BlackLine Unveils Industry’s First Accounts Receivable Automation Capabilities to Deliver Real-Time Insights into Customer Risks and Growth Opportunities Based on Behavioral Analytics

New Customer Attractiveness Scoring provides organizations with flexible models that assess creditworthiness to reduce risk and identify revenue opportunities

COMPANY NEWS: BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq:BL) unveiled Customer Attractiveness Scoring, new features in its AR (Customer Accounts) intelligence solution designed to provide real-time insights into the risk profile and behavior of an organization’s customers.

With behavioral insights collected in real time during the cash collection and management process, businesses can better identify customers who are at risk of not paying and/or delaying their payments and reduce the risk of non-payment. BlackLine’s additional capabilities will also help organizations better identify customers with minimal credit risk, allowing businesses to increase credit limits for those who demonstrate consistent payment behavior, becoming a better partner for the company.

As concerns about inflation and an impending economic recession persist, the ability to harness powerful insights into payment behaviors could help dramatically improve an organization’s cash flow. Additionally, as the cost of borrowing continues to rise, companies are looking internally for ways to free up working capital to invest elsewhere, without having to borrow from financial institutions. In fact, according to the Hackett Group report, the 1,000 largest public companies in the United States had nearly US$1.7 trillion tied up in excess working capital in 2021. As a result, The Hackett Group recommends that large companies to review and refine their credit risk. collections management and management process to capture changing payment behaviors and minimize exposure to bad debts.

Unlike credit risk profiles provided by credit agencies, BlackLine’s Customer Attractiveness Score shows customer risk based on payment behavior as it occurs, providing the most up-to-date assessment of risk, specific to the commercial relationship, instantly to the credit teams. The customer attractiveness assessment offers the following functionalities:

• Aggregated Client Benchmarking – which provides real-time benchmarking data across its entire client portfolio to determine which clients to prioritize for growth expansion or risk monitoring.

• User Configurable Internal Credit Scores – which allow credit professionals to assess customer behavior on their own defined criteria that they deem most important instead of relying on generic third-party ratings.

• “What If” analysis capabilities – which allow organizations to modify their risk model internally to see what the impact of decisions might be and thus adapt to industry events or the general macro-economic climate.

“Given changing global economic conditions, companies are under increasing pressure to maximize their cash positions, which means they are spending more time reviewing cash flow metrics, such as risk management. credit and collections management processes. In fact, we are now seeing executives being asked to report on cash flow and working capital as much as profit and revenue,” said Andy Lilley, Managing Director and Head of Global AR at BlackLine. “With cash management more critical than ever, we’re seeing more and more customers turn to BlackLine for intelligent insights, as businesses look to leverage real-time data and powerful analytics to improve decision making. critical decision throughout the company.”

The new Customer Attractiveness Scoring is part of BlackLine’s AR Intelligence solution, which enables clients to manage financial risks and opportunities by providing access to real-time actionable data, which helps them understand their clients’ financial behaviors and use the information to have strategic and operational impact. decision making. Customer Attractiveness Rating is generally available now as part of BlackLine AR Intelligence at no additional cost.

Kevin Permenter, Research Director, Financial Applications, IDC, added: “Dealing with today’s economic headwinds means looking for ways to free up working capital, and the best way to free up working capital is to better manage cash. One of the best ways to do this is to accurately assess credit risk in real time; after all, global economic uncertainty goes hand in hand with rapid and unexpected changes in economic conditions. Therefore, the more timely information an organization has about customer behavior, the better it can assess this risk and minimize exposure to bad debts. As such, BlackLine has developed a potentially impactful product feature with the BlackLine Customer Attractiveness Score, specifically designed to help businesses better navigate a challenging financial environment.

For more information on BlackLine’s market-leading AR automation solutions, please click here.

About BlackLine
Companies come to BlackLine (Nasdaq:BL) because their traditional manual accounting processes are unsustainable. BlackLine’s cloud-based financial operations management platform and industry-leading customer service help businesses transition to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility. BlackLine provides solutions to manage and automate financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes, helping large and midsize businesses in all industries do their accounting work better, faster, and with more control.

Over 4,000 clients trust BlackLine to help them close faster with complete and accurate results. The company is the pioneer of the cloud financial close market and recognized as the leader by customers on major end-user review sites including G2 and TrustRadius. BlackLine is a global company with operations in major business centers around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco Bay Area, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney. For more information, visit blackline.com.