Launched in 2012 and headquartered in London, Checkout.com today collects customer funds for some of the world’s largest and most high-profile companies, including Netflix, Sony, and Sainsbury’s.
As such, Checkout and its 2,000+ employees are subject to the requirements of demanding businesses that rely on them to keep their cash flowing—quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Employees see their mission as enabling businesses and their communities to thrive in the digital age.
Driving an ever-better service that delivers value.
According to the company’s Finance Transformation Director Sam Allen, “There is a growing pressure on us and our industry to provide an ever-better service that delivers value. Not only that, customers are also looking for tech partners that demonstrate purpose and consideration in the way they operate. And there is a strengthening need to ensure we can leverage AI in the best possible ways, all while maintaining the trust of the organization and the wider customer base.”
For all these reasons and more, Allen is happy to have Workday as the company’s strategic technology partner, saying “We really needed a system that could keep up with the pace of change while meeting regulatory obligations. That said, my favorite aspect of using Workday to date is its ability to meet some of the highly sophisticated use cases we have, providing complex solutions to complex problems and providing many controls that we have never been able to have before—mostly due to the large-scale data we use.”
Workday is enabling us to create complex solutions to complex problems, and have many more controls than before.
Sam Allen, Finance Transformation Director
Effortlessly handling “extremely high” transaction volumes.
Allen is quick to highlight some of the key advantages the finance team and the organization as a whole are realizing with Workday. “Working with Workday Financial Management has enabled us to put most of our entities and many of our newly acquired businesses onto one platform with a single ledger, giving us a single source of truth for all that financial information.
“Obviously that is extremely important—perhaps even more so is that finance and HR are working more closely through their use of Workday Human Capital Management. Using the same platform makes it clear that anything the finance and HR teams do impact all of us. So now we discuss what we are doing and the benefits each of us could get from the applications.”
A solutions architect on the finance team, says, “We could not do our jobs if it wasn’t for Workday. The powerful data model and insights it delivers absolutely speaks to the heart and soul of everything we’re about.”
And Workday simplifies the team’s processes. As she says, “The volume of transactions we have to deal with is extremely high. Before we had Workday Accounting Center, we tried to post our transactional activity into Workday using spreadsheets, and the effort literally set laptops on fire. Now the process is incredibly effortless.”
Empowering and enabling people to do more.
She is excited about the scale and depth of information that Workday solutions are enabling finance to leverage. “Our most important KPI is net revenue on a merchant-level basis—and given the number of merchants we have, that’s an incredibly granular KPI,” she says. “But by using Workday Accounting Center to capture our revenue and cost-of-sales information on a daily basis, we can now unlock merchant and customer-level information very rapidly.
“Our finance team can then go and share those insights with our FP&A and commercial teams, meaning we suddenly have a proper seat at the table and can influence decision-making. What’s more, because finance is also becoming far more technologically savvy, we’re also getting closer to the heart and soul of what Checkout.com actually does as a business,” she says.
She believes, however, that the most qualifiable benefit of all is the ability of Workday to scale at the same pace as the company. As she says, “We need scalable technology—meaning we don’t have to bolt on new members of the finance team. It’s about being able to control growth—not about cutting headcount in the business. With Workday, we are empowering and enabling our people to do more without having to bring in more team members.”
Workday transforms the way finance works by unlocking insights rather than processing data. I feel so privileged to deliver technology that makes people’s lives better.
Solutions Architect
How AI and ML are set to deliver on the dream.
Allen is very happy to see the levels of investment that Workday is making in AI and machine learning (ML). “I believe it’s going to cut out much more of the mundane manual tasks to free people to make more thoughtful, strategic decisions, completing more value-adding work that will challenge them and help them to grow as professionals.”
She agrees. “I’m really excited by the way Workday is embedding AI and ML directly into its software.
Workday is very soon introducing some really exciting new functionality around bank reconciliations and customer deposits. That’s going to mean that our finance team can spend much less time on manual work and much more on understanding what the data is telling them. And that’s the dream,” she concludes.
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