Peek Eliminates Thousands of Hours from Payments Workload with Tipalti

• Eliminated 110 hours per week spent on payments across a team of 4
• Increased partner satisfaction during onboarding and ongoing compliance and payments tracking
• Improved support team SLAs on all finance-related inquiries

HQ San Francisco, CA
Customer Since 2017
Industry Online Marketplace

With 195 countries in the world, Peek helps its customers discover and book amazing adventures. Fueled by wanderlust, they’re dedicated to “connecting the world through experiences.”

With the combination of the Peek.com marketplace and Peek Pro, a suite of software tools, Peek is more than just reservations. The robust platform empowers its activity and tour operating partners to manage and grow their businesses by offering multiple solutions, including booking, marketing, reporting, and payments.

For Sara King Brar, Accounting Manager at Peek, “connecting the world through experiences” was only feasible if they fixed their broken payments process.

“Our old system was difficult to manage. Only the finance team had complete access, and the reporting on the partner-facing side was lackluster. Partners couldn’t tell when their payments were sent to them, which is a very basic need.”

With a local finance team of three and an outsourced team in India, Peek was managing 30,000+ invoices per month and processing daily payouts to over 4,000 partners.

“We’re payments focused—we collect on behalf of customers booking tours, and then remit those payments immediately back to our tour operator partners.”

But for Brar, the manual process and constant support issues were creating a bottleneck in the business—she was spending too much time on payments.

“20% of support volume was payments-related questions which all went through me. We needed a platform that could make the experience better for our partners and our internal finance team.”

The solution? Tipalti.

“Before, there was nothing that made our partners feel secure with their payments information. Now, with the Tipalti onboard-ing flow, our partners handle their own onboarding—there’s an automatic check built-in for tax compliance, banking details, and business address. They manage everything on their own.”

Plus, the finance team was able to reap the rewards of an automated process.

“Our team in India was spending 6 hours a day on the payouts process. With Tipalti, they’ve cut that down to 30 minutes.”

Now, Brar’s two main payments challenges were fixed—the finance team was gaining back valuable time and Peek’s partner relationships were thriving. As Brar states, “From our partner’s point of view, it is part of our product to receive payments in a timely manner. With Tipalti, payment issues have significantly decreased—support is now able to meet their SLAs.”

And for Brar, the personal benefits were significant.

“Having payments off my plate frees me up to focus on strategic accounting, especially as the company grows.”

So what’s the future for Peek? According to Brar, it’s going global and further enabling their partners to create memories that will last a lifetime.

“Our customers are mom-and-pop shops whose passion projects turned into businesses. We want to do everything we can to make their lives easier. We don’t want them to worry about payments—we want them to spend their time exploring the cities that they love.”

And for payments?

“As we continue to expand internationally, I know Tipalti will have our back.”