Broker Messaging Example
Brokers like you always focus on scale because your core business is securing freight from shippers and booking carriers on the loads. Your revenue comes from preload work: booking loads and finding capacity while protecting your spread. But you’re facing some strong headwinds right now.
The freight market has softened, squeezed by rising interest rates and inflation, which impacts your revenues and margins. It’s forced some of your shippers to extend their payment terms, further squeezing your cash flow.
There are also macro trends making it difficult to secure capacity. High fuel costs and rising prices for trucks and insurance have caused a “carrier cash flow crisis.” Carriers care most about how and when they get paid, and those who can’t keep up ultimately leave the business, with fewer entrants replacing them.
And the transportation payments industry is still rife with blind spots between each stakeholder, which provide enticing targets for fraudsters.
In your typical post-load workflow, you balance requirements from thousands of shippers, and the needs and expectations of hundreds of factors, to pay tens of thousands of carriers. With each new player in the flow, you add several more touchpoints.
Shippers demand more documentation to pay invoices while extending their terms, so your staff spends time keeping track of requirements and communicating with carriers—performing many mundane, manual, and time-consuming invoice auditing activities.
Carriers keep asking when they’ll be paid, so you either pull from your credit to pay them directly, or slow pay them and hope they’ll be content.
And factors, who still get 60 percent of freight payments, keep calling and emailing to submit NOAs, verify loads, and settle their own accounts. You may also need to slow pay them if you’re stuck in a cash flow crunch.
All of these together create a human-intensive back office team that ultimately erodes margin on your hard-won freight.
It’s common for brokers like you to hire additional staff or divert development resources away from revenue-generating solutions to manage this chaos. But throwing people and technology at the problem erodes your long-term economics.
You’ll still be managing thousands of touchpoints each week. Your team will still field incomplete emailed PDFs, reams of digitized structured and unstructured data, and constant phone calls and emails from carriers and factors.
And diverting your investments to post-load payment management means taking them away from preload revenue-generating work, putting further strain on your cash flow and working capital.
All the while, you’ll still have blind spots between each group, leaving yourself open to fraudulent activity and reputational risk.
To differentiate from your competitors, you’ve been viewing payments as part of the load experience, and deploying your resources to cover every part from booking to settlement.
And while it’s important to keep stakeholders happy and loyal for further capacity, you need to do that by focusing on what you do best.
What if you could keep your focus on securing freight and booking loads?
When you off-load your post-load payment experience, you dramatically reduce the time and resources needed to manage payment to factors and carriers. Specifically, you’ll be able to:
Facilitate the auditing and payment of invoices from a single integration point, rather than from thousands of different touchpoints.
Expose early indicators of fraudulent activity.
Shore up your working capital by diverting post-load resources to pre-load booking activity.
And when you do this, you’ll eliminate chaotic communications with each of your constituents.
You’ll never have to take a call or email from a network factor—ever again.
You’ll lower your fraud risk, reduce double-brokering, and avoid double-paying invoices.
And you’ll improve your cash flow by growing QuickPay and deploying supply chain financing opportunities.
In the end, you’ll keep your operation focused on booking loads and finding capacity to drive revenue—which is why you’re in this business. Let’s talk about how CLIENT can help you do just that.