AI-powered post-payment audit for retailers

In retail and e-commerce organizations, complex business processes, dynamic commercial terms, and a rising number of supplier transactions are resulting in financial leakages. Due to the high volume of events, deals and promotions, retail price adjustments, seasonal variations, and joint campaigns, there's simply too much data to audit across channels.

Agreements with suppliers are often over email and not documented in a centralized deal management system. This makes analyzing contractual agreements against actual performance a daunting task, often resulting in overlooked discrepancies. As a result, companies continue to lose millions of dollars in leakages.

Using our years of expertise in the retail industry and advanced technologies like AI, Genpact has reimagined the post-payment audit program. We help retailers identify, recover, and prevent leakages that are not identified as part of pre-payment business processes.

Due to the complexity of business operations across goods for resale including supply chain nuances, the percentage of leakages for retailers can range from 0.2% to 0.5% of supplier spend. This means a retailer with an annual spend of $10 billion can expect $20 million to $50 million in potential annual savings. Genpact’s post-payment audit (PPA) solution has helped clients recover $1 billion across the source-to-pay processes.

The PPA solution is built to support over 150 leakage concepts. It runs leakage scenarios, such as allowances, volumes, margin loss, pricing damages, and other retail financial risk scenarios. This helps retailers recover lost funds and act on predictive insights to prevent future issues, leading to a reduction in operational costs and greater financial control.

The solution can scale your available technology stack and integrate with various cutting-edge technologies, including OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, Databricks, and ServiceNow, among others.

When clients transform their supplier post-audit and recovery audits, they can recover funds faster, reduce risk, and improve their overall audit effectiveness.

For one of the world's largest retailers, we replaced an existing post-payment audit program with our Microsoft Azure-enabled PPA solution. We helped the retailer increase recoveries by more than 50% in the first year. In parallel, the Genpact team shared insights to prevent upstream leakages and created a plan to eliminate over $10 million of leakages.

In another example, an online retailer was facing challenges with data residing across multiple systems and manually maintained files. Its manual processing of rebates, promotions, and allowances only made things worse, giving limited visibility into the completeness of billing for commercial terms with suppliers. With our PPA solution, we helped the retailer unlock $9 million by identifying missed commercial credits on allowances, rebates, and pricing mismatches, among other areas.

In summary, our digitally enabled PPA solution can:

• Significantly reduce financial leakage through partnering with business stakeholders, including merchants, supply chain partners, and other groups
• Grow recoveries over historical programs by up to 30% through deeper mining of transaction data and benchmarking across retail leakage scenarios
• Boost claim governance efficiency by up to 30% using a variety of technology enablers across the claim governance process
• Speed up audit cycles by up to 20% using matured audit modules built and ready to deploy over Microsoft Azure and Databricks-enabled solution
• Increase audit efficiency by up to 20%–25% by using our team of retail audit experts equipped with a library of recovery audit workbooks and digital tools like Microsoft Copilot

When time is money, now is the time to invest in AI-powered PPA processes.