Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) has
launched a web-based electronic bank account management (eBAM)
service for its corporate and commercial clients in the US and
Europe.
The rollout follows a year-long pilot with
eight clients, says Cindy Murray, head of Global Treasury Product
Infrastructure, Platforms and eCommerce at BofAML.
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eBAM is a generic term for web-based systems
that automate and standardize the opening, closing and maintenance
of bank accounts and treasury services, and provide an audit trail
of corporate account transactions.
Using eBAM systems, companies can
electronically add and delete authorized account signatories, and
digitally execute documents using e-signatures, without needing
paper signatures.
BofAML announced at SIBOS that it is offering
eBAM to users of its CashPro Connect multi-currency payment file
transfer system and its CashPro Online treasury management portal.
The bank’s CashPro systems use the ISO 20022 XML (eXtensible Markup
Language) financial messaging standard to facilitate cash
management data exchange with other financial institutions.
“We’re now providing eBAM to all our corporate
clients who want this facility,” says Murray. “For a corporate,
setting up eBAM is complex and challenging, because it requires the
firm to have a centralised database of bank account information,
which not every organisation has. Multinationals can have as many
as 2,000 to 3,000 bank accounts around the world.”
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By GlobalDataTo set up eBAM, a corporation needs to know who all the
authorised signatories are, and how its various bank accounts are
aligned with its legal entities, Murray says.
Identifying legal signatories
“BofAML has created a workflow mechanism for our eBAM
application that enables us to open accounts for our corporate
clients and identify who the legal signatories are.”
CashPro Connect enables corporations to send a
single file containing both electronic funds transfer and cheque
origination instructions to BofAML for global disbursement of
single-currency and cross-currency payments. BofAML edits the file,
which can include cross-currency wire transfers and low-value ACH
payments in any of 160 currencies, translating the data into
required global formats, and forwarding it to the appropriate
clearing systems.
CashPro Online creates a web-based “dashboard”
for the corporation to view all its bank accounts, Murray says,
including accounts with other banks. “The ‘dashboard’ offers
automated real-time reporting, so that the corporation can have
transparency on its current cash positions,” says Murray. “Because
we use the ISO 20022 XML standard, our system is bank-agnostic.
This means the corporation can use CashPro Online to pull in
information from its accounts with other banks.”
In September 2011, BofAML launched the
CashPro Invest service for users of CashPro Online. CashPro Invest
offers access via CashPro Online to 200 US dollar-denominated money
market mutual funds and other short-term investment products. “In
2012, we will add non-US dollar money market mutual funds to
CashPro Invest,” says Murray. “We worked with US trading software
vendor Cachematrix to develop CashPro Invest.”
In a related SIBOS announcement, Microsoft
said it had completed a collaborative project
with BofAML and Citigroup to become the first corporate treasury to
implement ISO 20022 XML standard, version two, for cash management
financial messaging. This standard provides a common language for
Microsoft to receive electronic bank statements from its global
banking providers.
