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AIA

Iron Mountain takes on accounts payable

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9th Mar 2011
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Iron Mountain, the international company best known for its archiving and records management services, is branching out into managed accounts payable services.

The company has opened European processing centre in Bratislava and created a new business process management division led by general manger Bettina Wonsag.

She described the new service as a “natural evolution” of what Iron Mountain already offers finance departments across Europe. “Our brand image is around compliance and risk mitigation; we’re taking it into the digital age,” she said.

The “hub and spoke” network that underpins its archiving services fits equally well with processing invoices and remittance documents. In a typical engagement for a European client, client companies would arrange for documents to be sent to a Post Office box (in the same country where local regulations require it) that Iron Mountain would collect and scan. The paper documents would be retained locally, but the scanned files would go to Bratislava for data extraction and validation.

The customer would then receive the scanned image files electronically, along with a data file containing around 20 key fields that could be imported to their accounting systems for processing.

To support the launch of its new service, Iron Mountain conducted a study of finance managers across Europe. Surprisingly, the study found that UK executives were “more conscious” of the process improvements and cost savings that could be achieved.

Where all of the respondents in Germany and 80% of those in France and Spain considered their accounts payable costs to be acceptable, only 44% of UK respondents felt this was the case. Around 30% of UK finance directors were actively frustrated with their accounts payable processes

“I don’t think Germany and France are more efficient than their UK counterparts. I think it’s an awareness issue,” said Wonsag. “The UK is very progressive in their awareness of the opportunity,”  and recognising the problem is the first step in curing it.”

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