How Hugo Scaled High-Stakes Verification Offshore – Without Sacrificing Speed or Accuracy

The Client

The Client is a UK-based fintech providing embedded finance and invoice funding to the recruitment and contracting sector – helping staffing agencies pay contractors before their own customers have paid them.

Every funding decision rests on verification: are the timesheets real, the approvers authorized, the contract terms valid, the supplier legitimate? Get it wrong, and the Client risks funding fraud or bad credit. Get it slow, and funding stalls.

As the business grew, verification became a natural candidate for its first offshore move. As the Client’s Chief People Officer put it, the aim was to streamline and drive efficiencies rather than keep onshore headcount doing administrative tasks. Hugo was one of two providers the Client engaged seriously, and won the work on responsiveness and a track record in fintech-adjacent back-office verification.

Partnership at a Glance

• Operational Scope: Six back-office verification workflows – Invoice Evidence Review, Timesheet
• Evidence Review, Timesheet Authorizer Verification, Master Terms Verification, Supplier Validation, and Assignment Verification
• Stakes: Verification gates whether the Client releases funding,  making the work a critical fraud and credit-risk control
• Team: A dedicated team of 10 agents plus a team lead
• Volume: ~1,200–1,800 invoices a month
• Speed: 100% of tasks processed within a 4-working-hour SLA
• Accuracy: >98% overall, 100% on high-risk cases
• Significance: The Client’s first offshore initiative – a proof of concept for offshoring more of the business

The Challenge

The Client came to Hugo for capacity: growth had pushed the verification queue past what the onshore team could carry, and leadership wanted that work off onshore headcount. But capacity was the surface of it.

• Accuracy was the real test: Each task decides whether real money moves. A missed digit or a mismatched email domain releases funding that shouldn’t move, or blocks funding that should. As the Client’s first offshore engagement, the whole arrangement was an open question: could an offshore team hold the accuracy that an onshore team held?
• Speed couldn’t be traded for it: Funding flows depend on fast turnaround. Verification carries a 4-hour SLA, so accuracy had to hold at speed.
• The work wears people down: Reading documents and numbers for hours and getting every one right is draining, and fatigue is its own risk to both quality and retention.

The Solution

Hugo’s response was to build a stable team, invest in structured training, and enable cross-workflow rotation, creating resilience without relying on constant churn.

Staffing: from flex to fixed

Hugo and the Client shared one goal: cover monthly volume peaks without letting accuracy slip. The Client valued flexibility; Hugo’s experience showed that a stable core team could deliver the coverage needed without sacrificing quality. Together, they built a team sized to absorb the peaks,  a model that matured into a fixed team of ten plus a team lead, with accuracy remaining strong as volumes shifted.

New agents train across all six workflows simultaneously through guided walkthroughs, shadowing, reverse-shadowing in the live queue, and knowledge-based tests to confirm readiness. The first cohort scored 100% on the core Invoice and Timesheet reviews, with agents becoming inbox-ready in roughly three to four weeks.

Multi-Workflow Operations

Hugo runs six verification workflows under a consistent process: gather the evidence, check it against the Client’s platform and rules, then approve or reject.

• Invoice & Timesheet Evidence Review: The highest-volume workflows, together accounting for 65–85% of weekly work.
• Timesheet Authorizer Verification: Confirming the person approving the work is authorized.
  Master Terms Verification: Checking contract terms, handled by the most senior agents.
• Supplier Validation: Confirming supplier legitimacy.
• Assignment Verification: Validating the placement itself.

The work is entirely asynchronous, with no live customer contact, and runs against a 4-hour SLA across every task type.

The Quality System

The Client owns final QA: their reviewers audit Hugo’s completed work. That raised the stakes on catching errors before they reached the Client’s review, so Hugo built pre-emptive quality controls around the process.

During improvement periods, Hugo rotated lower-performing agents into supervised peer audits, having them review colleagues’ work rather than sit on the live queue. It did two things at once: pulled the highest-risk agents off the front line and sharpened their error awareness by making them hunt for the exact mistakes they’d been making. Bottom performers on a structured improvement plan moved from around 88% to 97%.

Alongside that, the team lead provides additional QA coverage, high-risk cases are flagged pre-emptively, and each week the team reviews difficult edge cases to build cheat sheets that keep those decisions consistent.

The Results

What began as a test of whether high-stakes verification could be delivered offshore became a proven operating model.

• 98%+ overall accuracy: Accuracy climbed from near 80% to above 98%, reaching 100% on high-risk cases, while error volume fell by roughly 75%.
• 100% SLA attainment: Every task was completed within the 4-working-hour SLA, including during peak periods.
• 4–5-minute median handling time: Processing time reached the Client’s target without sacrificing accuracy.
• A stable model that holds: What began as a volatile, flexed staffing arrangement matured into a fixed team that absorbs monthly peaks while protecting continuity and quality.

Conclusion

The Client’s first offshore bet was on work most companies keep close: the checks that decide whether their money moves. The capacity was never really in doubt – the accuracy was. Hugo answered it with 98%+ accuracy at SLA speed, tracing every error to its cause, and building the quality controls that keep mistakes from reaching the Client’s review. That’s what turns a pilot into a blueprint for offshoring the next function.

“Hugo has shown us that offshoring doesn’t mean compromising on quality or control. They’ve built a reliable team that consistently meets our SLA and has become a trusted extension of our operation. What began as a pilot is now a model we have confidence in.”

— Chief People Officer, the Client