Foxtons slashes banking fees with Albany Solution

Foxtons Estate Agents has implemented Albany ePAY, the intelligent electronic payments and collections solution, from Albany Software. The solution is enabling Foxtons to process its 6,000 weekly transactions with Bacs directly, saving £50,000 per annum on banking fees.

Foxtons is London's leading estate agency and has in excess of 30 offices. It has a turnover in excess of £100 million and over 1,000 members of staff. After using a combination of separate systems to handle both its lettings client payments and corporate payments, Foxtons wanted to consolidate its transaction processing onto one system and save money on banking fees.

Gerard Nieslony, Foxtons Group Financial Controller, explains: "Before implementing Albany ePAY, we were processing transactions through a combination of different payment solutions making the process complex and costly."

After being notified that one of their software solutions was to be phased out, Foxtons decided that it was time to find a solution that could fulfil all the requirements of the business, both client and corporate.

Nieslony continues: "We thought it was time to take a fresh look and consider our options, which included looking at different suppliers. During the tender process, Albany stood out, both in terms of the usability and functionality of the ePAY solution, and in their consultative approach during the sales process. Compared to the other solutions we evaluated, ePAY wasn't over-engineered or overly complex. Albany also took care to respond to our brief and requirements and presented the solution that truly was appropriate for Foxtons."

Foxtons went live with the ePAY solution in September 2011. Since then the software has been used on a daily basis for all transactions, including lettings client payments as well as paying suppliers and staff through the monthly payroll.

Nieslony concludes: "Albany ePAY has enabled us to standardise both lettings client and corporate payments from a single central server, with one central administrator, delivering a much cleaner and neater way of dealing with our transactions. Albany ePAY is straightforward, user friendly, and performs a very simple function efficiently, without all the complicated bells and whistles which slowed down other offerings on the market. The implementation went very smoothly and any support queries have been resolved quickly and efficiently."