5,000 Hours Saved: How Yokoy Redefined mci group’s Financial Management
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- Customer Story
mci group, a world-leading provider of live and digital communication, combines the expertise of top agencies to drive brand and organisational transformation. Through strategic events, conferences, and marketing campaigns, mci enables its clients to build strong connections and elevate their brand presence.
Time-consuming and error-prone: Why mci group needed a new solution
Planning and executing these events required precise budget control – an ongoing challenge that, before implementing Yokoy, involved significant manual effort and inefficient, time-consuming processes.
With frequent business trips lasting up to three weeks, employees had to keep track of every receipt and manually enter expenses into Excel. Managing 160 cardholders and 18,000 transactions annually quickly became overwhelming for the finance team.
Expense processing often took one to two months. CFO Sebastien Hess recalls, “On average, each employee spent two hours per month on expense reporting, while our nine-person finance team dedicated nearly 5,000 hours a year solely to process them. Our workflows were slowing us down. Additionally, there was always a risk that some expenses wouldn’t be correctly recorded in the accounting system.”
Strategic decision: Why mci chose Yokoy and UBS
mci group sought a streamlined, efficient, and automated solution to optimise its expense management. Through its long-standing partnership with UBS, the company discovered Yokoy. Since UBS did not provide advanced digital tools for expense tracking, they recommended Yokoy as a strategic partner. Yokoy’s seamless integration with UBS credit cards and its flexible pricing model made it the ideal choice for mci.
mci has fully digitised its expense management with Yokoy. Employees use their UBS credit cards for business travel, while Yokoy’s AI automatically extracts amounts, VAT, and key financial data. “Yokoy allows us to speed up the entire expense process, ensuring that all expenses are accurately tracked and allocated to the right budgets,” explains Sebastien.
From delays to fast results: Yokoy’s tangible impact
Yokoy has fundamentally changed how mci group manages expenses. The finance department’s productivity has increased by an impressive 500% on credit card management, and expense processing time by operations has been reduced by 80%. What once took a month now takes less than a week. “The time savings are significant. Our accounting workflows for managing credit cards are now more than twice as fast. What was once a slow and manual process is now a precise, efficient, and data-driven solution,” summarises Sebastien.
Yokoy’s automation not only improves data accuracy but also delivers measurable savings by detecting expense anomalies, while process automation cuts costs and has allowed mci to save one full-time equivalent in the finance team. Beyond optimising a resource-intensive process, mci has laid the foundation for a scalable and future-proof financial management system.
“Our management was initially sceptical, but today, Yokoy has proven to be a game changer,” Sebastien explains. “The time savings and efficiency gains speak for themselves.”
The future with Yokoy: Smarter insights, greater transparency, more sustainability
mci group is looking to expand its use of Yokoy across more areas. Sustainability is a key priority for the future, and mci is actively exploring how AI-powered analytics can measure the CO₂ footprint of business travel. In collaboration with partners like TravelPerk, the company aims to automate the tracking and analysis of ESG-related data, including airline and hotel choices.
“The ability to track the carbon footprint of our expenses is one of our biggest challenges for the future. If we can use AI to extract this data directly from invoices, it would be a real breakthrough,” concludes Sebastien Hess.
