In times when finance and treasury teams increasingly work from home, digital and paperless processes become more important than ever before. This is equally true for bank account management. Banks increasingly offer electronic messaging to digitise and accelerate processes, however, usually this is only realised on a bilateral level with individual clients.
In a joint project with Serrala, a global financial automation and B2B payments software company, REWE Group, together with ING, managed to realise a fully standardised electronic messaging which enables it to digitally interact with multiple banks. To this end, REWE Group implemented the Serrala solution FS² eBAM which offers multilateral electronic messaging as a standard.
“We set out to improve and digitise our bank account management and that’s exactly what we have achieved with the SAP-embedded solution from Serrala. For accounts switched to eBAM we are able to accelerate our processes by 90%, enhance compliance, and increase security for our bank account and mandate management” described Benjamin Altmeyer, Head of Treasury Process & Application Management at REWE Group.
“It is great to see that with this joint project with REWE Group and Serrala, yet another state- of-the-art solution is available for corporations to transform their bank account management into a future-proof, and sustainable, digital solution” highlighted Remko Streng, ING Head of Transaction Services Sales – Germany & Austria, Regional Head Transaction Services Sales CEE a.i.
Dirk Bieletzki, Serrala VP Sales DACH states: “It is impressive that the highly standardised processes and electronic messaging of FS² eBAM proved to be a successful model for REWE. Such standardisation allows the fast and efficient replication for other companies. The communication involved with account opening, closing, and more becomes a matter of minutes instead of weeks.”
Instead of connecting every bank individually, REWE Group benefits from standardised transfer protocols such as EBICS and SWIFT that are included in the solution enabling the company to connect to any bank rapidly. The corresponding mappings for ISO20022 ACMT- XML formats are pre-set and can be implemented easily with any eBAM ready bank worldwide. The mappings, however, also offer the flexibility to adapt them to customer or bank-specific requirements, within the ISO 20022 message formats. The electronic messaging is not limited to exchanging data for opening, closing, or changing bank accounts, it is equally possible to communicate mandate information efficiently, quickly, and securely.
In a first step, REWE Group is implementing eBAM with ING, who contributed to this innovative solution, driven by its ambition to provide digital services to their clients.
Advantages of standardised electronic messaging
- Sending bank account and mandate management requests to the bank, including the required documentation and signatures, takes minutes instead of weeks. Such rapid processes for bank account and mandate management are particularly important for security reasons: communications help increase control and transparency to reduce fraud risks.
- No more time-consuming implementation of electronic messaging for every single bank connection. Thanks to the standardised eBAM, banks and corporates can communicate 100% digitally.
- Digitisation helps eliminate paper-based processes, enabling secure, transparent, compliant, and efficient bank account management especially when working from home.
- Companies benefit from enhanced auditability as they have all the information requested by auditors, for example financial annual closings, documents and information readily at hand.
For further details on the project, please go to the success story
