Industry collaboration speeds adoption of Electronic Bank Account Management

Published 

Banks and application vendors working together to bring corporations live

Las Vegas, 28 October 2013 — SWIFT, the financial messaging provider for more than 10,000 banking organizations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 212 countries and territories, today announced, at the AFP annual conference, that Electronic Bank Account Management (EBAM)  continues to get industry focus with corporations going live with multiple banks.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofA Merrill), Citi, JPMorgan and SWIFT have been collaborating to advance EBAM as part of the G.R.e.A.T (Global Rapid eBAM Adoption Team) Project which provides market experience to the on-going Common Global Implementation (CGI) EBAM workgroup.  Other key participants in the project include USI Insurance, and application vendors Weiland/Fiserv, e5 Solutions Group and SunGard. All contributed to the ongoing industry effort resulting in EBAM going live to support daily treasury operations.

“EBAM will help our company streamline processes and gain efficiencies through standardized and automated account management.  The collaboration and innovation between the banks and application vendors has been instrumental to the project’s success and will continue to promote industry adoption,” Nancy Colwell, Director of Treasury, USI Insurance.

“Collectively, we focused on what was required for corporations to go live in a multi-bank scenario. At the same time, the group experience will allow us to prepare for future iterations of EBAM. This experience is being shared with the CGI workgroup to continue the momentum of growing global adoption of EBAM,” said Cindy Murray, head of Global Treasury Product Platforms and eChannels, BofA Merrill Global Transaction Services.

Hubert J.P. Jolly, Global Head of Channel and Enterprise Services, with Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions said, “As clients continue to digitize their business processes, this milestone highlights Citi’s on-going commitment to EBAM and the use of ISO XML. Citi went live with EBAM in 2009 and have successfully worked with many key multi-national clients to improve their bank account management process.  This is a great opportunity to provide value through standardization and to increase EBAM adoption across the industry.” 

“Our mission was to help multiple clients, banks and vendors productively use eBAM in their daily operations.  While unique in the approach, working together was critical to our mutual success,” said Glen Solimine, Executive Director, J.P. Morgan and EBAM workgroup Coordinator for CGI. “EBAM truly benefits from the network effect. With broader adoption by all parties, the value to each participant increases.” 

“Collaboration among all players has been critical to the project’s success. Companies going live with multiple banks using EBAM standards is a key milestone for the industry. The next phase will focus on furthering adoption, including on-boarding more corporations and banks and expanding to more regions.  This project is the basis for us to continuously enhance the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of electronic bank account management standards,” stated Stacy Rosenthal, Director, Corporate and Banking Initiatives, SWIFT.

EBAM fully automates the management of accounts, including mandates, and facilitates the integration into back-office applications (TMS, ERP, HR-databases, etc.). It will sync the customer’s and bank’s views on account structure and related mandates in a fast, reliable, standardised and automated manner. Bank account management – including mandate management – is currently a paper based process between banks and corporates. Moving this activity to EBAM will lead to significant cost and time savings, and ensure there is a consistent view on account structure by both parties.

The Common Global Implementation (CGI) initiative provides a forum for financial institutions (banks and bank associations) and non-financial institutions (corporates, corporate associations, vendors and market infrastructures) to progress various corporate-to-bank implementation topics on the use of ISO 20022 messages and other related activities, in the payments domain.

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