The software called Aimie was trained on €700 billion worth of financial transactions

by Max Smolaks 4 October 2019

The French division of Manpower, one of the
largest recruitment and staffing companies in the world, has deployed an AI agent
developed by Sidetrade to help optimize credit management in its financial
department.

The software, called Aimie, has passed the
probation with flying colors – after nine months of testing, effectiveness of recovery actions grew 12
percent – and is now handling thousands of accounts.

"We started Aimie off with two customer
portfolios for a period of two months,” said Laurent Bueno, credit director of
Manpower France. “Encouraged by the results, we ramped up our use of Aimie.
Within four months, Aimie was managing nearly 60 percent of single-site
customers, which represents over 5,000 accounts, and nearly 10,000 follow-up actions
per month."

Manpower France has an annual turnover of €4
billion and collects 1.3 million receivables from 80,000 companies. It has been
working with Sidetrade since 2013.

Sidetrade, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, is a specialist in automation for financial departments, and has been increasingly moving into the AI space.

The company says its tools helped liberate
staff at Manpower from repetitive labor, while also achieving a significant
reduction in days sales outstanding. Deploying Aimie is the latest step
in this relationship: the software agent had been trained on 230,000,000 B2B payment
experiences, totaling sales of over €700 billion over the past three years.

Thanks to this knowledge, Aimie can analyze individual
accounts to determine the best collection strategy, according to criteria such
as buyer and seller profiles,
characteristics of the invoice, and
business relations history, including any disputes.

“Our solution, like all automation software,
was based on a set of predetermined scenarios, which needed to be regularly revised by business experts. On top of
this, Sidetrade added Artificial
Intelligence, which exploits the profusion of data available on customer
payment behavior, to provide
financial teams with the best possible recommendations in real-time,” commented Jean-Cyril Schütterlé, chief product officer at
Sidetrade.

“With over 700 payer centers to manage, it is
impossible for a manager to call all the debtors
in their portfolio. Aimie helps them decide which customers to contact first,” Bueno
explained. “We dismiss any alarmist talk
about Artificial Intelligence.
We actually see AI as a way to let us focus on real human know-how.”