PayFit interviewed Product Manager Mehdi Soliman and Mindee CEO Jonathan Grandperrin about the partnership behind this development. We thank PayFit for the interview content. You can find the original, in French, here.

Can you introduce your companies?

MS: Payfit was launched in 2016 with the ambition of making payroll and human resources management easier for European small- and medium-sized businesses, thanks to our unique technology. Four years later, we assist more than 3500 startups and SMBs in Europe in the digital transformation of their human resources. One essential mission drives our 450 collaborators: saving time for focusing on the essential, the human.

JG: Mindee was created a little later, in 2018, and today has 20 employees. Our goal is to offer all software developers solutions for intelligent document reading in order to optimize manual data entry, which is often cumbersome for users. We offer these solutions as a technology brick available through cloud APIs, which interface very easily with software.

Why did you choose this partnership?

MS: We benchmarked different OCR solutions, and after an initial selection, we tested each of them against our needs. Mindee was the best solution in terms of rapidity, efficiency, and reliability. We also took care to choose a solution that respected GDPR, with attention to keeping data confidential.

How did this partnership start?

JG: We were contacted in November and provided a test space so that Mehdi and his team could test our solution. We were delighted to be working with PayFit, which is a French success story. For us, it’s essential and strategic to work with French startups, which contributes to visibility and gives us access to a larger user base.

For each of you, what are the next steps in your company growth?

MS: PayFit has several challenges to meet in 2020:

• Continue to improve our product in all countries where PayFit is present, as we do today with the expense report module
• Recruit 250 people in France and internationally
• Launch PayFit in the Italian market

JG: Our goal for Mindee is to extend the range of applications for our technology, and to pursue development of our product catalog. There are multiple use cases we can manage, like accounts payable management, KYC, and others.

You mention other use cases, but why did Mindee start with expense reports?

JG: We chose to start off by working on the most complicated document. From a technical point of view, the expense report is the most complex document to dematerialize. The photo is often bad because it was taken in a restaurant and is blurry, or the paper is crinkled.

From a business perspective, today there is no independent technology provider focused solely on providing a high-performance solution for data extraction. Most existing solutions are from HRIS competitors. Optical character recognition (OCR) is a technology used by most of these providers and the expense report is a good entry point to this market.

Why did PayFit choose an OCR solution for its expense report module?

MS: PayFit wants to simplify human resource management in European SMBs, allowing them to gain time thanks to a rapid and reliable solution. Integrating OCR with our module means that an expense report can be added 5 times faster. It was therefore necessary and relevant to do it.

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