Article One Partners: Crowdsourcing Payments

Article One PartnersGlobal Payment Engine Helps Efficiently Fund Patent Research Worldwide

Article One Partners, a leading global patent research organization, uses Tipalti to:

• Make global payments via a variety of methods and streamline the international payment process, saving significant time and reducing costs by eliminating manual data entry.
• Achieve greater scalability, enabling the company to expand its global Researcher network and offer a wide variety of payment options.
• Improve Researcher community satisfaction by offering payments in local currency and significantly reducing payee paperwork.

The Challenge

Article One Partners offers a cutting-edge patent research platform that applies the power of crowdsourcing to strengthen the quality of legitimate patents and reduce unjust patent monopolies with validity evidence. The company works with hundreds of Researchers—located from Texas to India—who are engaged in supplying this vital evidence.

The company compensates its Researchers for their efforts, paying up to $5,000 for premier evidence and routinely disbursing smaller sums. All told, the company has paid millions of dollars to its active Researchers worldwide, some of whom voluntarily work with the company on a full-time basis. As the company grew, it ran into a volume problem of its own: With the addition of Researchers around the world, the payment process became increasingly time consuming and burdensome.

The company needed an efficient way to make mass payments on a global scale, comply with a variety of local tax and reporting regulations and process massive amounts of payment-related paperwork. Article One Partners values its Researcher community, so the company also needed a way to streamline payee paperwork requirements and offer its Researchers a range of payment methods as well as multiple currency options.

The Solution

Article One Partners found its ideal crowdsourcing payment solution with Tipalti, a SaaS solution that makes mass payments a snap. With Tipalti, Article One Partners found a flexible, automated payment engine that was deployed by embedding a few lines of HTML on the company website. With Tipalti, Article One Partners significantly reduced processing costs and labor requirements by eliminating hours of manual data entry.

Researchers register and choose their preferred payment method. When Article One Partners uploads payment files, Tipalti automatically verifies payee information, performs cross-checks against government blacklists and helps ensure compliance with payment regulations worldwide. Tipalti streamlines and automates the entire payment process – from payee registration through funds disbursement and tax compliance.

Tipalti disburses the funds in the Researcher’s method and currency of choice dramatically reducing the amount of paperwork Researchers complete. This provides Article One Partners with a competitive advantage, encouraging Researchers from around the globe to partner with the company.

“Our Researcher community really appreciates the reduction in paperwork and the increase in available payment methods,” said Eric Baer, Vice President, Product and Technology at Article One Partners. “Internally, we’re extremely happy with Tipalti’s service because it has significantly streamlined the payment process, and it has made us much more scalable: We’re a growing company, and now we can expand and scale operations more quickly with a simple, effective global mass payment solution.”

The service Article One Partners provides is essential to supporting patent quality worldwide. Thanks to Tipalti, the company can now focus on helping its growing list of public and private sector clients foster innovation while efficiently managing rewards for the global team of Researchers who are essential to its success.