Nordea’s Instant Reporting API helps RaskRask stay in great shape

Since their formation in Aarhus in 2015, RaskRask has experienced rapid growth and is now one of the leading providers of mobile personal health and wellness care in Denmark. RaskRask’s user-friendly platform enables companies and private customers to book a professional massage therapist, personal trainer, hairdresser or yoga instructor for a home or workplace visit whenever it suits them. Created in collaboration with carefully handpicked specialist partners, RaskRask’s fresh and innovative hub offers potential customers a selection of professional masseurs, personal trainers and yoga instructors, all available in their local area.

Moving from an entrepreneurial beginning to becoming an established company has placed increasing demands on the available time and resources of RaskRask’s team. One area that required optimisation as orders have grown was the company’s process for reconciling payments from customers for the services they have received. Increasing automation was highlighted as the key way of improving the manual and often cumbersome task of reconciling payments.

Albert Iversen, RaskRask CEO & Founder, says: “We have been going for six years now and in the beginning it was a bumpy road as it often is in the entrepreneurial journey. We had to find our own way with our new approach to on demand health and wellness. As we’ve really started to grow and expand our customer base in the last three years we have really seen the need to start automating some crucial processes to be able to handle our increasing volumes.”

A long term partnership

Nordea has had a close relationship with RaskRask from the early years of the company through the bank’s Startup & Growth programme. As RaskRask expanded and the discussions switched to automating and digitising cash management procedures, Nordea were on hand to present a premium API (Application Programming Interface) service from Nordea Open Banking called Instant Reporting.

Lars Kristoffersen, Cash Management Adviser at Nordea, says: “For start-ups with high ambitions, it’s very common that you go full throttle, full speed ahead when you are trying to get things off the ground. RaskRask had a lot of incoming payments and in the early days they were basically picking up the pieces of how to process these along the way. As the company grew things were becoming a real hassle as they received thousands of incoming payments and were only able to easily reconcile less than half of them. We started talking about the more common cash management solutions and how to invoice and be able to reconcile. RaskRask had actually begun to use APIs themselves and over time their entire infrastructure, including their ERP system was built on APIs. This made Nordea’s Instant Reporting API an ideal solution to offer to RaskRask. Following the integration of the Instant Reporting API, close to 93% of all RaskRask’s incoming payments are now automatically reconciled.”

Albert adds: “From the beginning, Nordea has really understood us and our needs and has been able to give us the help and technical support we needed. We’ve been discussing some of the issues we’ve had and some of the automations we’d love to do. We try to automate as much as possible in order to spend more time with the customers and be able to handle the scale and ambitions we have with our company. We haven’t been able to find a good solution to our issues before the API so we were excited about the opportunities we can already see with this solution. Instant Reporting has made a significant improvement compared to our previous set up and we are definitely more ambitious. We want to get the percentage of reconciled automated payments as close to one hundred as possible.”

Making a connection

Following an onboarding to Nordea Corporate Netbank the Instant Reporting API is now in place, connecting RaskRask’s database directly to their Nordea accounts. This enables a full overview of account transactions and the ability to observe and reconcile recent transactions as-they-happen or filter lengthier payment histories by date range. This can be done either in real-time or as frequently as the RaskRask team decides throughout the day.

When a RaskRask customer books an appointment for a service such as a home massage, the booking data is entered into the company’s database and a link is created to a payment ID. When the payment for the treatment is received, the payee is identified and matched up to the actual booking as the ID is extrapolated through the API, enabling the reconciliation to take place.

Jacob Heath, RaskRask CTO, says: “One of the things that’s very normal in entrepreneurship of course is that you allow a less strict but more flexible payment stack. We give our customers as much freedom in their payment choices as we possibly can which means that we’ll have payments with different types of IDs and different ways of recognising them. Sometimes we have had challenges identifying who actually made a transfer either through MobilePay or through their bank. Previously we had a lot of manual insertions of different strings or different descriptions and we would have to sit and manually match that up to our database. We would do this once a month meaning there would be a sizeable chunk of unmatched payments that we would have to manually sit and follow through. What the Instant Reporting API then did, which is quite amazing, is to give us an automated solution that runs every day, several times a day, making sure that once we get to the end of the month, we don’t have this large pile of missing transfers.”

Good to B2B flexible

Albert continues: “Specifically for our B2B customers, almost all of them want to pay by bank transfer. We make a single invoice for all of the bookings that they have had in one month to make it easy and convenient for them. As we are really growing in the B2B segment we’re seeing high growth in the number of payments made in this way and the Instant Reporting API is essential in helping us to match payments from single invoices to multiple bookings.”

Currently RaskRask fetch information via the Instant Reporting API every couple of hours although the possibility is there to receive data more frequently, making the solution highly flexible.

Albert says: “We are still in the experimental stage regarding how often we actually need to receive the transaction data. Right now we are fetching data every three or four hours during business hours. We could easily update our script to set it up for every hour or half hour depending on our future needs. One of the really interesting ideas we have is that we’re able to give the service provider instant feedback on whether or not the payment was received. Right now we basically pay our service partners their share of earnings once a month but the Instant Reporting API might make it possible for us to pay out more often if they prefer because we will have this automated reconciliation per booking on the fly.”

Extensive onboarding

Integrating the Instant Reporting API proved to be a relatively smooth process and was also helped by RaskRask’s digital mindset and existing familiarity with APIs.

Jacob continues: “We’ve been using the technology around APIs for over two years and we’ve built our own API to handle our entire stack and business logic. So the API technology was definitely familiar to us once we started with Nordea’s API. In the beginning there was a quite extensive onboarding and security process. That was probably the most time consuming part. We felt we received really good support and if we had any questions, the Nordea team were really quick to answer. In general integrating the API was quite self-documenting I would say. Once I began authenticating through the codes app, the mobile application that you use for two factor authentication, it took a period of around one week and then we were ready to go into production.”

Better customer experience

Thanks to the Instant Reporting API, RaskRask has been able to save time and resources previously tied up in the manual reconciliation of payments. Having an improved system for reporting on the status of incoming payments also means that RaskRask is able to improve satisfaction levels for both customers and service providers.

Jacob concludes: “The biggest thing for us is the saving of resources around the manual working hours. On top of that, we can provide a much better customer experience as we can reach out much earlier if we’re missing a payment or can’t recognise a payment rather than on a monthly basis. If a month goes by since you received your massage therapy, then you might’ve forgotten about it and be surprised but if you received your treatment yesterday or a few days ago, then you’re probably more open to finding a solution and making the payment. With the Instant Reporting API set up we can make a more precise follow-up, both to our partners and customers to collect information. The end goal here is to make all parts of the communication regarding financial transfers, more precise both to the partners and to the customers.”

Albert concludes: “Both from a customer experience point of view, and making sure we get the payment point of view, the Instant Reporting API is very important for our business as well. Having access to a Premium API from Nordea and seeing what we can do there is also opening up our creativity in other ways of how to use this, where we can automate more processes or make new features for our B2B clients. Right now we’re working on establishing the right foundation so that we are able to scale, and that means automating the right processes. A big part of that is obviously all of the bookkeeping and pay-out related tasks. That’s where Nordea’s Premium APIs are such a huge part of this solution. We both have bigger visions within Denmark but also outside Denmark which really requires more of both the organisation but also the tech and the systems behind it to facilitate growth. That’s why we were super excited about the Instant Reporting API. It gives us flexibility and the opportunities to really be creative and find the solutions that work for our customers and our partners and facilitate the growth for us.”

For more information on Nordea’s Premium APIs, please write to Lars at l.kristoffersen [at] nordea.dk.

Find out more about RaskRask here or visit the Nordea API Market here.