Find new payment solutions and streamline debt collection

Horizon Ferries is an international transport and travel service company with Europe’s most comprehensive route network. During 2013, 14.6 million passengers travelled with Horizon Ferries, and the company also transported 3 million cars and 2 million freight units.

For several years now Horizon Ferries has worked strategically with innovations as a means of developing new solutions, products and services. In line with this vision, Broker was approached to find new payments solutions to offer Horizon Ferries’ customers on their website, including open invoice and partial payments options.

Because Horizon Ferries is present in many countries and serves customers from around the world, one of the challenges was to provide a common solution that would work across multiple markets with local variations.

Finally, Horizon Ferries was looking to define an efficient dunning and debt collection.

Incorporate an online ordering process

The solution proposed by Broker incorporated an online ordering process for trips, offering open invoice as a payment method, along with various part payment options. This new offering was complemented by real-time risk assessment and validation of customers.

The solution was rolled out to a number of European countries where Broker had partnered with the client to deliver it based on local demands (for example, ELV in Germany).

A successful transition and operational excellence

• Local solutions in a global system – Broker uses the same API to deliver open invoice in all markets.
• Continuous roll-out of solution – Sweden, followed by Germany, Denmark and Norway.
• One single point of contact for client – one country responsible for implementation and client communications base upon local knowledge on legal and business related issues.

Deal with outstanding debts

Oak Tree Solutions, is the UK’s number one classified and community website. It brings together “buyers” (consumers looking for something) with “sellers” (businesses and people offering something).

It’s everyone’s local notice board – generating more than 250,000 new listings a week, and attracting 13.7 million visitors and 400 million page views a month. As the business grew, Oak Tree found it was spending increasingly
more time chasing overdue payments.

To improve its cash flow, Oak Tree decided to outsource its credit control function to Broker to benefit from Broker’s finance expertise and track record in accounts receivable & debt collection services.

The task was to develop a speedy and efficient process for improving cash flow and collecting outstanding balances.

Create a dedicated team

To manage the outstanding debts, Broker created a customized collections process and appointed an experienced, highly trained team of credit controllers and collectors to the business.

Individual team members were assigned to particular customers to strengthen the relationship with customers and provide them with a consistent credit control partner, which in turn supported process efficiency and maximised cash collection rates.

Significant debt reduction

• Collected approximately 70% of outstanding debts owed to the business within a very short timeframe.
• Major cash flow improvement: increased collection rates by more than 200% (2015 compared to 2014)