Streamlining Finance Workflows: Insights from Summit CEO, Jo-ann Chung

In this interview, Jo-ann Chung, CEO and founder of Summit, discusses innovative features they've developed at Summit to improve expense management. Summit specialises in automating finance workflows, reducing the manual effort involved in expense management, and providing finance teams with greater visibility into spending patterns. In this conversation, Jo-ann shares how Summit leverages AI tools like smart capture, smart approval workflows, and anomaly detection to streamline processes. She also explains how Summit helps finance teams improve efficiency, governance, and compliance, ultimately empowering them to focus on more strategic tasks.

One key feature involves using AI to automatically allocate expenses to the correct cost centre, department, and category, even when this information isn't directly provided on the invoice. Another feature, the policy checker, allows companies to upload their expense policies, enabling real-time verification of whether submitted claims meet company guidelines. This not only saves time but also enhances accuracy, giving employees, managers, and finance teams greater confidence in the expense approval process. Jo-ann also shares a deep dive into future developments that make Summit a game-changer for financial automation.

To hear more insights from Jo-ann, we invite you to listen to the full interview with MoneyFM or read the transcript below.

Right Business: This app is easing finance managers' workflow

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INTRO: The Best of Money Matters. Right Business. Welcome to The Right Business, where we dive deep into the stories of trailblazers who dare to disrupt the status quo, finding the gap in the market to find the right business.

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Hongbin Jeong (HJ): Hello, I'm Hongbin Jeong. Financial efficiency is the backbone of any successful organisation, yet many traditional tools fall short in addressing the unique needs of finance teams. These teams often face overwhelming workloads, manual processes, and limited visibility into spending patterns, leaving little time for strategic decision-making.

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And one company has decided to transform the way finance professionals work. And that's Summit. Now, Summit is a platform that is specifically designed to streamline accounts payable processes, consolidate expense management, and provide real-time insights, empowering finance teams to save time, reduce costs, and improve financial control.

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To explore how Summit is revolutionising financial workflows and empowering finance managers to focus on strategic growth, joining me today is Jo-ann Chung, who is the CEO and founder of Summit. Hi, Jo-ann. Thanks for joining us today.

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Jo-ann Chung (JC): Hi, Hongbin. Thanks for having us.

HJ: All right, Jo-ann, you've had 20 years of experience in financial services and B2B payments.

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What inspired you to move from working in this industry to founding Summit? I mean, during your career, did you observe any recurring pain points or inefficiencies in how finance teams operated that led you to create Summit?

JC: Yeah, I think, as you pointed out, I've been involved in payments for a long time. And when it comes to business payments, there's actually a lot of work that goes in before a payment is actually made. There's a lot of stuff around capturing the payment, making sure the right information is attached to the payment so it can be accurately captured on the financial statements for the business, as well as ensuring that the right approvals are in place across that business.

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And so through my time involved in payments, I actually got to see and learn about what is it that businesses have to do before they even get to the payment. And that got me thinking that actually there's a lot there that we can do to help businesses, because actually the process involved in getting ready to make a payment is very mundane and time consuming. It involves a lot of data entry, a lot of processing capability.

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And so just looking at how much time it takes finance professionals to actually do that made me go, hey, that's something we could really help with. And so that's what really inspired us to actually deliver Summit, because we found there was a real opportunity to help with workflow management for finance teams. And that's what Summit's all about.

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HJ: I see. I see. I mean, there are many existing platforms which claim to help with automation and expense management.

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What were the key gaps you identified that convinced you to a tailored solution like Summit was necessary? And how does it differ from other existing platforms?

JC: Yeah, look, I think the big one for us is we specialise in workflow management. A lot of the other platforms that exist in market, the workflow management is kind of like an add-on to other things that they do. So it might be that they're also offering payments.

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It could be that they're also offering accounting services. It could be that they're also offering procurement. We really specialise in workflow for businesses.

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And so that really helps hone in on all the different processes and the complexities of processes that exist for finance teams today to ensure that they're getting their workflow correct. And it becomes really important for finance teams, because it is critical that they capture that information correctly. If they fail to do their workflow correctly, it really opens them up to weaker governance and compliance controls within the business that could then lead them to seeing things like unintended spend happening on the business or even the worst case scenario, being exposed to like fraudulent behavior that happens that sees businesses lose money.

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And so this is where our specialty comes in, because we really focus on things like the governance and compliance needs of processing workflows that are related to expense processing or spend management.

HJ: I see. Well, I mean, your target audience are finance managers, and we've read that you've described Summit as a co-pilot for finance managers.

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What exactly do you mean by co-pilot?

JC: Yes, so firstly, I should point out because a lot of people talk about co-pilot as something that kind of replaces people. We definitely don't see our platform replacing finance professionals. If you actually take a look, like there was a recent survey that was done that actually showed that 89% of top finance execs in Singapore spend over half of their time on manual back office tasks.

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So this is things like data entry, report creation, processing, etc. And considering how much study they do to become a finance professional and the ongoing continued study, that is not the most exciting point of anyone's job. And so what we're actually focused on with our tool is how do we use things like AI and smart tools to reduce all these tedious, mundane tasks.

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And so that's what we mean by co-pilot is how do we help reduce all the manual, mundane, repetitive tasks that a finance person does, as well as provide tools to allow them to add greater value based on their expertise. So we equip them with things such as reporting and analysis that allows them to see different trends that are happening around their expenses in their business. And we provide them with tools that helps make it easier for them to do things like detect anomalies across the expenses that are hitting the business.

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HJ: I see. I see. Well, let's shift our focus to what Summit actually does here.

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Summit provides a connected automated workflow that handles both vendor invoices and employee expenses, offering real-time visibility into spending and delivering tangible benefits like cost saving and improved efficiency. Could you walk us through some of its core features and perhaps explain how they simplify the accounts payable process for finance teams?

JC: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess it centers around a few key features.

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So the first is it involves smart capture. So we use technology like optical character recognition to automatically allow you to scan an expense. It could be an invoice.

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It could be a receipt. And we automatically populate the fields that are necessary to be captured by reading it and translating that onto the screen. So it takes away the need to manually key that.

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We also put in some smarts to infer information. So if it's not on the invoice or the receipt, we can work out what those other fields might need to contain as a result. So like a really common example in like the average person's everyday life is when you're filling out forms and you're inputting your address, rather than writing out your full address in the form, if you put in your postcode, it will automatically pre-populate the other information based on what it knows about your postcode.

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So that's what our platform does. It uses a lot of smart tools behind it to be able to automatically populate information. We also have smart approval workflows.

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So this is where businesses often need different people to approve expenses before they get paid. And depending on the type of expense that it is. So our platform allows you to set up all of those nuances around who needs to approve what invoices in what order.

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So it might be that it goes to a manager first and through a GM before it hits the finance team. So we have the ability to pre-program that and automatically guide the expense through that workflow process on the platform. We also do things like accounting integration.

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We know that those expenses need to get into your accounting software to make sure that your financial statements are represented accurately. And so we provide integration to platforms like Xero and NetSuite. That means that without any manual intervention, it can pre-populate those accounting platforms with the correct information as needed.

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And the last part for us is really, as I mentioned before, anomaly detection. So we've got some real smart tools, things like policy check and duplicate detection that are often hard to do when you're processing things manually via email and spreadsheets is to find out when things don't comply with company policy or may have already been processed before. We're able to do that instantly as you're processing the expense.

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So these are all those kind of features that we have to help that make that workflow process much more effective and fast for finance teams.

HJ: I mean, it seems like efficiency and accuracy is like the main points for Summit. Do you have like in terms of number or a percentage, how much better Summit is in improving the efficiency or the speed of it or the accuracy of it compared to, let's say, a traditional method of it?

JC: Yes, I think I mentioned, you know, we actually spoke to hundreds of businesses in the lead up to launching Summit.

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And these are businesses in Singapore, and we were amazed to find that 40% of them are actually processing this stuff manually through emails and spreadsheets. One of our customers, for example, we found has been able to save 80% of time in processing invoices. So that's how much time they've been able to cut down simply by digitising and leveraging some of the smart options that we have to make the process go much faster.

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So they were really thankful that they moved to the platform because they kind of said we've been able to free up all this time to do other things. And we feel that the process is a lot more accurate.

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HJ: I see. I see. I mean, Summit's also described as a platform that bridges automation with visibility into spending patterns. So does this combination kind of give finance managers a competitive edge?

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JC: Yeah, it absolutely does. I think, you know, what we do is we arm our finance teams or finance professionals with the tools to be able to do things that they traditionally find quite difficult. As I said, finance teams spend a lot of time on data entry and processing. And so they don't often get time to pick up things like I said, anomalies.

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If there's a duplicate, did this thing get submitted a week ago? You need a really good finance person who can remember and kind of recognise and go, I think I've seen that expense before. And so this platform arms them to go from being reactive on things that are found out after the event to being really proactive and stopping unintended expenses before they occur, as opposed to spending hours trying to recover funds from money that shouldn't have been expensed out of the business. Like that's just one area.

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But also, if you look at the reporting, our reporting tools actually give them visibility about those spending trends. So you start to see patterns of what's happening. You know, if you suddenly get an unusual invoice or expense, you can see that really clearly when you've got the data in front of you at your fingertips, showing what you've been paying a supplier every month.

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If it suddenly doubles, you know, before you make the payment to the supplier, you can start asking questions about, is that invoice actually correct? And so that's what we're trying to do is really arm our customers and empower them to be proactive in managing their business.

HJ: Right. I mean, you also heavily emphasise reducing manual effort and errors while, you know, improving control and decision making through a user-friendly interface.

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How does Summit's user-centric design ensure that finance teams can, you know, easily adopt and maximise the platform's potential?

JC: Yeah, look, that's really important for us. It's all about intuitive design when it comes to our platform. So we've designed our platform in a way that allows finance teams to get started really, really easily.

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They can literally, we've got things like guided tools that can help them navigate the platform and how to get set up. And it's very, very simple to get started. After you're on board and create your login, you can literally get started with very simple things around creating some budgets.

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You can start actually processing expenses straight away. But we do that through our design, which makes it easy to navigate our customers through the workflow from capture, through approval, through exporting data.

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HJ: I see. Well, Summit aims to continuously evolve with technology and the needs of finance professionals, positioning itself as a leader in financial automation and efficiency. Are there any upcoming features or advancements that you're particularly excited about, Jo-ann? Such as new AI tools or expanded capabilities for user customisation?

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JC: Yeah, look, I think there's two that we're really excited about. One of them is around auto-categorisation. So when it comes to capturing expenses for a business, many people may not realise, but there's a lot of other information that needs to be captured to ensure that those expenses are accurately reported in a business's financial statements. One of the things that we're doing is leveraging our smart AI tools to actually help be able to pre-populate information based on what can be inserted. So this is all the manual task it might do, which is take a look at an invoice and then determine things such as what cost center to allocate it to, what department to allocate it to, what expense category to allocate it to within the business, et cetera.

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Even though that information is not contained on the invoice itself, we're able to use the smart of our platform to be able to infer that accurately for a customer. And so that's something that we're working on that will be coming in the future. And we're quite excited about that because the prospective clients we've spoken to about this are actually quite excited by how much extra time it will save and how much more accuracy they'll get.

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Because often this differs depending on if you've got multiple people in your finance team, they might choose different things depending on their level of experience to be able to tag expenses.

HJ: That's amazing.

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JC: Yeah, so that's one of the things that we're working on. And we've just recently launched a policy checker feature, which just about everybody has been in a role at some point where they've had to claim to be reimbursed by the company for an expense that they've incurred. That can be quite a painful process because you incur an expense, you want to make sure it's within the company's policy and rules on what you can spend and that you will get paid for it. We've developed a policy checker feature, which in the past, in past software, you might have had to set up a whole heap of rules in a platform and then had to maintain those rules.

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We now allow customers to do something really simple, which is upload your document, your policy document. It could be a Word document, a PDF document. We automatically read that every time expense claim is submitted by an employee.

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And we can tell them real time whether or not that expense meets the company's expense policy. It gives visibility to the employee, gives confidence to the managers who are approving it, and it gives confidence to the finance team that only the correct things are being reimbursed to employees as well on the way through. That's all leveraging like the smarts around AI, being able to read it, interpret what the expense is and compare that to the policy.

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So no more having to hunt up documents, no more having to check, read and interpret documents. It does it all for you instantly.

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HJ: Wow, that's amazing. We're looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Jo-ann, for joining us today.

JC: Thank you so much for having me.

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HJ: Thank you. We've been speaking to Jo-ann Chung, who is the CEO and founder of Summit. This has been The Right Business with me, Hongbin Jeong.