Overview
A private equity-backed group ran its finance operations across its own line-of-business applications, with heavy integration between them. Order to cash and procure to pay needed a large finance team. Most of that team's day went on volume work: reading invoices and remittances, matching them, chasing queries, reconciling bank lines and posting.
Veriland redesigned both processes around AI agents. The agents now do the volume work, with bank reconciliation at the centre. People handle only the exceptions, approvals and sign-off.
The result: £32m a year in recurring savings, excluding one-off costs, and 450+ FTE of finance capacity released. The saving lands directly in EBITDA.
The Challenge
The group needed to take cost out of finance without weakening its controls. Two things made that hard.
- Volume. Invoices, remittances, orders and bank statements arrived every day, and people keyed, matched and chased most of them by hand. Bank reconciliation took a large share of that effort.
- Connected systems. The work ran across several of the group's own applications and the integrations between them, not inside one ERP. A new system would not remove the work. The fix had to operate across the estate the group already had.
What We Did
We redesigned order to cash and procure to pay around agents, with bank reconciliation as a major focus. Each process follows the same five stages.
- Capture. Agents read invoices, remittances, orders and bank statements as they arrive.
- Match. Agents match invoices to orders and receipts, cash to open items, and bank lines to the ledger.
- Resolve. Agents resolve routine differences within agreed limits, and answer or chase supplier and customer queries.
- Escalate. Anything outside the limits goes to the right person, with the evidence and a suggested action attached.
- Approve. People approve payments, credit decisions, write-offs and sign-off.
The agents work across the group's line-of-business applications and the integrations that connect them. We keep the detail of the agent design and the integration work for conversations under NDA.
Where People Stay in Control
The finance team sets the rules, and the agents work inside them.
- A person approves every payment, credit decision and write-off.
- The finance team sets each agent's thresholds, and anything above a threshold is escalated.
- The agent that prepares a transaction never approves it. Segregation of duties applies to agents as it does to people.
- Every agent has its own identity, with only the access its task needs.
- Every agent action is logged in an audit trail the auditors can read and test.
The Results
- £32m a year in recurring savings, excluding one-off costs.
- 450+ FTE of finance capacity released across order to cash and procure to pay.
- Exceptions only. The finance team now reviews the transactions that need judgement, instead of processing every one.
Could This Work for You?
This result did not depend on Dynamics 365 or any single platform. It depended on high-volume, rules-based work spread across connected systems, which most finance operations have. Agentic Finance Operations explains how we run the same approach for other clients. It starts with a fixed-price diagnostic and a pilot on one process, measured against a metric agreed upfront.
