A corporation’s connection to a bank is at the core of its operations. To be in business, you need to have a relationship with at least one bank and a solution for sending payments and receiving account information. Processes relating to cash outflows and inflows obviously need to be secure and run without interruptions. In addition, Treasury needs reliable and up-to-date data on transactions and account balances for accurate analyses, forecasts, and financial and business decisions. In short, all bank material needs to be pulled in.
Considering the critical importance of bank connectivity, surprisingly many corporations are still making do with online banking tools and manual processes for uploading and downloading data. This leads to a myriad of different web banks and security tokens and it can be almost impossible to keep track of who has which security token.
The different banks, and respectively the different interfaces in use can also at worst, create a lot of manual work sending payment files and gathering account balance data. If the process is automated but the integrations are hosted on-premise, the IT department and Treasury have to deal with a considerable maintenance burden to keep the solution up-to-date and operational.
The advantages of multibank connectivity can be best achieved when the bank connections are acquired as a service.
Read more about this in the SWIFT Compatible Application finder.
Valmet wanted to create consistent automated processes for payment management and reconciling and posting customer payments in its international Financial Service centers.