Our Experts
-
Mike Kresse
- senior vice president, payment services
- SunGard’s AvantGard Corporations business
- mike.kresse@sungard.com
Mike Kresse is senior vice president of payment services for SunGard’s corporations business. In this capacity, he is responsible for driving the development and strategic direction of the PayNetExchange global payment portal solution. Mr. Kresse has been with SunGard for 9 years serving in a variety of sales and solution roles.
Prior to joining SunGard, Mike spent more than 16 years working in technology and finance at various software companies including Oracle, Network Associates and Cognos. Mike earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of California, Santa Barbara.
Commentary
There is a continued movement towards electronic payments, but adoption is still slow, particularly in North America. Many companies want to pay their vendors electronically, but a fair amount of those vendors will not accept electronic payments, regardless of how easy it is made for them to adopt the technology.
Today, approximately 10 billion B2B transactions are processed in the US annually, at costs ranging from a high of $58.09 per transaction for inefficient organizations tied to paper checks, to a low of $1.50 per transaction for highly efficient organizations leveraging electronic payment processing, according to a 2007 report by the Aberdeen Group. In some countries B2B payments made by check remains over 65%. With the average corporation processing 500,000 payments annually, the cost savings and efficiencies can have a dramatic impact to the bottom line.
Because some companies have thousands of vendors, the one-to-one approach of inviting a company to accept electronic payments is unrealistic. A one-to-many approach is needed. Even more ideal is an invitation model based on social networking concepts, allowing payees to register in a global directory which is made available to payers. Payers then leverage the directory which contains account details to invite the payees into their network. This viral model is in place now in AvantGard’s PayNetExchange and is helping to accelerate the adoption of electronic payments.