An Intelligent Investment in Kanbina

David Hammel, UK Managing Director of SystemsAccountants, explains to us why Kanbina are now part of the SA Group and what persuaded them to invest in this growing technology.

At the start of 2020, the SystemsAccountants Group (SA) continued its diversification from Finance Systems recruitment, towards becoming a multi-disciplined technology group, by taking a major stake in AI start up, Kanbina.

In 2019 SystemsAccountants selected Kanbina to hyperautomate the Finance processes across the SystemsAccountants Group. They rapidly achieved success in terms of process automation, resource savings and management information convincing the Executive team that Kanbina had much to offer the SystemsAccountants client base. As a result, in Q1 2020 SA invested in Kanbina and started to actively promote it by weekly webinars!

Having already founded one of the UK's leading Oracle NetSuite partners, Sansa Solutions, as well as establishing NetSuite and Unit4 ERP Alliance Partner businesses in the US, SA's decision to invest in Kanbina was an easy one.

Kanbina has developed an API ready, SaaS AI platform that connects client accounting and ERP systems to powerful Machine Learning models that use the client's data, to remove the manual work Finance staff do in Finance Operations, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable.

SA recognised that Kanbina is a market opportunity that represents billions of dollars in savings and productivity gains globally to its Client base.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) really deliver the Finance Automation benefits that OCR and RPA have not quite managed.

It was clear to us that AI, and Machine Learning (ML) in particular, are going to be infused in everything we do during the next decade, and Kanbina really have edged a strong head start in building commercial ML applications that really do deliver the automation benefits, that have been touted but never fully delivered, by previous iterations of automation technology, such as OCR and RPA.

It is our view that Machine Learning will displace these earlier technologies over the next few years, and we can be confident in this, because firstly we have implemented Kanbina AP in SystemsAccountants and achieved 90% automation levels in invoice processing, within a few weeks of go live, and are now moving to Straight Through Processing for AP.

Secondly, Kanbina have deployed their core AP solution into companies ranging from fast growth startups such as Huel and Habito, right up to major international companies like Avenir Global, where Kanbina handles multi-jurisdiction AP operations across North America, the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

In fact, Kanbina's sales momentum has really accelerated during the first half of 2021, with multiple client wins in the US, the UK and Europe, making it a truly Global player.

A global gaming company, with operations in 22 countries and with 3,500 employees was a recent major client win, and Kanbina AP also went live across one of the leading Pan-European automotive distributors of high performance cars and trucks in Q1 of 2021.

From a technology perspective, we believe Kanbina leapfrogs the current solutions for Finance Process Automation, such as OCR and RPA, as we forge a disruptor position in what Gartner calls the Hyperautomation market, and what we have coined as "Machine Learning Process Automation" or MLPA.

MLPA and Hyperautomation tools offer the next level of digital transformation for Finance in that they enable entire processes to be automated and not just tasks. This can be achieved in a very short timescale compared to traditional finance transformation and ERP programmes which can take a number of years before ROI and Total Cost of Ownership is realised. Kanbina enables you to level up in finance process automation much more quickly.

Kanbina's USP lies in our capability to manufacture Machine Learning models to extract AND move data across an end-to-end business process, matching and executing actions, thus enabling customers to adopt touchless processing in many aspects of operational Finance.

Kanbina's Machine Learning models ingest and learn from client data, they get better and better over time, and don't suffer the same limitations as RPA, in that they don't need an army of client-side Bot developers to set them up, and don't need to be updated every time the client upgrades their core ERP software or operating systems.

What also makes our AI software highly robust, is that we have developed proprietary software that industrialises the process of manufacturing Machine Learning models and embeds them into end-to-end finance processes with minimal human effort. Currently most AI solutions require data scientists to craft and train Machine Learning models, dictating a more expensive and cumbersome roadmap to deploying commercially ready Machine Learning, compared to our more technologically advanced approach.

Our core products have been designed to be tactical and swift to deploy, and because of our API ready platform architecture, we can easily integrate with any ERP system.

What's really exciting is that our Machine Learning Process Automation solutions can be trained in any language in the world, enabling us to rapidly deploy automation solutions anywhere on the planet.

Kanbina is truly an evolutionary part of the SystemsAccountants Group and will fuel our capacity to quickly deliver effective, scalable Finance AI Hyperautomation solutions to our clients. In turn enabling organisations to realise savings and value much faster than traditional large scale Transformation programs.

All of which supports the strategy, vision and philosophy that Finance Transformation UK have adopted. We are looking forward to our collaborative partnership and adding value to their ecosystem and client base.

Author: David Hammel

David Hammel is the UK Managing Director at SystemsAccountants and Client Services Director at Kanbina AI. He has 20 years' Executive experience in Finance Systems across Recruitment and Technology implementation.