ARTICLE
In emerging countries, cash remains the predominant payment instrument. As the money supply increases, one of the biggest hurdles for the retail sector to scale their businesses is insufficient optimization of cash operations – cash collection, cash pickup, cash delivery, and cash delivery in transit. Each day, retailers are required to manage cash from the point of sale to all the various money management operations happening in the background. Without a full stack cash management solution, retailers are forced to focus their daily efforts more on cash management – hiring and managing cash pickup and cash delivery agents to deliver cash from multiple points of sale to company’s premise, hiring cash/money courier services such as a CIT vehicle to deliver in-house cash to their bank account – and less on customer engagement.
Shortfalls of manual cash operations
With manual cash operations, a retail business with multiple points of sale cannot track where their money is at all times. Moreover, with cashiers and cash delivery agents involved, it becomes complicated to track who has access to their money and when and where it is headed. This creates problems with bookkeeping, fraud, and theft throughout the cash lifecycle.
The lack of a paper trail that comes with the practice of handling cash operations manually is a serious problem for retail businesses. When you cannot track your cash pickups and cash deliveries in transit from multiple touch-points, cash discrepancies from point of sale to on-premise safe, on-premise safe to bank account become impossible to track.
Manual cash operations present an inherent internal and external security risk for retailers. Cash collections remain subject to theft, fraud, and human error from point of sale to on-premise safe up until cash is transported and deposited in your bank account. By the time your cash collections reach your bank account, the lack of due diligence, paper trail, and security makes it nearly impossible to track cash discrepancies and forces retailers to write this off a bad debt expense each month. As competition and desire to differentiate through customer experiences increases, retail businesses must adopt secure and efficient technology-enabled solutions for cash handling and management.
Full stack cash management solution for retailers
One example of a full stack cash handling and management solution is via Loop. Loop offers a comprehensive hardware/software solution for optimising cash collection, deposit, and transportation processes for retail businesses. Loop’s smart cash deposit machines do more than just collect and store cash – they automatically count, verify, and deposit your cash in machines that are built with bank grade security and can be installed near point of sale, warehouse, hub or wherever you choose. This means that retailers accepting cash payments from individuals can install smart deposit machines at all locations where cash accumulates actively on a daily/weekly basis and enjoy security benefits that a bank offers on their own premises. Moreover, smart deposit machines allow deposits to be made 24/7, even while offline. Retailers can greatly benefit from the security and flexibility by working directly with Loop.
To ensure smooth operations for Loop clients, Loop offers dedicated on-site personnel that are trained and can troubleshoot any hardware or software issues encountered with Loop machines installed on site. These dedicated on-site personnel can also train your cashiers and delivery agents on how to use Loop smart deposit machines to deposit and verify transactions via a user-friendly interface that requires minimal prior knowledge.
What makes Loop cash deposit machines smart is their interconnectivity with a cloud software that uses best of class encryption and modern end-to-end cryptographic techniques to ensure the highest level of data security and safety. Loop’s financial OS enables retail business owners with round the clock real time cash analytics, monitoring, and reporting tools, identification methods to authenticate each individual transaction to minimise operational errors and the time required for depositing funds.
In conclusion, Loop’s full stack hardware/software solution for cash management – cash collection, cash pickup, cash delivery, and cash delivery in transit – can reduce overall operational cost, increase efficiency and security of cash deposits, and provide real time analytics to track cash deposited at each location and by whom the deposit was made, gauge the cash level in each machine at all locations, and decide the optimal time to use CIT vehicle services to deliver cash to a bank, minimising delivery costs and bank fees paid per deposit. Loop also provides technical training for all staff members that will interact with Loop’s user-friendly hardware/software interface which requires minimal prior knowledge. Loop’s full stack solution provides a full audit trail for maximum transparency throughout the cash lifecycle which ultimately shrinks cash leakages, allowing retail businesses to discover new working capital with each monthly cash lifecycle.