Our tech, AI investment key to unlocking power of `humans + machines' in office of the CFO: HighRadius CTO

The total addressable market for HighRadius, which offers 'cloud based autonomous software for the office of the CFO', extends to tens of billions of dollars with companies, big and small, needing technology transformation for their processes, says Chief Technology Officer Tanuj Vohra.

"In India, specifically, HighRadius has emerged as the default choice for leading shared services and global business services centres for running their order-to-cash business processes," Vohra told PTI.

With 800-plus clients, including Unilever and Kellogg, spread across 90 countries, the company has logged a 50 per cent CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) over the last four years.

''We believe that our investments in technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are key to unleashing the real power of `humans + machines' in the office of the CFO,'' Vohra said.

HighRadius utilises Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings across all products. According to Vohra, running AWS has offered business stability with auto-scalable compute and managed services to help scale and handle peak loads.

Excerpts from the interview: Q: Can you talk about the journey of HighRadius and the key milestones so far? A: HighRadius is a category-defining SaaS (software as a service) market leader driving the AI revolution for enterprise finance and accounting teams.

With the HighRadius Autonomous Finance Platform for the Office of the CFO, we've helped 800-plus clients like Unilever and Kellogg transform their operations, unlock business value, and improve efficiency of their overall order to cash (O2C) business processes.

Founded in 2006, HighRadius was one of the earliest SaaS providers to pivot to the cloud. In 2010, HighRadius built its own Robotic Process Automation (RPA) agents - even before the term was coined. By 2014, HighRadius pioneered the use of AI for automating the cash application business process.

Since then HighRadius has developed 13-plus use-cases for AI and machine learning for O2C, treasury, and record to report functions for the office of the CFO.

Q: What is the size and scale of your operations, and at what pace have you grown in past years? A: With 800-plus clients across 90 countries, HighRadius has had a 50 per cent CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) over the last four years. HighRadius has been the number one vendor on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for O2C two years in a row since its inception.

Q: What are your expansion plans as a fintech enterprise SaaS company? A: Most single-category players in the 'office of the CFO enterprise' SaaS space have failed at becoming multi-category players via acquisitions.

Unlike others, HighRadius has expanded beyond O2C solutions with its own AI-powered autonomous treasury (2020) and autonomous accounting (2022) for Record to Report (R2R). Our solution allows for accurate reconciliation and continuous financial close, while providing proactive anomaly management. We aim to continue on this journey to expand in other areas in finance.

Q: What is the size of the market you are addressing? A: The total addressable market for HighRadius extends to tens of billions of dollars. Starting from companies as small as USD 50 million in revenue to the world's largest organisations - they all need technology transformation for their O2C, record to report and treasury processes.

In India, specifically, HighRadius has emerged as the default choice for leading shared services and global business services centres for running their O2C business processes.

Companies use HighRadius autonomous receivables to speed up the conversion of accounts receivable to cash. This helps typical HighRadius clients unlock up to USD 3 million in working capital annually.

HighRadius autonomous treasury pivots the treasury function from reactive reporting to proactive portfolio and investment management.

The highly accurate AI-driven cash forecasts can help treasurers generate USD 2 million additional yield from their cash investments.

HighRadius autonomous accounting converts the month-end close and reconciliation to a state of continuous close. This means accounting teams are no longer doing the month-end mad rush and CFOs achieve faster close and reliable reconciliation.

Q: What is the digital infrastructure and technology backing HighRadius' operations? A: The HighRadius platform features a multi-tenant SaaS architecture, which ensures ease of implementation and compatibility with both public and private clouds.

The infrastructure complexities involved can be broadly categorised into the following areas of multi-tenancy and scalability, integrations, and global deployments with multi-geo infrastructure and disaster recovery (DR).

We have over 800 clients, and more than USD 7.7 trillion in receivables were processed via our infrastructure in 2022 - which is about twice the GDP of India! And we have 1,000-plus AI models deployed at scale with our clients.

HighRadius comes with pre-built integrations with more than 1,000 customer websites/accounts payable portals via RPA bots, 50 banks globally, 30 credit agencies, and 15-plus payment service providers (PSPs). To facilitate smooth integrations despite differences in data formats, protocols, and authentication mechanisms, we leverage APIs, webhooks, and middleware.

Additionally, HighRadius provides Representational State Transfer (REST)-based APIs for data transfer and supports bi-directional integrations with over 20 ERPs.

Then there are global deployments with multi-geo infrastructure and DR. This ensures that our infrastructure is truly fault tolerant - compliant with the strongest of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) requirements for our clients.

Q: How is HighRadius looking to leverage new technologies like AI and machine learning to stay ahead? A: HighRadius continues to invest in new technologies with a focus on automating processes, improving efficiencies, reducing costs, and providing excellent customer experience.

We have invested heavily in AI/ML with 13 specific use cases and four granted patents, and multiple patent applications filed.

Q: Can you describe your solution and the workloads you are running on AWS.

A: HighRadius products have a three-layer architecture (DMZ, App and DB). Each layer communicates through firewalls. The DMZ layer is exposed to the internet, code gets deployed into the App layer and data is stored in the DB layer.

HighRadius utilises many AWS Services such as RDS, EKS, ASG, EC2, SQS & S3 across all products. Due to the number of real-time transactions and volume of data processed our major focus has been in building highly scalable compute Infrastructure and robust database clusters.

We are using AWS EC2, EKS, and ASG for automating scaling based on demand, AWS Lambda for serverless computing.

Q: In terms of business outcomes, what benefits have you experienced as a result of running on AWS? A: Running AWS has allowed us to be quick to market for rolling-out features without having to worry about stability, security and availability. It has also offered business stability with auto-scalable compute and managed services help us scale and handle peak loads.

The cost and operational efficiency with RDS managed services minimises resource needs for running activities (disaster recovery, back-up, etc). Features such as deep storage allow us to further optimise the costs.

Improved deployment reliability via EKS managed services allows us to run containerized workloads and orchestrate data pipelines. (This story has been produced by PTI in collaboration with Amazon Web Services).

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