Gaming Innovation Group

Gaming Innovation Group (GIG), is an industry-leading platform and media provider delivering world-class solutions to iGaming partners and their customers. Dillon Mercieca, former finance manager and now Senior Treasury Analyst at GIG explains why he started using Soldo after having used a credit card solution for 5 years.

The switch from company credit cards to debit cards

With the company growing, the volume of expenses to manage increased as well, causing additional admin time for the finance team. They would spend a lot of time doing manual reconciliation, chasing for receipts, confirming the transactions had gone through and making sure transfers had been allocated correctly before being able to issue the management of account. And with, sometimes, receiving up to 60 receipts for one single employee it quickly became a problem.

When Dillon Mercieca, Senior Treasury Analyst, joined Gaming Innovation Group (GIG), the company was using a local payment card provider, which offered credit cards but was not designed for international Corporate use. They frequently encountered issues when paying in Malta or abroad, with cards being blocked and transactions not passing through, even despite not having reached the payment limits on certain occasions. They had no online platform to store invoices and receipts or split the cost, and often had delays in seeing transactions reported causing a lot of financial and admin burden for the finance team. On top of that debt burden would take two weeks to deal with and they lacked the real-time visibility on transactions so after using them for 5 years, and let the frustration grew, they decided to look for an alternative solution.

GiG main area of spending are:

• Online advertising
• Accommodations and flights
• Travel expenses
• Company expenses

They needed a solution that would cover both company and individual expenses, simplify the claims and accounting process and reduce overall costs and admin burden.

Dillon first came across Soldo upon hearing positive recommendations from his industry peers at the Malta Sigma conference and he made the switch from credit cards to Soldo cards shortly after.

Managing business expenses with real-time control and visibility

Today, GIG use a combination of physical and virtual cards that are assigned to the different teams based on their use. Nominative cards are given to employees who have recurring spend of a certain amount and company cards are used for departmental spending with funds shared across multiple people.

• Their Sales and top managers mostly use physical cards for Travel & Entertainment and expenses and enjoy that they can add them to Google Pay or Apple pay for easy on-the-go payments.
• Their IT team use dedicated Google virtual cards which they use for managing recurring subscriptions.
• Their Media team uses virtual cards for managing online advertising.

“Employees need expense cards to carry out their roles efficiently. Knowing we can create virtual cards at the touch of a button gives us more agility and peace of mind that there won´t be any delays waiting for plastic cards to be produced.”

Everyone has an easy way to access company money securely and without having the hassle of then manually collecting and submitting receipts. On the finance side, they have a real-time view on company-wide spend, they can allocate costs directly from the Soldo platform and issue new cards instantly without having to wait for KYC check all the time.

From manual reconciliation to spend automation

As for any successful business that’s scaling its operations and looking to maximise effectiveness and minimise time waste, introducing automation can be just the way to make that happen.

Between chasing for receipts, confirming the transactions had gone through or making sure transfers had been allocated correctly, being able to issue the management of account was long and tedious. Now with Soldo, employees no longer need to waste time looking for lost receipts, keeping manual copies and adding up columns of numbers on a spreadsheet. They just take a photo of the receipt via the Soldo app, classify the cost and it’s done, other information are auto-populated and it’s quicker and easier each month, explains Dillon :

“Card reconciliation used to take up to 7 hours. Now with Soldo it takes us 30 min and we have a 99 % receipt rate and cost allocation rate.”

This has also made the accounting team’s job less redundant as it is possible to trigger automatic reminders to employees to submit their expenses. In the past, this had to be done via email which was time-consuming and involved a lot of chasing to meet payment deadlines. Now, the team sets up notifications one week before the end of the month to remind everyone to include missing receipts of their transactions.

“With the mobile app, employees just take a picture of the receipt and upload it. Before, the finance team would receive a bunch of receipts and will spend time to allocate them. Now, the finance team needs less time to finalise the management accounts.”

Making expenses easy for employees and finance teams alike

Apart from the cost, what was most important to the GIG was the user experience. They wanted to make sure it would be as easy as possible for employee to use the new expense system.

For travel expenses for example, employees used to go through a travel agency which offered an online portal to book flight and accommodations, but now with Soldo cards they get the flexibility to book directly the flight themselves and find a much cheaper option.

“We have a lot of clients, and our employees often travel abroad. Whether they’re working in the US or in Europe, if they need to book a hotel or plane ticket, they can´t wait for the expense to be approved – they need immediate access to finance”

Using Soldo cards and business expense platform, GIG easily manage requests and payments approval, reconcile expenses, while having all spending data recorded in real-time. The IT team is glad they don’t have to save receipts on Google drive anymore. Everything is centralised and safely stored in the Soldo platform. On top of that, Dillon has assigned specific roles within the platform, so department heads can access their respective dashboards and see how much was spent at any point of time – making it easier for them to manage their yearly budget.

“Once employees started using the Soldo mobile app, they were extremely satisfied. We received very positive feedback from our senior management as well.”

GiG is continuing its expansion and has recently acquired a new company in France – where they are already planning to deploy their new expense management solution. Indeed, since introducing Soldo in the company, Dillon says ‘Soldo makes life much more easier’.