By TriumphPay Chief Technology Officer Mike Mangino and Chief Product Officer Garrett Wolfe
In the United States, the trucking ecosystem is based on a trust-but-verify model when it comes to ensuring that services are completed successfully within the bounds of an agreement. Further, constituents have historically remained very guarded of their proprietary data, for good reason. Many of the inefficiencies in the ecosystem are rooted in these two truisms.
Factors must trust that the invoices they purchase are accurate and complete. To guard against fraud, they must verify some portion of the invoices they purchase because they are providing liquidity to a carrier 30 or more days before they will (hopefully) be paid in full by their debtors. If it were possible, factors would want to verify every invoice that comes in. Due to the manual nature of many verifications compounded by the explosive growth of factoring volumes, they settle for verifying just a fraction of invoices and design elaborate risk-mitigation policies around this fact.
Brokers face this same dilemma. They must audit every invoice they receive to make sure it meets the billing requirements of their customers and what they contractually agreed to pay the carriers. Once they send these invoices to their customers, the shippers are now the ones performing manual verification on documents and data points that are sent through multiple stops in an ecosystem before reaching them.
What would this ecosystem look like if we could find a way to remove the need to verify? How could we simplify our processes if this trust was enforced as part of a network? At TriumphPay, we’re making that a reality. With more than $236 million and 100,000 transactions, we are connecting carriers, factors, brokers and shippers with seamless access to trustworthy data. Best of all, we’re doing it in a way that everybody maintains ownership and security of their data.
With the payments network, factors receive data about the loads of their clients, and only their clients, at the time of booking. They get details including the origin and destination, rate, equipment and other elements that allow them to help their clients with fuel decisions, load matching and other value-added services. The factor also avoids the time and expense related to performing prepurchase verifications. Imagine a world where a factor had data from the source of truth on a load and no longer faced the risk of purchasing a fraudulent invoice? That is what the payments network is delivering.
Once the factor has purchased the invoice, the factor sends an invoice, as structured data, to the broker that is matched to the load and verified for the correct amount. This eliminates the manual indexing work done by the broker, allowing for increased margins and more automation of invoice approvals. The broker can also provide automatic invoice status updates back to the factor, eliminating the time-consuming status check calls or emails they currently must answer.
Over time, this same connection will be made to shippers as well. By connecting all of the parties in these transactions with accurate, up-to-date data directly from the source of truth, TriumphPay is building trust into the transportation ecosystem. The days of time and money being wasted on verifying invoices are coming to an end.
Of course, that’s only one kind of security you need to worry about. Having secure knowledge of the truth of your transactions is only valuable if your data is secure as well. TriumphPay knows that data privacy must be one of our core values. From using industry best practices including encryption throughout the technology stack, to making security part of our software development process, we know that you depend on us to keep your data safe. More than 500 brokers and 70 factors trust our proven technology every day.
