How Rakuten Collected 1.25 Billion with Kolleno

Rakuten is a global technology group serving billions of members worldwide, with businesses spanning e-commerce, fintech, digital content, and more. Since its founding in Japan, it has grown into one of the world’s largest internet companies, connecting millions of shoppers with the brands they love.

Petro Pillati is the credit and collections manager at Rakuten Rewards, the group’s cash-back business that gives members money back when they shop with their favorite brands. Since 1999, Rakuten Rewards has paid its members more than $4.6 billion in Cash Back, partnering with thousands of top brands across apparel, beauty, grocery, travel, and dining. Behind that scale sits a demanding credit and collections operation. Petro has led it for three years, running accounts receivable across a portfolio of merchants in the Americas and the UK, where his job is a constant balancing act: assessing each customer’s creditworthiness, keeping payments on time, and protecting the relationships on both sides.

As Rakuten grew, the tools behind the credit and collections team started to strain. What worked at a smaller scale could not keep up with more than 4,000 customers generating thousands of invoices.

The core problem was that information lived everywhere at once. Credit data sat in one system, billing sat in the ERP, and dunning ran through its own tool with none of them connected. Making a single decision meant moving between five different systems, clicking through screen after screen, and pulling everything into Excel to combine it by hand. At this volume, even keeping accurate notes at the invoice level was close to impossible.

All of that came at a cost. The team could reach the right answer, but it took too long. Credit approvals waited while notes and assessments were gathered from separate places, and risk often went unnoticed until an account had already aged 90 or 100 days. None of this was a skills gap. It was a visibility gap, created by tools that each held part of the story and never connected.

Kolleno gave the team one place to work. Credit data, aging, notes, and customer communications now sit together, arranged the way the team wants to see them. No more logging into system after system to piece an answer together.
What made it fit was the partnership behind it. From the first conversations, Petro was working directly with Kolleno’s engineers, not just the sales team. They customized the platform to fit Rakuten’s business, building the exact reports, fields, and view the team needed. The credit approval bottleneck disappeared, with notes and assessments now sitting side by side on one screen.

The same visibility changed how the team chases payments. Because every account’s full history sits in one place, the portfolio can be segmented by risk, region, and other parameters, each with its own automated reminder sequence. Strategic accounts are handled gently, while higher risk accounts are followed up more closely. Behind these workflows sits a single policy that defines how each group is treated, so the team stays aligned while the system handles the details. And if an account’s risk level changes, the workflow adjusts automatically.

Once the team could see everything in one place, the results followed. Since go-live, Rakuten has collected $1.25 billion, with 92% of all overdue invoices paid. Balances that once would have been written off now get collected.

That kind of result takes constant follow-up on every account, and automation is what makes it possible at scale. That is why around 73% of all outbound communications now go out automatically through Kolleno, keeping accounts moving without anyone lifting a finger. That follow-up does real work, with 1,720 invoices settled after a Kolleno chase. It also shows up in speed, as half of all invoices are now paid within 27 days of issue.

The bigger change is how the team spends its time. Around 90% of the team’s daily work now happens in one place, inside Kolleno. With the full picture of an account on a single screen, the team catches risk earlier instead of spotting it once an account has already aged. At the same time, the routine work of chasing, note taking, and follow-ups largely runs on its own, freeing the team to focus on the accounts and decisions that need real judgment. Less time goes to the mechanics of collections and more goes to the customers behind them.