FLOOR TO OUR MERCHANTS: TXT GROUP

Martina Furini TXT
Martina Furini
Chief Financial Officer, TXT Group
From a small bookshop in Ferrara to a leading player in the distribution of school books: the story of TXT seems like a true entrepreneurial fairy tale: who are its main characters?

The main character of this story is Mauro Padovani, founder and CEO at TXT Group. Thanks to his vision, a completely new business was created: with a team of ambitious, strongly customer-oriented co-workers, he managed to bring school books sales into large-scale distribution.

For over 20 years you have been a reference point in Italy’s publishing sector: TXT is a major player for both large-scale distribution and the retail channel in the educational segment. In addition to this, your offer gradually got even richer…

The desire to take on new challenges has led our management to always invest in research and development, to set up technological solutions aimed at a continuous improvement of our services. Among these, one of the most successful ones is certainly our patent for automatic, custom and 100% recyclable book cover services. Moreover, in 2015 we began setting up different start-ups in the digital field, a truly key sector today.

Your company has been able to constantly innovate itself: how important are digital transformation and the online channel for your business?

They both have enormous importance to us: for this very reason, we do have our own Information Technology department, which allows us to work with internally developed applications. For a long while already, orders have been placed via our own web portal: with time, its usage has been extended to all market channels served by TXT.  As far as school books distribution is concerned, we can say that we managed to truly revolutionise order management, thanks to our focus on technology and digitization.

Have Covid-19 emergency, lockdown and the pandemic we are still dealing with had an impact on your business?

We have suffered the impact of the pandemic at organizational level, primarily as we had to adapt all our production processes to Covid-19 safety protocols. However, although 2020 was a particularly challenging year, we did not register a decline in revenue. Certainly, the fact that we already operated online as a business has avoided significant disruption: even if working from home, we have managed to carry out our activities as normal and bring our projects forward with a strong team spirit!

What are the cornerstones of your strategy, also in light of these recent events?

Innovation and digitization definitely belong to our key cornerstones, and so is a customer-centric approach. Our main objective is to streamline every single operation and interaction, within a process of continuous improvement of our services.

As a B2B market player, how important are payment-related aspects and activities at TXT?

Payments are a key element and even within B2B sales, their efficiency is essential not only to customer satisfaction and trust, but also to service quality and competitivity of a business. Our sector is still in the very early stages of digitisation. However, even if customers are not so digitally savvy, they are extremely demanding when it comes to order delivery times: this is why digitizing payments and adopting solutions that are in line with customer needs, is no longer optional.

Why did you decide to use MyBank and how did it respond to your needs?

We decided to switch to MyBank solution exactly because we were looking for a payment tool that could speed up our order management processes. We have entered the retail channel a few years ago and this market channel is particularly demanding in terms of delivery times.

Prior to MyBank adoption, traditional bank wire transfers were the mostly used payment method: to be sure that a payment had been successfully made by the customer, we had to wait for the funds to be actually transferred and available on our account. Only at that point we were able to release and process the order: we were bound to the typical timings of traditional wire transfers while dealing with the seasonal business of school books sales, where even a delay of only one or two days makes a difference.

Obviously, this method was not efficient for us and customers themselves started asking for alternative tools. At our end, we needed to speed up processes and, at the same time, have certainty of payment collection: we found a valuable and effective solution in MyBank.

How is MyBank payment solution offered to TXT customers?

MyBank has been integrated in the reserved area of our website, which is called MyTXT. Customers have their individual login credentials to make book orders and payments, as well as to monitor their order shipment tracking. Therefore, MyBank was added to our internally-created Professional Reserved Area accessed by book shops and included in the check-out with a dedicated payment button.

What results have you achieved with MyBank?

MyBank proved to be a valuable tool that, on one hand, eliminated any delays linked to payment processing times and, on the other hand, automated our processes: previously, a dedicated operator had to check and confirm payment receipt as well as update order information on our system: all this now happens automatically.

With MyBank, order release and processing are immediate, which has greatly improved customer satisfaction. In addition to this, thanks to its irrevocable transaction with real-time confirmation, MyBank provides certainty of payment, which streamlines our daily activities and makes demanding manual tasks no longer necessary.

MyBank provides real-time payment confirmation as well as 100% automatic reconciliation.
How do these features facilitate your collection processes?

Today, process automation is vital even when it comes to administrative tasks: we very much value this aspect because we tangibly saw the significant improvement it provides. Automatic reconciliation of MyBank payments allows us to minimise manual duties and lets our team focus on activities with a greater added value compared to data entry and monitoring.

3 Jun 2021

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