Sage the market leader in cloud business management solutions has partnered with high-growth UK payments fintech, Modulr, to simplify the task of managing accounts payable and payroll payments for millions of UK businesses.
The solution, known as Sage Salary and Supplier Payments, will allow businesses and their accountants to securely manage and process payments from directly within the Sage Accounts and Payroll products.
A key part of the success of small businesses is their ability to access high-quality and responsive banking services. Initiatives such as Open Banking and the RBS Alternative Remedies Package are creating new opportunities for digital alternatives to increase the competitiveness of these services.
The Modulr and Sage partnership aims to improve the payments offerings available to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and accountants; helping to bring much needed innovation and competition to the UK SME banking and payments market.
Sage Salary and Supplier Payments, powered by Modulr, will allow business owners, payroll managers, accounts payable administrators, payroll bureau and accountants to securely process payments directly from Sage Business Cloud Accounting and Sage Payroll products. The seamless and automated payment service will be delivered to Sage customers across the UK using Modulr’s award-winning payment accounts that provide access to payment services 24/7, 365 days of the year.
The solution will allow customers to eliminate manual payment processes, preventing costly errors and risk of sensitive payment data being compromised whilst benefiting from the time saved by automated reconciliation of payment data. Importantly, Sage’s Accountant and Payroll Bureau Partners will be able to benefit from delegated service access—allowing the accounting practice to seamlessly control and manage payments processing on behalf of their whole client base, while simultaneously reducing practice overheads.
Seamus Smith, Executive Vice President Global Payments & Banking at Sage, said: “Being able to pay employees and suppliers on time is an essential part of modern business. By enabling our SME customers and accountant partners to automate vital financial processes directly from our products, we can exceed their expectations. This will help them to save time on administrative processes, take control of the flow of money through the software, improve data security and reduce costs.
“Modulr brings significant industry expertise that offers us the opportunity to expand the capabilities of our solution with new functionality and geographies, together with specific support for the development of our partner channels.
“Customers and accountants will further benefit from real-time visibility of payments, seamless reconciliation of payment data into Sage’s Accounting and Payroll products and role-based access controls, meaning that they can track and manage a full audit trail of activity pertaining to outgoing payments, which will give them full control of a crucial part of their business.”
Myles Stephenson, Chief Executive of Modulr, added: “Our Payments as a Service API platform enables our partners to quickly and easily integrate new payment services into their core products. Our innovative partnership with Sage will enable SMEs to address the significant burden created by existing inefficient payment processes. Our fully integrated service provides a fast, easy and reliable alternative to processing payments via traditional business and corporate banking.”
The new Sage Salary and Supplier Payments, powered by Modulr, is now available to existing Sage Payments customers and new & existing Sage customers.