Markant, the service center in the B2B payment sector, processes over six million receipts a year for more than 200 retail and trading companies. Thanks to smart INVOICE, Markant can now respond even better to the special wishes and needs of its customers – individually, flexibly, scalably and, of course, powered by AI.

The market-proven Insiders solution smart INVOICE enables the Markant Group to achieve the highest quality and validity in the management of payment flows for its customers. More than 200 retail companies and around 15,000 industrial partners work with Markant in the Payment Services division. The payment service provider processes more than six million receipts per year, sometimes with hundreds of pages per document.

The multitude of customers and large number of industry partners who issue invoices to the trading companies results in an enormous variety of layouts and formats for the incoming documents. In addition, each customer usually has different requirements with regard to the fields to be read. In addition to standard mandatory fields such as document number or document date, some customers expect information and logic to be read that is not standard and cannot be easily read by every OCR. Meeting these individual customer requirements adequately is a major challenge for Markant.

In some cases, Markant handles all payment transactions between suppliers and retailers for its customers in the contract business. Here too, there are enormous differences in the quality of the documents and therefore special requirements for OCR.

The business group was therefore looking for a reliable solution that not only delivers the highest quality and can react flexibly to changes, but also enables individual adaptations.

“We need both: the highest possible degree of automation and the highest quality. This is the only way we can efficiently offer our customers individual service with the enormous volumes of documents”

, says Torsten Breitkreuz, Head of International Projects at Markant, summarizing the requirements. “With smart INVOICE from Insiders, we get all this and use AI as an enabler for innovation.”

The AI-supported two-stage solution for automated invoice processing achieves top scores for document reading quality, performance and user satisfaction. Users in post-processing praise the ergonomics of smart INVOICE, which also facilitates the onboarding of new employees at Markant. Thanks to machine learning, manual activities for new customers can also be quickly reduced to a minimum.

While the initial aim was simply to replace manual data entry, the main focus was later on increasing the level of automation while maintaining the highest quality. Today, Markant is particularly focused on the scalability of the solution in order to cope with increasing internationalization.

For Markant, smart INVOICE is not just a simple document reading system, but an entire workflow with various components.

 “It is a great advantage for us that we can expand smart INVOICE individually. Sometimes, we have to check some things more specifically or in a special environment in order to really read out 100% valid data. Here we work very closely and in partnership with Insiders, who respond very flexibly to our individual requirements”

, explains Frank Groß, Product Owner DigiDoc Services / Archive Processes at Markant.

By working closely with the Insiders team, Markant benefits from all the advantages of a German manufacturer with the corresponding proximity, direct access to product owners and developers of the product as well as a high level of continuity in the people responsible.

Enthusiastic about the solution, Markant also uses smart INVOICE internally for its own P2P processes. The other Insiders products are also of strategic interest to Markant, as customers are increasingly requesting the evaluation of other document types such as delivery bills or reminders.