Published: January 01, 2000
In the wake of the global financial crisis, corporations and other businesses have heightened their focus on how to reduce risk, optimise working capital, and make financial processes more efficient and transparent. At Bank of America Merrill Lynch, our clients are helping us develop plans for global interoperability, and few things are as vital to this drive toward efficiency and connectivity as giving clients the latest and best technology.
One of the world’s largest financial institutions, Bank of America Merrill Lynch executes more than 70,000 transactions per day globally, in nearly 100 currencies and with an average daily notional volume of $70bn. Our online cash management systems have more than 500,000 users. That size and reach demands a strategic vision for not only cultivating innovative solutions but also collaborating with other companies to more quickly deliver technological advances to clients.
One building block of interoperability is payments. Historically, banks have offered a fragmented payment experience through legacy systems, forcing clients to use multiple screens with varying levels of functionality as they manage transactions.
Channel integration is a core element of our strategic payments vision. Our CashPro Online product converges the file access channel and the treasury management portal into a single payments management channel. Doing so brings file access into an environment of enriched capabilities, and simplifies the client’s end-to-end experience.
Using intuitive technology will enhance the payments process. Previous generation payments capabilities could be compared to using a standard postal service. Our new capabilities are more akin to high-end overnight shipping, which includes features such as real-time tracking. Such applications already are used in retail banking and now can demystify treasury management.
Strategic partnerships also are vital to bringing more innovation to clients, and this year we have actively engaged in relationships that ultimately provide the most valuable new technology. Defying the mindset that a bank must own every process, we have collaborated with such leading providers of payments solutions as First Data Corp. and Bottomline Technologies.
With First Data, the new Bank of America Merchant Services ultimately will process over one billion transactions per month – from credit, debit and prepaid cards to merchant loyalty, cheque and eCommerce payments. Bottomline will acquire our PayMode operations, bringing its experience with advanced invoice management workflow, global payment platforms and innovative cash management offerings.
But the real model for how banks can embrace innovation and boost efficiency for clients is CashPro Online – our next-generation online banking channel, shaped in part by a client Advisory Council. Along with collapsing several payment applications into one hub, CashPro Online will take an information reporting process that has been transaction-oriented and make it more business-oriented and strategic.
Treasurers and cash managers increasingly want an enriched reporting experience, which allows them to gain an enterprise-level view of information across multiple data marts. Banks should work to remove the burden of transactions from clients and let them analyse and use that information to make critical business decisions.
Clients also want to receive information through their delivery channel of choice. Such access is vital when workforces are dispersed and business is conducted nonstop around the globe. To meet that need, banks must move toward flexible information delivery that moulds to the workflow of individual employees while giving senior management a single strategic view.
Imagine being able to go beyond viewing numbers on a spreadsheet to organising data by map location or in other sophisticated ways based on business needs. Or having rich Internet applications with the ability to drag-and-drop information, enable forms to remember client information, and create real-time simulations and interactive charts.
Other client priorities include being able to deliver files in any format – a key objective for the Bank of America Merrill Lynch near-term payments strategy. The next year will bring enhancements that focus on supporting payments in multiple formats and languages for different currencies, enabling companies to accept, initiate and report on payments generated from virtually any file format.
Large banks traditionally have had a patchwork of separate silos as a result of mergers and acquisitions, and clients often waste time navigating different systems instead of focusing on their core business. Increasingly, a banking portal is a daily relationship – a frequent touch point that is critical for the client. Given that, we’ve worked aggressively to deliver a true end-to-end payment experience.
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