How Unum modernized AP operations through crisis and innovation

A decade-long partnership turned a 75% staffing loss into an opportunity for growth

"OSV is an integral partner for my operations. It's important for me to make sure my lights stay on at Unum. Having OSV to help me make payments in an effective and efficient manner is crucial for our operations."

Walter Leinberger, Director of Procure-to-Pay Operations

When crisis strikes without warning

What happens when you lose 75% of your accounts payable team in a single month? For Walter and his team, this wasn’t a hypothetical scenario — it was their new reality.

The crisis unfolded rapidly. Two veteran AP specialists, each with 40 years of institutional knowledge, announced their retirements within weeks of one another. Then came the call no leader wants to receive: their third team member had fallen off a truck and suffered serious injuries. Suddenly, Unum's entire AP operation, responsible for keeping the lights on at a 10,000-employee insurance company, rested on the shoulders of one brand-new employee who'd been there less than a week.

“I actually would thank the new person every day for not quitting,” Walter recalls, “because the volumes that she had to manage.”

The pressure was relentless. But Unum had something many companies in crisis don't: a nearly decade-long partnership with OneSource Virtual for accounts payable services and invoice processing automation. When disaster struck, that relationship became a lifeline.

Beyond band-aids: built to last

The staffing emergency exposed a deeper truth: Unum's payment infrastructure was overdue for change. As a conservative insurance company, Unum had been slow about modernizing. Their antiquated ACH system couldn't provide the full remittance information suppliers increasingly needed. The result was mountains of paper checks that felt about as modern as a fax machine.

"Cutting checks, I mean, that's like 40 years old, right?" Walter notes. "That goes along with the fax machine."

When OSV approached Walter about AP Pay, the timing couldn't have been better. The accounts payable services solution enabled a complete transition from checks and limited ACH to modern electronic payments with full remittance information — exactly what suppliers needed in their increasingly digital operations.

“As we have more of a remote environment, especially after COVID, we didn’t have a lot of suppliers [who] didn’t have an AR department that was in-house to obtain those checks and take it to the bank,” Walter explains. “So, moving to this product allows us to get away from our antiquated ACH product and printing checks.”