Automating for impact: UMB streamlines expenses with Yokoy
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- Customer Story
UMB is one of Switzerland’s leading IT service providers. With 15 locations, 14 in Switzerland and one in Spain, the company delivers tailored technology solutions that help clients streamline operations and focus on what drives their business forward.
At the heart of UMB’s philosophy lies a clear mission: “UMB – creating time.” By eliminating complexity and enabling operational efficiency, UMB helps its customers reclaim capacity for what matters most. But despite this commitment, one internal process hadn’t yet caught up with that vision: expense management.
Lost time, little oversight: Why manual wasn’t enough
Before implementing Yokoy, UMB’s expense process was largely manual and paper-based. Employees submitted physical receipts, which were passed on to the finance department for validation and booking.
With more than 100 corporate credit cards in circulation, managing the growing volume of transactions became a near-impossible task. Without automation, the finance team lacked real-time visibility into spending, making it difficult to monitor trends and maintain oversight.
At the same time, compliance enforcement was equally limited. Without embedded approval workflows or automated rule checks, policy violations could only be identified manually, often with significant effort.
To address these issues and reduce operational risk, UMB turned to automation.
Zero paper, full control: Inside UMB’s new process
In 2020, UMB implemented Yokoy Expense to digitise and automate the entire expense process. A key requirement was seamless integration with the company’s finance systems to ensure accurate and automatic booking of expenses. “Ideally, we only step in when something doesn’t go through as planned,” says Mersiha Fazli, Accountant at UMB.
Today, employees simply upload their receipts. Yokoy’s AI scans, categorises, and routes each expense through predefined approval rules, flagging any policy violations along the way. “Yokoy enforces our policies automatically. If something doesn’t comply, the system flags it immediately,” explains Mersiha. Manual intervention is the exception, not the rule.
“Yokoy enables us to monitor all expenses in real time without any extra manual effort. We always have complete oversight,” she adds.
Less complexity, more efficiency: UMB frees up time for what matters most
Since rolling out Yokoy, UMB has seen a clear shift in how things get done. Manual work has largely been replaced by intelligent automation. Expenses move quickly through the system, VAT reclaim is effortless, and anomalies get flagged before they cause issues.
With fewer repetitive tasks to worry about, the finance team finally has room to focus on what matters: spotting exceptions early, improving processes, and supporting the business with real financial insight.
“Thanks to Yokoy, we were finally able to eliminate manual processes and truly start creating time—just as our company promise says,” says Mersiha.
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.”
Laying the groundwork for tomorrow
UMB’s finance transformation is ongoing. As Mersiha shares, the company is preparing for a major ERP system migration in 2026—an initiative that will open the door to further automation and AI-driven finance solutions. While the focus today is on refining current processes, the finance team is laying the groundwork for future scalability and long-term agility.
