Bawag PSK is an Austrian bank with a rich history dating back to 1883. The bank offers a wide range of financial products and services, catering to individuals, businesses, and public institutions across Austria. Boasting impressive figures such as €53 billion in total assets, €36 billion in customer deposits, and a net profit of approximately €404 million in 2020, Bawag PSK has established itself as a leading financial institution known for its customer-centric approach and strong financial performance.

Situation: Expense processing with spreadsheets for 20 years

For the past 20 years, Bawag handled internal finances by manually entering them into excel documents. Being the 4^th largest bank in Austria means Bawag is steeped in tradition, but in this case their traditional finance process was prone to errors, which resulted in a lot of email traffic. It was also difficult to explain the process to new hires, which would delay the onboarding process.

People who had traveled or had expenses would fill in the fields and then send it to finance. Then they would have communication back and forth between the finance team and different employees as there were always mistakes in the file or information missing.

So Bawag decided to look for a better way.

Solution: Implementing Yokoy – A powerful spend management solution with a personal touch

Bawag created a list of stringent quality requirements, that would decide the best tool to manage their spend in the future. And after comparing different tools, they chose Yokoy. 

They hadn’t done an overhaul of this scale before at Bawag. But they felt in control throughout the process, noting that Yokoy took a lot of care in making everyone feel supported and heard during implementation. 

Patrick Gross (Customer Success Manager) was a delight to work with as he could show Bawag what could be done and also show us opportunities we didn’t yet know of.

By analyzing the structure of finance processes at Bawag, Yokoy removed many dispensible steps with automation. Some flows would have 4-5 intermediate steps that could be automated fully. This would result in an impressive impact on Bawag’s finance management. 

Impact: 12.79x ROI, increased speed, and easy onboarding

As a result, Bawag’s entire expense process incurs only 6% additional operational costs relative to the total costs incurred by expense payments. For comparison, previously the process cost an additional 22%.

The finance teams administrate the entire process at once, without having to ping-pong information back and forth between different departments. As a result, Bawag has already saved 1.732 working hours in the first year.

As far as the employee onboarding issue goes, there has also been an incredible improvement.

With Yokoy we didn’t have to explain anything to new joiners. We just gave them the link and they knew how to use it.

The automated and streamlined process has resulted in an efficiency gain of 75.6% and enabled Bawag to save 12.79 times the investment in Yokoy’s expense management tools. 

In conclusion the impact was that Bawag now closes books faster, doesn’t spend as much time on onboarding and enjoys increased transparency.