Payment tracking across the SWIFT payment network is easy compared to making grant payments and support payments to the various governments, companies, and the huge number of very different parties world-wide that charities and Non-Governmental Organisations have to send and manage payments to. 

Sunlight Payments claim they have built a payments platform that will:

• enhance donor confidence in grant programs and use of those funds in order to encourage increased donations
• provide tracking and attribution across these payment distribution chains
• prevent and detect fraud schemes across a library of over 40 procurement schemes and attributes using algorithmic approaches
• provide our customers with the tools they need to identify trusted, reliable vendors; and
• reduce overall costs through an optimization of bank and foreign exchange fees and standardized donor reporting.

Sunlight Payments is backed by an investment from Bill Gates, and uses Bank of America Merrill Lynch as its

financial services provider.

Succssfully tested

Sunlight Payments successfully tested their new platform with Pathfinder International, a women’s reproductive health non-governmental organization (NGO) working in 19 countries, which was selected as the pilot customer for the test because of their existing strong accounting systems. Sunlight Payments and Pathfinder International used the new platform to move monies from the NGO’s U.S. office in Watertown, MA to country offices in Tanzania and Uganda. Unlike traditional paper payment methods, the pilot electronically tracked the follow-on payments down the distribution chain to vendors and partners in local communities in each country. This approach allowed Pathfinder staff to have visibility into payments across all parties. Those participating in the pilot moved monies between the Sunlight platform and their bank accounts, in the currency of their choice.

Platform development and impact

Sunlight Payments assembled a team of payment, fraud detection and distributed systems experts from KPMG, Deloitte, and Amazon to deliver this first test platform. “Over the past two years this world-class team developed a solution that will revolutionize the way payments are distributed to provide essential services in the field,” said Sunlight Payments CTO Eric Merritt.

The Sunlight Payments system provides:

• transparency tracking and attribution across payment distribution chains;
• prevention and detection of fraud across an extensive library of over 40 procurement fraud schemes and attributes;
• tools for identifying trusted, reliable vendors; and
• cost reductions achieved through an optimization of bank and foreign exchange fees.

Pathfinder’s use of the new platform allowed it to reduce the total burden of processing the payments for the grant program while increasing visibility into the transaction process.

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CTMfile take: The key is to “have visibility into payments across all parties”. This is not easy across so many different parties, systems and schemes.