Often this award goes to the bank that has done a particularly good job of providing useful digital features through a smartphone app to retail customers. This year we recognize a wholesale bank, most renowned for the technology behind its CashPro offering for payments, receivables, liquidity and FX management. Bank of America is western Europe’s best digital bank.
With Dublin rapidly emerging as one of the world’s leading tech hubs, Bank of America has become a trailblazer in the city and set up a digital centre of excellence in its EU headquarters. This includes the Dublin Development Lab and local CashPro development team, which have continued to play a critical role in 2023.
The Dublin Development Lab is a software development centre that offers flexible resourcing for global Bank of America technology projects, with a particular focus on enterprise risk and finance. It is, for example, a centre for the bank’s efforts to develop tools for counterparty credit risk management, climate risk management and even model risk management. The lab also offers wide-ranging digital training for staff and resources to research emerging technologies that benefit the wider bank.
More importantly, it is a centre for core client offerings.
“From a technology perspective, we always work directly with our business partners and clients – to learn what they need and want,” says Andrew McKibben, international head of technology and CIO for global corporate and investment banking and global payments solutions. “Technologists are better placed when they understand the business and spend time understanding client needs so that the technology being developed meets those requirements.”
An example is open account automation, launched last year on CashPro. This is a new trade finance solution that addresses invoice approval and payment, one of the most common processes in global trade. It speeds up the time to approve an invoice from what was often days or weeks to a matter of minutes.
The process was historically paper-intensive and time consuming, as the provider was required to extract data from associated documents to ensure that what the business originally ordered is what the supplier actually shipped and invoiced for.
“Open account processing and payment has been a complex and manually intensive area for a very long time and across the industry. The delivery of this is a great example of really understanding client needs and working collaboratively to achieve that,” says McKibben.
This year we recognize a wholesale bank, most renowned for the technology behind its CashPro offering for payments, receivables, liquidity and FX management: Bank of America
Open account automation absorbs and collates data that already exists within the supply chain ecosystem and enables clients to manage the invoicing process end-to-end with minimal human intervention. One client has already seen 96% straight-through processing rates.
The team that delivered it included a global project lead based in London and members of the Europe, Middle East and Africa technology team including specialists in digital user experience, cybersecurity engineers and process redesign engineers, the latter tasked with reimagining how the solution could adapt to a digitally native offering.
“While we are a global bank, we are intent on cultivating an innovative, agile culture that is also local and allows any person to be supported in the development of a good technology idea,” says McKibben.
This has led to the bank recording a leading number of patents in the financial industry with more than 7,300 inventors around the world.
In September 2023, the Dublin CashPro team supported the launch of the bank’s CashPro third data centre project. With significant year-on-year CashPro sign-in increases, this supports the surge of traffic flow and helps maintain resilience of the platform.
“We are very focused on stability and resiliency,” says McKibben, who sits on a number of industry operational resilience groups that seek to better understand risks to the resilience of the financial sector.
