How does Tipalti make it easier for LSPs to manage their payments? Why is the company such a good fit for LSPs?

Tipalti specializes in helping businesses worldwide improve complex payment processes. Our company was originally founded in 2010 to help ad tech businesses manage payments to a growing number of publishers. Our team quickly realized the breadth of applications a mass payments provider could have across industries.

Tipalti’s solution is a natural fit for LSPs because our tool is designed for international businesses. With the ability to help make payments in 196 countries and over 120 currencies, Tipalti simplifies how LSPs work with their translators, interpreters, or other language experts. In today’s fast-paced world, LSPs need business solutions that can act as quickly as their language experts do; with Tipalti, language businesses can rest assured that all of their international payments will be handled quickly, easily, and efficiently.

Unlike other payment companies, Tipalti is a licensed money transmitter. As an approved Money Services Business (MSB) with its own banking rails in both the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), Tipalti can offer the same level of services around payments as a bank. An MSB license allows Tipalti to control the entire compliance review process, meaning we can help expedite how quickly our customers can make payments using our platform. Without the appropriate Money Transmitter License, payment businesses are at the mercy of the banks for approval to send payments to their client’s payees.

Managing payments across several different languages and regulatory standards is easier said than done. How does Tipalti introduce harmony to these discordant systems?

Tipalti helps growth-oriented, multinational companies take their financial operations to the next level. Handling complex payment processes is in our DNA and is part of our core mission as a company: helping you handle your most challenging payments and finance operations.

We partner with leading financial technology companies to ensure the businesses we serve have a clear plan to synchronize their technology, people, and processes to help ensure long-term success. Identifying partnerships with software providers that our customers use to improve their finance operations — such as accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems — is critical to helping keep customers up to date on compliance and regulatory requirements. Tipalti’s tax engine is certified annually by KPMG to ensure our clients have as smooth a filing process as possible.

When dealing with a freelance-heavy industry like language work, onboarding new workers efficiently is a major concern. How does Tipalti help with this task?

Streamlining the supplier onboarding process is critical across all businesses and industries, but it’s especially important when your business relies on freelancers, as many LSPs do. With Tipalti, LSPs can design a custom, self-service onboarding experience for language experts. Companies can customize the look and feel of their onboarding portal and have the option of embedding an iFrame into the HTML of their website.

Seamless onboarding sets you up for success by creating a better experience for your language experts, leading to stronger relationships. Translators can quickly and easily check payment status and accuracy via the self-service portal, saving time for your internal team while providing a better user experience. Moreover, the Tipalti system has 26,000 global rules built-in to help avoid payment issues or errors before they happen, while also automatically checking data against international sanctions codes, US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blacklists, and more. A seamless onboarding process, which helps reduce payment errors by 66% or more, gives LSPs more time back in their day to focus on strategic growth.

Ensuring that freelancers are paid promptly is another major source of concern. How does Tipalti speed up this process?

Tipalti provides LSPs a single source of truth for paying out their freelancers. Before working with Tipalti, many businesses in the language industry need to manage and maintain banking relationships across several, if not dozens, of countries to ensure their freelance and contract workers were paid accurately, in their preferred currency, and on time. With Tipalti, businesses can manage all of their banking and payment needs through a single system, offering better overall business visibility while giving the business a better chance to make payments on time and accurately.

Tipalti indicates that it can substantially reduce payable workload with its automated services. How does Tipalti offload so much of the human effort?

According to the Institute of Financial Management, accounts payable (AP) is the most time-consuming function in finance. Automating AP is a no-brainer for many companies looking to regain time for strategic initiatives. Tipalti helps businesses address their payment challenges holistically, starting with supplier management and regulatory compliance to reconciliation with their ERP or accounting system of record and more.

Making even one supplier, freelancer, or contractor payment can be daunting, and figuring out how to automate all payments can greatly impact operational efficiency. Having a single system to manage payments eliminates the need for your team to confirm standard payment information like account number or routing number — and if any changes are needed, your suppliers, freelancers, or contractors can make them through a self-service portal. With regulatory compliance built into Tipalti, businesses can feel confident that year-end tax calculations are done properly while ensuring all payment information is fed into their accounting system for tracking and audit purposes.

Many of our customers had three or more employees managing payments before implementing Tipalti. With Tipalti, businesses can often reallocate employees towards more strategic and growth initiatives since automated processes can manage payments so efficiently.

Another major benefit of Tipalti is risk reduction. How does it help eliminate the risk of fraud and other issues for LSPs and their workers?

With more than 26,000 rules built into the system, Tipalti helps companies remain compliant with global regulatory requirements. For example, during onboarding, Tipalti constantly runs payee data checks to ensure the supplied information is accurate and up to date. Tipalti tracks contact details, account numbers, email addresses, payments, and more to help proactively uncover patterns and identify potential fraudsters within your network. With more than 7,400 payees blocked and $4 million in potential savings, our proactive AI-powered fraud detection solution, Tipalti Detect, cuts down on risk without adding any work to you or your team.