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Improve Your Payments Processing

A 6-step guide to optimizing Fiserv payments
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Improve Your Payments Processing
Challenges (12) Goals (12) 6 Steps Preview Outcomes Data FAQs (4)

Optimize Fiserv Payments Processing for Better Cash Flow

Identify hidden bottlenecks and reconciliation errors that slow down your financial operations. Our platform reveals the root causes of processing delays to help you streamline transaction lifecycles and improve cash flow. Use these insights to eliminate manual rework and strengthen your compliance posture across every stage of the workflow.

Download our pre-configured data template and address common challenges to reach your efficiency goals. Follow our six-step improvement plan and consult the Data Template Guide to transform your operations.

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The Strategic Importance of Payment Flow Optimization

In the modern financial landscape, payments processing is no longer just a back-office function, it is a critical driver of liquidity and customer satisfaction. When you utilize Fiserv for your card processing, ACH, and bill pay needs, you are handling a high volume of transactions that directly impact your working capital. However, even with a robust system like Fiserv, inefficiencies can creep in. Manual intervention in the approval chain, delays in bank communication, or recurring errors in transaction validation can lead to significant cycle time increases. By optimizing these workflows, you reduce the cost per transaction and ensure that funds move through your ecosystem with minimal friction, ultimately improving your overall financial health.

Transforming Financial Visibility with Process Mining

Process mining offers a revolutionary way to look at your Fiserv data. Rather than relying on static reports that tell you what happened, process mining shows you how it happened. By using the Payment Transaction ID as a case identifier, you can visualize the entire journey of a payment from the moment a request is created to the final settlement. This level of transparency allows you to see the actual path a payment takes, including all the loops, bottlenecks, and deviations that are often invisible in standard dashboards. You can identify exactly where a payment stalls, whether it is waiting for a secondary approval or stuck in a validation error loop, allowing you to make data-driven decisions about where to apply automation or policy changes.

Targeted Improvement Areas in the Payment Lifecycle

When analyzing your payments processing within Fiserv, there are several key areas where optimization typically yields the highest returns. First, consider the validation and authorization stages. If your data shows that a high percentage of payments are being sent back for manual correction, it indicates a need for better front-end data entry or improved validation rules. Second, look at the scheduling and instruction phases. Process mining can reveal if payments are being scheduled too early or too late, which can affect your interest earnings or result in late fees. Finally, the reconciliation process is often a major source of delay. By identifying patterns in payment errors and resolutions, you can streamline how your team handles exceptions, moving away from reactive troubleshooting toward proactive process management.

Realizing Measurable Gains in Efficiency and Compliance

Successful process optimization leads to measurable improvements across several key performance indicators. Reducing the cycle time from payment request to settlement directly enhances your cash flow predictability. Furthermore, by standardizing the approval and authorization workflows, you significantly strengthen your compliance posture. Process mining provides an immutable audit trail, showing that every payment followed the required regulatory and internal checkpoints. This transparency is invaluable during audits, as it proves that your financial operations are consistent and controlled. Beyond compliance, you will likely see a reduction in operational costs as manual touches are eliminated and error rates drop, allowing your finance team to focus on more strategic activities.

Launching Your Optimization Journey

Starting your journey toward a more efficient payments processing workflow does not require a complete overhaul of your existing systems. By leveraging your current Fiserv data and applying process mining techniques, you can begin to see immediate opportunities for improvement. The first step is to map your current state to identify the most frequent deviations from your ideal process. Once you understand where the friction exists, you can implement targeted changes, such as adjusting approval thresholds or automating routine notifications. As you refine these steps, you will create a leaner, more agile payment operation that supports your business growth and financial stability. Explore our templates and guides to see how you can apply these insights to your specific environment today.

Payments Processing ACH transfers transaction reconciliation financial compliance settlement cycle treasury management accounts payable team payment authorization

Common Problems & Challenges

Identify which challenges are impacting you

Manual intervention or missing approval levels often cause payment instructions to stall before they reach the execution stage. This results in missed deadlines and potential late fees that impact your organizational credibility and vendor relationships.

When payment details are entered incorrectly, they trigger validation errors that require manual correction before processing can continue. These errors disrupt the flow of automated payments and consume valuable staff time in your accounts payable department.

Large time gaps between the funds being transferred and the final reconciliation in your records create visibility issues for cash management. This lack of real-time data makes it difficult to forecast working capital accurately and can lead to financial reporting discrepancies.

Payments that bypass standard validation or approval steps pose a significant risk to financial integrity and regulatory compliance. These maverick payments often occur when users find workarounds to speed up urgent transfers, leaving the organization vulnerable to audits.

Missing strict daily cutoff times for ACH and wire transfers leads to payments being pushed to the next business day. This delay can result in missed delivery dates for vendor payments and negative impacts on your relationships with suppliers.

System glitches or manual entry mistakes can lead to the same payment being authorized and sent multiple times. Identifying these duplicates after the fact is difficult and often requires a manual, time-consuming recovery process that risks permanent loss of funds.

Once a payment error is identified, the time it takes to resolve and re-process the transaction can be excessive. This lack of agility in error handling leads to frustrated vendors and a growing backlog of unresolved financial exceptions in your workflow.

Without a consolidated view of the payment lifecycle, stakeholders often struggle to determine the exact status of a high-value transfer. This leads to excessive status inquiries and manual tracking across different systems or departments to find answers.

Many organizations rely on manual steps for payment details validation or notification sending, which increases the cost per transaction. These labor-intensive tasks prevent your finance team from focusing on higher-value analytical activities that benefit the business.

Variance in how long it takes for different payment methods or payees to settle makes cash flow forecasting difficult. When settlement dates are unpredictable, treasury managers must maintain higher cash cushions, which ties up valuable working capital needlessly.

When payment notifications are sent significantly later than the funds transfer, payees may spend time following up on expected funds. This creates unnecessary administrative work for your support teams and can damage long-term business relationships over time.

Overly complex approval hierarchies designed for security can inadvertently become the primary cause of payment delays. When too many individuals are required to sign off on a routine transaction, the process slows to a crawl, especially during peak fiscal periods.

Typical Goals

Define what success looks like

Reducing the time it takes to move from a payment request to final authorization is critical for maintaining vendor relationships and meeting financial deadlines. By shortening these cycles, organizations can avoid late fees and take advantage of early payment discounts, which directly improves the bottom line and operational reliability.

ProcessMind identifies specific steps within the Fiserv environment where authorizations stall. By analyzing the path of every Payment Transaction ID, the platform highlights bottlenecks and provides data-driven evidence to justify workflow changes or higher automated thresholds for routine transactions.

Every manual correction in the payment process adds costs and introduces the potential for further errors. Minimizing these interventions ensures that payments move smoothly through validation steps without requiring human touchpoints, which leads to a more scalable financial operation and reduced administrative overhead.

Using our process mining capabilities, you can pinpoint the exact validation stages where errors occur most frequently in your Fiserv data. This insight allows teams to refine data entry rules or enhance automated checks, significantly reducing the volume of transactions flagged for manual review or correction.

Closing the window between funds being transferred and the final reconciliation of the ledger provides a clearer picture of available cash. Reducing this gap helps treasury teams make more informed decisions about liquidity and reduces the risk of reporting discrepancies during financial closing periods.

ProcessMind tracks the duration between the Payment Settled activity and the Payment Reconciled activity. By visualizing this transition, the platform helps identify if delays are caused by banking lags or internal manual processes, enabling targeted improvements to speed up the final books.

Adherence to internal controls and external regulations is non-negotiable in financial operations. Standardizing payment paths prevents rogue spending and ensures that every transaction follows the prescribed authorization and validation steps, which significantly mitigates audit risks and potential financial penalties.

The platform automatically discovers all payment paths taken within Fiserv and compares them against your ideal process model. It flags non-compliant deviations in real time, allowing managers to intervene before unauthorized payments are finalized and ensuring that every Payment Transaction ID follows a sanctioned path.

Missing bank cutoffs can delay payments by several days, especially over weekends or holidays, leading to strained vendor relations and missed financial targets. Ensuring that all payment instructions are sent within specified timeframes is essential for predictable cash management and maintaining high service levels.

ProcessMind analyzes time-stamped activity data to identify transactions that consistently approach or miss cutoff deadlines in Fiserv. By monitoring these trends, organizations can adjust resource allocation or shift processing times to ensure every payment instruction is sent on time and according to banking schedules.

Duplicate payments represent a direct loss of capital and create significant administrative burdens for recovery. Eliminating these errors protects cash reserves and ensures that financial records accurately reflect genuine obligations, preventing unnecessary drain on the company's working capital.

Our solution scans transaction attributes for identical amounts, payees, and dates across the entire lifecycle. By uncovering the root causes of duplicates in the Fiserv workflow, such as system glitches or re-entry of failed payments, ProcessMind helps prevent future occurrences and improves overall financial accuracy.

When a payment error is identified, every minute spent in resolution delays the final settlement. Rapidly addressing these issues minimizes the operational impact and ensures that payment errors do not escalate into larger financial disputes or missed obligations that could damage the company's reputation.

ProcessMind provides a transparent view of the error resolution path, tracking the time from Payment Error Identified to Payment Error Resolved. This visibility helps identify which error types or departments take the longest to address, allowing for more efficient resource planning and faster cycle times.

Straight through processing represents the most efficient way to handle payments, as it requires no manual intervention from start to finish. Increasing the percentage of transactions that reach settlement without human touch lowers operational costs and speeds up the entire payment cycle.

The platform measures the degree of automation across the payment lifecycle in Fiserv. It identifies manual activities that could be automated, such as payment scheduling or notification sending, and provides a data-driven roadmap for increasing straight through processing rates across different payment types.

Inconsistent settlement dates make it difficult for treasury teams to accurately forecast cash flow. By standardizing the time it takes for funds to be transferred and confirmed, organizations can achieve more predictable and stable financial planning, which is essential for long-term growth.

ProcessMind provides detailed analytics on the distribution of settlement times within your Fiserv instance. By identifying the factors that cause variance, such as specific payment methods or currency types, the platform helps you implement strategies to normalize the timing of all transactions.

Fast and accurate notifications build trust with payees and provide internal stakeholders with immediate confirmation of financial actions. Reducing the delay between payment settlement and notification helps maintain transparency and improves the overall experience for vendors and internal teams alike.

Our process mining tool tracks the latency between the Payment Settled activity and the Payment Notification Sent activity. By highlighting delays in this final stage of the process, ProcessMind enables you to optimize notification triggers and ensure stakeholders are informed without unnecessary delay.

While multi-level approvals are necessary for high-value transactions, they often become a major source of delay for routine payments. Streamlining these structures allows for faster execution without compromising on financial security, ensuring that funds move at the speed of business.

ProcessMind visualizes the entire approval chain for every Payment Transaction ID. This helps you identify redundant approval steps or inactive users who are slowing down the process, allowing for the optimization of approval authorities and roles within the Fiserv workflow.

Having a single, unified view of every payment transaction prevents information silos and ensures that all departments are working from the same data. This transparency is vital for effective treasury management and rapid response to operational issues across the organization.

By aggregating data from Fiserv, ProcessMind creates a comprehensive digital twin of your payments process. This centralized visibility allows teams to monitor transaction status in real time and identify broad trends that would otherwise remain hidden across fragmented systems or departments.

The 6-Step Improvement Path for Payments Processing

1

Download the Template
2

Export Your Data
3

Upload Your Dataset
4

Analyze Your Process
5

Implement Improvements
6

Monitor Your Process
1

Download the Template

What to do

Obtain the Excel template designed for Fiserv payment structures, including fields for transaction lifecycles and settlement logs.

View Data Template Guide Download Template
Why it matters

A standardized structure ensures all card, ACH, and bill pay data points are correctly mapped for accurate process mining.

Expected outcome

A data template tailored for Fiserv payment logs.

YOUR PROCESS INSIGHTS

Transform Your Fiserv Data into Actionable Insights

ProcessMind provides a clear map of your payment workflows to help you eliminate reconciliation delays. Discover exactly where settlement errors occur and how they impact your working capital.
  • Map complete payment flows from end to end
  • Identify the root cause of settlement errors
  • Detect bottlenecks causing reconciliation delays
  • Audit compliance across all financial workflows
Discover your actual process flow
Discover your actual process flow
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Identify bottlenecks and delays
Analyze process variants
Analyze process variants
Design your optimized process
Design your optimized process

TYPICAL OUTCOMES

Transforming Payments Processing Performance

Enterprises utilizing process mining on Fiserv data streams identify critical inefficiencies, such as manual intervention points and payment exceptions, to accelerate transaction cycles. These outcomes reflect the tangible improvements achieved by prioritizing visibility across the entire Payment Transaction ID lifecycle.

~ 0 %
Higher STP Rates

Increase in automated flows

Removing manual rework in the Fiserv environment allows more payments to move from request to settlement without any human intervention.
0 % faster
Accelerated Authorizations

Reduction in approval lag

Streamlining multi level approval structures reduces the average time between payment creation and authorization, speeding up the release of funds.
0 %
Regulatory Compliance

Adherence to internal policies

Automated monitoring ensures every transaction follows the prescribed path, minimizing risk and achieving 100 percent compliance with financial regulations.
0 % reduction
Rapid Error Resolution

Mean time to resolve issues

Identifying payment validation failures instantly allows teams to resolve errors faster, which maintains consistent cash flow and payee trust.
0 days faster
Reduced Settlement Gap

Improved financial visibility

Shrinking the duration between settlement and reconciliation provides accounting teams with the central visibility needed for precise cash management.
0 % detection
Duplicate Prevention

Safeguarding cash reserves

Flagging transactions with identical attributes before settlement prevents duplicate payments and the high cost of manual recovery efforts.

Performance metrics vary based on organizational complexity, transaction volume, and data integrity. These figures serve as benchmarks for typical improvements seen across global financial environments.

FAQs

Frequently asked questions

Process mining uses the Payment Transaction ID to map every step of your payment flow, from authorization to final settlement. It reveals hidden bottlenecks and deviations that standard Fiserv reports might miss, allowing you to see exactly where transactions stall or encounter manual rework.

You need an event log containing the Payment Transaction ID, a timestamp for each activity, and the activity name itself, such as Authorization Initiated or Settlement Confirmed. Supplemental data like transaction amount or currency type helps further segment the analysis to identify high risk or high value delays.

Yes, by visualizing the digital footprint of every transaction, the tool identifies points where payments are frequently kicked back for manual correction. This insight allows teams to target specific validation rules for automation, significantly increasing your straight through processing rates.

Traditional reporting typically provides static snapshots of KPIs, like total volume or average processing time, but fails to show the path between those metrics. Process mining reconstructs the actual sequence of events, highlighting non-compliant paths and undocumented workarounds that impact your cash flow.

Initial insights can often be generated within two to four weeks once the data connection to Fiserv is established. After the first data upload, you can immediately begin identifying the root causes of missed processing cutoffs and settlement delays.

Process mining excels at identifying redundant loops where the same Payment Transaction ID or related metadata appears in multiple settlement logs. By flagging these patterns in real time, you can implement preventative controls to stop duplicate transactions before they drain cash reserves.

While real time integration provides the most immediate value for monitoring cutoffs, you can start with a one time file export to conduct a baseline analysis. Many organizations begin with periodic batch uploads to identify long term trends before moving toward a live monitoring setup.

It provides a complete, objective record of every payment path taken, ensuring that 100 percent of transactions are audited rather than just a small sample. This transparency makes it easy to demonstrate to regulators that your team is following established policies and resolving errors within required timeframes.

Optimize Payments Processing and Reach 98% STP Today

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