The credit team got smaller. The payments got bigger.

A salon owner is not a procurement department. They are cutting hair until six, they do their admin after close, and the invoice they need to query is one of maybe four they will deal with that month. L'Oréal A/NZ has thousands of them, alongside pharmacies and clinics that trade on different terms again.

That shape of book punishes manual process. Every reminder was sent by hand, every invoice distributed by hand, and every dispute worked through an email thread with no owner and no clock on it. The people best placed to manage credit risk were spending their day on data entry and on answering the phone.

The phone was the symptom worth paying attention to. Customers called because there was nowhere else to look. They wanted a copy of an invoice, a balance, confirmation that a payment had landed. None of that needed a person, but all of it got one, and it arrived during the hours the credit team was trying to work.

Surepayd went live in August 2019. The platform took over invoice delivery and reminders, and put a mobile self-service portal in front of every customer.

• Invoices and statements available whenever the customer wants them, which for a salon owner is usually after closing.
• One-click payment, and autopay for customers who would rather not think about it again.
• Disputes raised and tracked in the portal, with a timeline, instead of in an email chain.
• Payment terms and hierarchies configured per segment, because a pharmacy group and an independent salon do not trade the same way.

The distinction that matters is where the work went. Automating a reminder moves effort from one person to a system. Giving a customer the answer removes the question. Inbound calls fell by 85% in the first twelve months, and they fell because customers stopped needing to make them.

Between 2019 and 2023 the value of payments collected rose by 40%, and the number of payments by 36%. Days sales outstanding came down by 30%. None of that came from chasing harder.

The clearest sign is the team itself. L'Oréal went from three collectors to two supervisors, while transaction volume grew. The roles changed rather than disappeared: the work that remained was credit management rather than administration, which is the work those people were hired to do.

Aged receivables and overdue balances fell alongside it, helped by disputes finally having an owner and a resolution timeline rather than sitting in an inbox until someone chased.

Results in year one are an implementation. Results in year six are infrastructure.

The platform has been through a full generational upgrade in that time, moving to Surepayd V2 in June 2024 without interrupting the receivables operation running on it. It has supported L'Oréal through a major ERP programme rather than being displaced by one.

The engagement that started in Australia and New Zealand is now the reference for L'Oréal's wider markets. That is the strongest thing a case study can report: not that the project worked, but that nobody has wanted to unpick it since.