KlarisIP Delivers Speed and Compliance While Lowering Costs for National Geographic

HQ New York
Customer Since 2017

Industry Business Services

• National Geographic outsourced its 19-person rights and clearances department to KlarisIP
• Firm delivers 30% cost reduction for contributed content to National Geographic
• Time to onboard content contributors reduced from 100 days to two weeks

KlarisIP is a firm that’s dedicated to helping companies acquire, use, and monetize content for publication. This involves clearing the rights and making payments to people all around the world for their content, which can be photographs, videos, music, or articles.

One of the firm’s first clients is National Geographic. As Ed Klaris sees it, “The use of content is exploding at places like National Geographic, but the desire to cut down on costs is equally important for these enterprises.”

Outsourcing the workload of securing rights and payments for content is a smart move for National Geographic because it’s not a core competency of the media giant, but it’s an essential component to the business. This includes onboarding people from all over the world in order to make payments to them in a tax-complaint manner. According to Klaris, first initially trying to approach this process manually was a hardship for everyone involved.

Using the client’s vendor onboarding systems was very slow, and the onboarding process would take upwards of 100 days to go through all the forms and get people set up. We were getting a lot of complaints from people who wanted to be paid. We saw a tremendous opportunity [for] increasing the speed of payables operations while reducing costs.

Jill Durkin, ImaginAb’s Controller,To scale onboarding and payment operations as a service, KlarisIP needed a robust solution for paying thousands of people worldwide, and the firm met this challenge with Tipalti. Says Klaris, “People need to be paid in many different currencies and [using different] methods. There was no way we were going to go into the business of cutting ACH payments, and wire payments, and check payments, and any of several payment options both domestically and internationally without a robust platform. Tipalti stepped in with an excellent solution, which we would really ultimately never have been able to do manually.”

The payoff for working with KlarisIP has been significant for National Geographic. “We replaced what was a 19-person department at National Geographic handling intellectual property management and payables, and we’re able to guarantee a 30% savings on the total cost of running an operation like that, while at the same time improving the service levels dramatically,” says Klaris.

For the creative folks providing great content to National Geographic, the process for onboarding and getting paid has been radically simplified and accelerated via a self-service portal for establishing tax-compliance and payment methods.

In a world where you’ve got thousands of small vendors, you want an efficient way to get people onboard and paid. We turned what was a 100-day turnaround to get people paid to a two-week turnaround.

Moving forward, KlarisIP has a unique and significant service offering for the content supply chain. Whether it’s the photograph, video, television show, or movie that’s moving through the chain from production to distribution, the rights associated with it will involve someone getting paid. For KlarisIP, managing the content supply chain as well as payments gives the firm an end-to-end service offering that is unique and a competitive advantage. “We can now not only provide a world-class service to National Geographic and its contributors, but we have the capacity to pay worldwide in just about any currency, by any means, so any company sourcing content worldwide can take advantage of our expertise and managed services,” says Klaris.

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