A new breed of tech companies across industries – such as insurance, lending, marketplaces, and more – have to process & reconcile large volumes of bank payments for their products to work and this is proving to be a real challenge. With payment needs shifting from batch-based to real-time, this challenge is becoming harder and companies need new infrastructure to manage their bank payments.

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Before Atlar

Until recently, businesses had three options:

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Scale a finance team

In the early days, companies often handle bank payments manually. That means having a finance team create and monitor transactions within a bank’s online platform and match line items one by one with internal books. Alternatively, companies access banking services and reconcile bank statements via a legacy accounting software provider. These options offer a poor user experience and are prone to human error.

Things get increasingly complex as a growing company must deal with larger payment volumes, expand to new markets, and onboard new banking partners. At this stage, companies need to think of ways to automate bank payments.

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Use a payment service provider (PSP)

PSPs sit in the flow of funds, meaning money moves through their bank accounts. They assist holding customers’ funds, initiating payouts, and accepting payments via an API. PSPs bear credit risk and take care of compliance on the customer’s behalf.

Even so, PSPs have several drawbacks. Many have limited geographical reach, and they are costly due to bearing credit risk. Companies can lose control over onboarding as PSPs conduct ‘Know Your Customer’ checks. Lastly, businesses will have to weather slower receivables turnover due to rolling reserves and delayed settlement from PSPs.

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Building custom integrations

As an alternative to using a PSP, some companies choose to build internal software that connects directly to banks’ cash management channels, such as SFTP, EBICS, or API.

However, building bespoke integrations is time-consuming, requires significant engineering resources, and demands deep knowledge of banking and payments. Features such as approval chains, audit trails, role-based access, counterparty management, and webhooks for real-time notifications all need to be baked in from the start. For most businesses, the opportunity cost of building internal bank payments infrastructure is just too high – it eats up capital, time, and deviates focus away from the core product.

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Enter Atlar

Atlar saves businesses from manually managing bank payments, paying substantial fees to PSPs, or wasting engineering hours on non-core functionality.

Thanks to pre-built bank connections and the platform we’ve designed to manage them, we remove the complexity and let you fully automate and manage your payment flows.

When you plug into Atlar’s API, your company can automatically initiate credit transfers and direct debits, reconcile incoming payments, monitor balances across bank accounts, and track the status of payments live via webhooks.

Atlar’s intuitive dashboard lets finance teams easily configure users and roles, set up approval chains, manage counterparties and monitor audit trails.

Atlar provides an off-the-shelf solution that automates bank payments at scale and lets you focus on the core business activities that really matter.

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Try it out

‍Interested in automating your bank payments? Get in touch with us at partnerships@atlar.com, we’re looking forward to speaking with you!