
“We need to continuously push for more maturity in the market by offering new features. Things we thought were completely new three years ago are now a natural part of our everyday lives. For several years, we’ve been helping companies save time documenting expenses. Now we’re taking it one step further by helping companies save time and resources by automating more tasks within the expense management process. It’s about lifting the process to a whole new level, while at the same time assisting businesses and their employees work in ways they didn’t think was possible. We’re moving from digitisation to automation.”
Acubiz is rolling out the new feature in Denmark, shortly followed by the rest of the European markets.
Want to know more about how you can use open banking to create more value for your customers? Explore our open banking blog or reach out to us to get some inspiration.
