Billtrust Insight 2022 recap: AR automation, evolved

It’s impossible to summarize everything that happened during our recent virtual global conference in a single Billtrust Insight 2022 recap article. But here are a few of the highlights from what proved to be an informative event we’re grateful to have been able to offer to our user community, partners and guests.

What was the mission of Billtrust Insight 2022 – and did it succeed?

What was the mission for Billtrust Insight? To deliver connections with industry leaders, analysts and peers, expose attendees to unique and interesting speakers, and use our sessions to provide actionable insights, best practices, training, and proprietary analysis. Based on the feedback we’ve received, it succeeded at all of that.

For an event like Insight to be successful, everyone who attends must walk away feeling they’ve learned something that’s truly actionable and useful. Ideally, that means we’ve supplied value not only for their business, but for themselves as professionals.

The Day One Keynote session exemplified that, as our CEO and Founder Flint Lane discussed the value of meditation in finding work/life balance with Dan Harris, a #1 New York Times bestselling author and former ABC News anchor, who has become a leading advocate for mindfulness and meditation practices.

Exploring the many facets of accounts receivable automation

Accounts receivable automation isn’t a narrow-spectrum topic. Not when you consider the many different dimensions of AR automation that we touched on during Insight 2022 by a wide range of different experts and speakers. Here are only a few examples:

• Kevin Permenter hears a lot of feedback about AR vendors from his clients. Kevin and his firm, IDC, provide tech research to businesses of all sizes, and he says there are three main themes today for providing excellent automated AR: Convergence, Employee and Customer Experience and Data Insights. You can hear much more from Kevin by watching an on-demand video of his session, “Unleashing the Potential of AR Automation with IDC.”

• Steve Reynolds spent ten years at Microsoft where he supported the launch of Office 365 before he became the Vice President of Research at Paradoxes where he helps clients form data-driven strategies. He’s worked with Billtrust on previous research into the accounts receivable automation sector and how companies are addressing new challenges. In “The DNA of Future CFOs,” Steve shared insights from a new research study about how future CFOs are developing, what sets them apart from “last-gen” CFOs and what they’ll want as they move into finance leadership roles.

• “The more we focus on checks, the less we’re actually figuring out how to optimize and improve the digital alternatives.” Whether you’re a small business or multinational enterprise company, the driver behind big changes in the way you ask for and receive payments is usually someone in your finance department. Leaders from Visa, Moov, FIS and Billtrust laid out their “Predictions and Prognostications: the Future of B2B Payments” about why accounts receivable (AR) is the easiest lever to utilize in accomplishing that, and how accounts receivable automation figures into that evolution.
• “Your customers are wildly different when it comes to how they want to interact and transact with you.” If you’re in an AR finance role for your company, you know that processing paper checks and ACH payments manually is a tedious, time-consuming task that’s draining for employees and punishing in terms of costs. Nick Babinsky, Tom Scott and Lissa Andrews of Billtrust put together an in-depth session to share key lessons about automating remittances (which freed up one client’s time by 85%!)  in “Are Virtual Cards & Decoupled ACH Crushing Your Team?”

A great team effort (but wait till next year!)

Pulling together a successful event like this, year after year, never just happens automatically.  It was a total team effort by everyone involved, from the internal team that organized and orchestrated the conference to the speakers who brought vision and intelligence to their sessions, from our participating partners and sponsors, and from the Billtrust community itself that was so engaged with the event.

Every year we try to set a higher bar for this event.  Yet each time around, everyone manages to somehow surpass it.

In that spirit, keep an eye out for more from Billtrust on we’ll go with next year’s Insight event. As the accounts receivable automation landscape keeps evolving, though, we’re sure there will be new aspects to illuminate, new products and features to explore and new challenges to solve.

These Billtrust Insight 2022 sessions are available as on-demand videos. Check the Webinars section of our Resources library in the future as we add even more.

Unleashing the Potential of AR Automation with IDC

Scale Cash Application and Drive Digital Payments

Managing Exempt Sales in a World of Economic Nexus

Uncheck Paper Billing and Payments

Predictions and Prognostications: The Future of B2B Payments

Are Virtual Cards & Decoupled ACH Crushing Your Team?

The DNA of Future CFOs: Research Insights