Hartwell drives process automation through HSBC’s Treasury APIs

With over a century of experience, Hartwell Automotive Group Limited (Hartwell) is one of the United Kingdom’s leading vehicle dealers, operating 11 dealerships across the market.

Hartwell were in the early stages of migrating their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to a new provider who offered more flexibility and bespoke tailoring, and wanted to explore how this ERP could integrate with HSBC to bring efficiencies and automation to current payment and receipt processes.

Treasury APIs were suggested to Hartwell to provide real time payment initiation capabilities and real time statement access.

The challenge

Lack of speed on payments

Hartwell made approximately 300 Faster Payments a month to suppliers and finance companies. These were created manually using a physical paper approval process and dual-keying of single-entry payments into Hartwell’s online banking portal. This was a inefficient, time-consuming process.

Lack of clarity on payment status

Hartwell also found it challenging to gain timely status updates on payments, which made it difficult to identify which suppliers had been paid, and when. This also made payment reconciliation cumbersome, as payments had to be matched manually to open invoices. Hartwell looked to resolve these issues by developing a fully automated process in their new ERP that provided real-time status on payments.

The solution

Hartwell decided to implement HSBC’s Treasury Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), enabling them to perform a number of new innovative payment processes directly in their ERP system. Through HSBC’s Account Balance and Transaction Balance APIs, Hartwell can now gain real-time status on payments from each of their HSBC accounts when needed using Camt.053 and Camt.052 reports. The greater clarity on payment status allows the business to better identify which suppliers have been paid from which account, assisting to automate reconciliation and allowing purchased vehicles to be released in a much quicker timeframe.

Additionally, HSBC’s Real-Time Payment APIs provide Hartwell with a means of initiating payments on-demand directly from within their ERP, allowing suppliers to receive payments in a matter of seconds. HSBC’s suite of Payment APIs will also allow Hartwell to initiate single or bulk payments via domestic and cross-border rails, including BACS, CHAPS, Faster Payments and SEPA. HSBC also developed the capability for Hartwell's API payment files to be approved in HSBCnet, which is now tried and tested and available for other customers to benefit from.

Benefits

“Like many businesses, Hartwell are on an automation drive and the implementation of Treasury API’s has significantly improved efficiencies across the company. The digitisation of the paper-based authorisation process has resulted in a much improved, secure audit trail with reduced environmental impact. The enhanced visibility provided by real time reporting has also resulted in an improved experience for our customers in purchasing vehicles from us.” James Risbridger, Group Financial Controller, Hartwell Automotive Group

• The combined capabilities of HSBC’s APIs ultimately helped Hartwell automate the initiation and reconciliation of over 300 payments a month
• Hartwell now also enjoys real-time visibility on 100% of vehicle purchase payments through the support of HSBC’s Transaction and Account Balance API’s
• Full automation of payment reconciliation processes saves Hartwell’s finance team 2.5 days a week, equating to 90 hours a month
• Real-time payment support also allows Hartwell to reduce time spent to fulfill invoice payments from days to minutes