How Innovation and Client Connection Leads to Change at Deluxe

We talk a lot about innovation at Deluxe – it is one of our core values. As a company, we consistently encourage the notion of “everyone innovates,” and we’ve even dedicated space within our Atlanta office to it. But how are we innovating and learning with our customers in mind?  

Scott Sanchez, Vice President of Product Innovation at Deluxe, defines innovation as delighting businesses and solving their needs so they can thrive and succeed. To do this, no matter the role, we must be committed to listening to customers, identifying their pain points, and working together to solve their problems. This is the focus Scott and his team applied recently when working with the Receivables as a Service (RaaS) team to seek solutions to problems they didn’t even know needed to be solved.  

First, what is RaaS? Simply, it is a platform to assist companies in processing their Accounts Receivables (AR) - in other words, helping them get paid. RaaS looks at how companies process payments, providing solutions for them to digitize, automate and streamline their processes, providing access to their cash faster.  

With hundreds of clients relying on Deluxe RaaS services, the team set out to look at what is next in the space, but also how to better meet client needs. By combining the subject matter expertise of the RaaS Accounts Management team with the firepower of our Innovation team, they are looking at ways to create the framework for an entirely new concept in the Receivables space.  

After months of research, and interviewing dozens of clients for more than 120 hours, the Innovation team concluded that the biggest unfulfilled need was helping these AR specialists to do their day-to-day jobs. Specifically, these professionals were in critical need of help resolving and applying payments. The Innovation team’s 120 hours of time listening to client needs helped determine a roadmap of solutions aimed at what the customers actually desire.  

There is still work to be done and more information to be gathered, but the first step to earning trust is ensuring customers believe we will put them first. When we decided to make this one of our core values, we committed ourselves to taking the time to listen to customer needs and putting effort into finding the right people – and solutions – for the task. By starting with questions like “what’s the problem” rather than creating new products based on our best guesses, innovation helps Deluxe move the needle and create even better platforms and products.