The challenge

Herbalife was seeking to streamline its sales collections (both online and offline) by providing its customers with a seamless, real-time transaction journey. Herbalife wanted to reduce the potential risks associated with the point of sale, such as physical cash handling and manual data entry into its systems. Herbalife also wanted to automate the onboarding process for associates and streamline the pay-out process for incentives.

The solution

DBS partnered with Herbalife to digitise its sales collections process and automate the onboarding process for its staff, providing a streamlined process for pay-outs of incentives.

Online collections through Herbalife’s portal using UPI, powered by APIs. Herbalife’s key objective is to embrace new-age digital solutions and reduce the costs of collections for online sales through its portal by utilising features including:

• Direct integration with the bank, for a seamless user experience for online UPI collections.
• Expand the range of digital collection tools that consumers can use to make payments.
• Reduce the sales fulfilment time from four hours to 15 minutes.
• Enable real-time fulfilment of online sales by leveraging APIs.
• Contactless collection solutions at point of sale (POS) using dynamic QR codes and APIs.

DBS proposed digitising the collections process at stores by generating a dynamic QR code on the POS terminal. At the POS, the customer scans the QR code with his or her mobile banking app and makes the payment via UPI, an instant payment gateway in India that facilitates inter-bank transactions. A real-time API credit confirmation message is then triggered and sent to Herbalife through the POS terminal to notify it of the successful payment.

This solution has helped Herbalife to achieve its key objectives, of reducing risks and lowering the operational cost of physical cash collections while improving the customer experience at brick-and-mortar stores.

The solution:

• Digitises the collections and fulfilment process for sales done at stores.
• Manages risk and prevents fraud by avoiding cash transactions.
• Increases sales by improving the client experience at the point of sale.

The solution also incorporates an automated onboarding process and digitisation of payments to staff, and digitisation of payment to associates by automatic confirmation of bank account details through penny testing using APIs.

Best practice and innovation

The solution demonstrates innovation and best practices, which were developed while designing and delivering the solutions.

The bank and Herbalife engaged in a digital bootcamp to discover Herbalife’s existing business processes. The parties used a consultative approach to identify risks and inefficiencies in business processes, to improve customer journeys for Herbalife.

They established the digital DNA for the initiative by collaborating with multiple functions within Herbalife, including treasury, business, audit, legal and technology, right from the planning stage.

Key benefits

• On-line collections.
  • Reduced costs by more than 70%.
• Contactless collection solutions at POS using dynamic QR code and APIs.
  • Reduced costs by about 30% and enabled Herbalife to continue business operations during COVID-19 through contactless payments.
  • Improved risk management and control.
  • Prevented fraud.
  • Improved the efficiency of sales fulfilment.
  • Reduced manual effort.

“Herbalife and DBS share the same ethos and DNA, which is to embrace and deliver digital solutions that make a difference. The original engagement started as a simple cheque issuance project and has gradually grown into a multi-layered contactless digital solution across our online and offline channels. Movement from traditional modes of payments such as cheques to digital, real-time alternatives is a vision that DBS and Herbalife share, and we are happy to have made significant progress on that front,” says Vivek MP, Director Finance.

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