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Also in this section: Cheques SEPA and PSD Mass payments and collections Payment cards Mobile phones/Cellphones Online micropayments Future of payment systems |
Companies and banks are now concentrating on improving the level of straight-through processing in all transactions. One area where this is producing significant results is in the reconciliation of payables and receivables, often one of the few remaining manual processes in shared service centres (SSCs). Citi calls this straight-through reconciliation (STR) and has developed new services and techniques to eliminate these manual processes. These include enhancing payment data and delivering it in a single file to maximize auto-reconciliation in ERP systems, standardizing return message integration processes with clients’ internal ERP systems and reviewing the workflows of all bank-to-corporate processes. STR is set to become the new measure of SSC efficiency as companies focus on their overall Order-2-Cash performance. The 2010 Euromoney survey of banks’ mass payment and collection services covers nine leading cash management banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, RBS, Santander and SCB. The survey data is given in Table 1 (click here to see Table 1: Bank mass payment and collection services, January 2010) . The survey again showed that mass payment services are mostly a part of banks’ general payment services. All the banks provide electronic banking and host-to-host connectivity, and all but one also offer user digital signature authorization. The number of countries where local clients have access to SWIFTNet services varies considerably, from 13 to 90. All the banks provide BIC and IBAN validation tools and only one does not offer a conversion service. The acceptance of ISO 20022 XML files varies widely.
The country coverage of the banks’ mass payment services also varies widely with Citi covering the greatest number for all payment methods except ACH credits, where HSBC has the most. For mass collection services Citi again has the greatest country coverage for all types of service, except for ACH direct debits where again HSBC has the most.
The survey also shows that there are considerably more than 2,000 payment factories globally with Citi dominating, supporting 729 payment factories. RBS is second overall, supporting 435 payment factories, but has the largest number in Europe. The other main findings are that almost half of existing payment factories are in Europe with the fastest growth in payment factories in Asia-Pacific.
