CaptivateIQ allows Fitch Solutions, a large global enterprise organization, to maintain control over its compensation process and manage commission spend more effectively. Unlike other commission solutions, CaptivateIQ “doesn’t require an entire army” to administer, putting Fitch Solutions’ Head of Incentives in the driver’s seat. The platform has been an enormous time saver – saving the team a full day per week, and unlocking capacity to analyze commission spend.

The Hero

Katerina George is the Head of Incentives and Controls at Fitch Solutions. Fitch Solutions is a global leader in providing powerful analytics, data and research to inform credit risk and strategy decisions.

Katerina is part of the Finance team at Fitch Solutions and heads up all of the commission work, managing data cleanliness, calculations, payouts, and inquiry resolution. She’s responsible for the commission interactions between sales reps at the micro and macro levels – from top to bottom. For 140+ reps. 

To manage her workload, Katerina relies on the help of CaptivateIQ.

[QUOTE 
| quote: CaptivateIQ will make your life a lot easier. Who doesn't want that?
| name: Katerina George
| title: Head of Incentives and Controls at Fitch Solutions
|]

The Challenge

A distant memory.

That’s how Katerina described the pre-CaptivateIQ days.

100% manual. 100% Excel spreadsheets. Many (many) formulas, calculations, and lookups... followed by checks (and rechecks and reREchecks).

Pay is important, and paranoia sets in.

To quell her anxieties, Katerina configured her spreadsheets with “belts and braces” to verify the accuracy of her calculations. 

As Fitch Solutions acquired several companies and the team grew, this entire process became unwieldy to manage. A few areas became especially painful.

Information Dissemination and Inquiry Management

Information dissemination was very tricky, “horribly manual, and a bit of a nightmare,” as Katerina described it. 

Fitch Solutions is a global team (with as many as 20 teams),  so the number of statements manually sent out became unmanageable. Even more of a challenge was what happened next.

Once I hit send, I would hold my breath and wait for emails and feedback to arrive – the barrage of emails.

On top of that, Katerina worried the reps did not actually get the necessary information. She would send out reports and comp plan documents via email and not know (a) if they were delivered, (b) if they were opened/read by the rep, or (c) if reps understood the information in them.

Historical Data Tracking (Audit-ability)

Another challenge came in the form of change logs. Each and every change in Excel had to be manually notated – the what and the why.

If I changed anything in Excel, I'd have to make a note about what I've done. I’d put little notes in each cell tracking the updates.

For an enterprise organization with strict compliance regulations, this process was not scalable.

Lack of Rep Transparency

The most critical challenge Fitch Solutions faced though was the lack of rep transparency. Simply put, the lack of transparency created issues with controlling commission spend.

The team experienced instances where reps claimed they were “unaware” of incentive structures. This resulted in a tricky place for management – should they offer leniency because the rep did not know, or enforce the planned payout structure? Without a way to verify that reps understood the structure of their commission plans, the company felt pressured to adjust payouts.

The Solution

As the volume of new hires at Fitch Solutions continued to increase, it became more and more challenging to manage and administer commissions in Excel. They needed a platform that could manage their growth.

We looked at another well-known vendor. They would build our plans out for us, but there was a lot of knowledge I had to acquire just to administer it on an elementary level.

She didn’t have time to invest in learning the tool. And the proprietary language needed to manage that tool was viewed as a risk, creating a dependency on the people that were trained to use it.

What we didn't want was to have an army of IT people propping up our solution, or needing proprietary knowledge to manage it.

CaptivateIQ did not require learning a new language, and the ease of back-end administration was appealing to Fitch’s lean comp team.

CaptivateIQ is a beautifully streamlined solution. Excel is not a proprietary language - there are a number of people that can understand it. It's not going to be a mystery box if somebody on our team walks off.

The Results

CaptivateIQ provided Fitch Solutions with precisely what they needed.

Once implemented, reps gained full visibility into their comp plans and reports. While this was great for the reps, it was also a massive help for Katerina. She is now able to maintain control over the entire commissions process. She has the assurance reps can see and understand their comp plans and statements. She knows when reps have viewed their reports. If they need help understanding something, contacting Katerina directly through CaptivateIQ is a simple, streamlined process. 

With CaptivateIQ, everything is in one place and it's self-service for the rep; they can go in and see their pay, and contact me directly with questions.

Approval workflows require reps to approve their statements – so no one can claim, “I didn't know”. In Katerina’s words, CaptivateIQ “eliminated gray areas” where the company might otherwise have to consider compensating payees differently than expected.

Katerina estimates the time saved using CaptivateIQ is about one day per week.

What does she do with this “bonus” time?

She can now focus on higher value tasks – analyses & reporting to more effectively manage commission spend.

CaptivateIQ has condensed my workload to a manageable level. It’s freed up my time considerably to do other value-add tasks. I’m now able to make more informed decisions around commission payouts & manage commission spend better.

With CaptivateIQ, Katerina can efficiently administer commissions at scale, and keep Fitch Solutions’ commission spend under control.