How NextBillion.ai Optimised their Purchasing & Billing Workflows, with by Aspire’s Payable Management Systems

The Company: Helping Businesses Reclaim the power of Map Data and AI

Founded in 2020 by ex-Grab employees Ajay Bulusu, Gaurav Bubna and Shaolin Zheng, NextBillion.ai is an industry-leading spatial data + AI platform. It offers a wide range of mapping APIs and SDKs, tools, and industry-specific solutions to its customers across the globe. With customers across APAC, the US, Europe and Africa, the decentralised map data platform will continue to expand its presence globally.

The Challenges: NextBillion.ai faced obstacles in managing payables

#1 Painstaking process for bill payments

In the past, NextBillion.ai had to grapple with manual processes to manage their barrage of bill payments. Employees had to manually enter the description of the invoice on a spreadsheet. The finance team would then verify each entry individually and perform multiple checks before they could approve it.

Inevitably, this took up a lot of time to process company-wide bills from start to finish. On top of that, manual uploads tend to be more susceptible to errors, adding to the pain points of both the finance team who had to verify each bill

#2 Opening multi-currency accounts posed high charges

NextBillion.ai comprises close to 100 team members across the region, namely India, China and Singapore. To facilitate payments for their internationally diverse team, they sought to open an SGD and USD account. However, they found that opening those accounts required them to pay additional fees and maintain substantial minimum balances that were not feasible in the long run.

This brought them to a major turning point. The company was reaching a critical stage where they were looking to expand to more countries. Thus, they knew they needed a more scalable solution that was able to support them no matter where they were based next.

#3 Lack of automation for payables processes

At the time, it was clear that they were floundering in cumbersome manual-based processing. This made it difficult for them to stay on top of key processes, including:

• Manually feeding in payment info, which was error-prone
• Managing approval flows
• Maintaining budgets
• Making & reconciling payments

Because of a lack of automation in these core functions, NextBillion.ai needed to dedicate significant time and resources to maintain their payable management system.