97% of European companies experience problems with their current payment systems, new Numeral research shows

Numeral, the leading bank orchestration platform, published new research conducted in partnership with research company OpinionWay, showing that 97% of European finance executives experience pain points in their companies’ payment operations. As companies grow, decision makers encounter challenges, including ensuring that payments initiated are correctly executed, managing payment errors, and managing payment returns.

As a result, 90% of decision makers share that their company plans to invest in upgrading their payment operations in the next 18 months, with 55% of companies planning to invest €100,000 or more, this number going up to 88% for decision makers describing their payment operations as primarily manual. 18% of them plan to invest more than €1,000,000.

Finance and treasury executives have significant hopes for these investments, with 88% expecting to capture very or extremely important benefits from improving their payment operations.

In addition, the more payments companies manage, the more payments become an IT topic, with involvement from engineering teams growing from 9% for companies managing less than 100,000 payments per year to 43% for companies managing more than 100 million payments per year.

“When the volume of payments grows, manual or semi-automated systems fall short. They introduce too many manual errors that are harder to identify and fix as volumes grow, require more resources for low added-value tasks, and make straight-through processing, instant payments, or timely reconciliation impossible. As few solutions enabling end-to-end automation are available on the market, companies turn to their product and engineering teams to bridge the gap, which might, in turn, deviate these resources for technical projects more core to companies’ businesses,” adds Édouard Mandon.

Survey methodology

This report was conducted in partnership with OpinionWay. The audience was companies with 250 to 5,000 employees in Germany, France and the UK. 905 decision makers, including titles such as CFOs, SVPs, VPs of accounting, controllers, payment managers and other decision makers on corporate accounting and finance teams, were interviewed online during December 2022 and January 2023.