This is the first in a series of posts to explore the use cases for Corporate-to-Bank Integration Platforms across corporate Treasury & Finance.
If you’re tasked with managing the corporate banking environments on behalf of your organisation, you already have a lot to think about.
Each bank has its own set of standards and formats to follow for processing payments, financial messages and statements.
This complexity is typically compounded further by disjointed back-office infrastructures, where payment file processing and approvals, reconciliation and forecasting all take place.
Sound familiar?
Common challenges for multi-banked corporates
The ability to access multiple banks’ services can bring considerable advantage; but the need to access and integrate multiple banking systems can be costly and resource-intensive.
According to SWIFT, this adds complexity and potential risk into companies’ financial processes, including:
- The need to support different security protocols reduces transparency and makes it difficult to comply with audit requirements
- Fragmented data and inconsistent content from banks restricts a timely, accurate view of cash and risk across the business
- Payment processes and formats often differ between banks, with the risk of error, omission, and payment failure
- Inconsistency in formats and processes makes it difficult to automate activities such as bank account reconciliation, reducing treasury and finance efficiency
- Adding or changing banking partners can be costly and time-consuming, so companies effectively become ‘tied’ to their incumbent banks. This impacts on treasurers’ ability to support the evolving business requirements and has serious risk management implications
The role of Corporate-to-Bank Integration
Step in the integrator. Technology providers and FinTechs like AccessPay are at the forefront of the concept of Corporate-to-Bank integration: the idea that businesses financial data should flow seamlessly and securely between bank and corporate back-office.
Corporate-to-Bank Integration platforms are not a “luxury” technology, nor are they a novelty. They represent a new dawn for financial management and a future where this management can be acquired with such sophistication that they have the potential to not only transform job roles, but the long-term outlook for entire organisations.
By consolidating and integrating bank account visibility and functionality with the corporate back-office infrastructure, treasurers quickly become freshly armed with a whole inventory of new, value-adding capabilities:
- Automated transformation of bank files and financial messages,
- Orchestrate payments, reconciliation and cash management workflows between individual banks and back-office systems in one central platform
- Significantly reduce manual dependency and risks associated with multi-bank finance and treasury operations.
- Adding or removing banking partners from the operating model is easily standardised and ensures minimum disruption to teams and internal resources
With little-to-no IT development required to use platforms like ours, file formats can be mapped from any bank and transformed into a data output format that can be consumed by any ERP, TMS or back-office system.
In turn, this makes it far easier to identify risks and fraudulent activity across the banking network, with all files and transactions going through one platform.
Without clear integration between banks and back-office systems, finance and treasury teams are often forced to work within complex spreadsheets to manage daily positioning, deliver forecasts and reconcile statements versus ledgers.
Teams investing in corporate-to-bank integration have reported time savings of over 80% and can deliver mission-critical insights on cash and liquidity faster.
Read the eBook: 7 Reasons for Change in Finance & Treasury to start building your internal business case for a Corporate-to-Bank Integration Platform.