API Save Distributors Time

If your business could save 3,300 man-hours a month, what would that do for your productivity?
One of our clients, SG5, is the main distributor of beer and stout for Asia Pacific Breweries in Singapore. It supplies over 5,000 customers from standalone businesses to large chains – but it had a problem that it needed to address.

Each day, its frontline staff was travelling extensively to collect cash and cheques. Collecting and reconciling these payments represented significant costs for the company and its cashflow was also being impacted because of the time it took to clear the cheques.

SG5 wanted to resolve these problems by digitalising payments and collections. We worked closely with the company and its distribution network, analysing its payment processes and identifying its specific problems. Once our research was complete, we set about developing a new platform to support end-to-end cashless transactions, including instant payments and fully automated accounts reconciliation.

The solution was powered by two of our industry-leading product suites – DBS RAPID and DBS MAX.

RAPID or ‘Real-time APIs with DBS’ is our suite of banking API solutions that allows us to integrate our banking systems directly to our clients’ operations, providing them with fully automated, real-time access to our banking services.

DBS MAX is a mobile-based QR payment collection solution. It allows sellers to receive payments instantly by simply creating a QR code which the buyer scans, generating an immediate payment in favour of the seller.

The new solution has transformed SG5’s cash management. The firm has saved over 3,300 manhours of staff time a month – time which was previously spent collecting and reconciling cash payments. Based on an average 170 working hours per month, that is the equivalent of 19 or 20 full time employees. SG5 is using the saved time to upskill its staff and take the business to a new level.

Cash and cheques are a growing problem for businesses. The time and resources required to collect payments, the risk of bills or cheques being lost, the impact on cashflow and the hygiene issues in handling money have prompted many cash-dependent companies to use this time to implement cashless payment solutions.

If this describes your business and you would like to explore better ways to manage your cash, we can help. As well as being a bank, we are a leader in providing banking API solutions with more than 200 clients using DBS RAPID – the largest banking API library in the world.