In a year when traditional ways of managing corporate cash flows, trade and retail payments faced their biggest challenge yet, one bank continued its relentless investment, building upon years of success. Bank of America once again wins the award for North America’s best bank for transaction services.
The bank’s global transaction services (GTS) unit facilitates $1.5 trillion of transactions per year in the region. In 2020 its CashPro app was used to approve $174 billion of payments, ahead of the $159 billion processed by Venmo, PayPal’s mobile payment service. Some 74% of the bank’s clients are now digitally active.
Building tech is one thing, but underlying everything BofA has done is a constant focus on service quality.
“Being the market leader in the US gives us a massive scale advantage, which means we are plugged into and have understanding across all levels of the market,” says Matthew Davies, co-head of global corporate sales for GTS and head of GTS for Europe, Middle East and Africa. “But we differentiate ourselves in terms of our quality of service and that is because we have continued to focus on the service area even as our business has grown.”
CashPro goes from strength to strength. It was recognized for “excellence in functionality” by Greenwich Associates in January 2021, the only one of 70 platforms to receive that plaudit, and it ranked top in platform design, as well as in its ability to provide a digital end-to-end process.
“This has been a year in which the use of digital services has been critical,” says Stephanie Wolf, head of global financial institutions, governments, business banking sales and GTS risk. “It had been coming for a long time before Covid, but the pandemic really shone a light on the importance of ensuring an end-to-end digital environment.”
Clients were flocking to CashPro as economies shut down their traditional avenues in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Visits to CashPro’s application programming interface developer portal rose more than 500% over the year, while use of electronically signed documents through CashPro Assistant rose more than 300%. Bank of America hosted nearly 100 WebEx training sessions in 2020, attended by nearly 30,000 clients. In the first quarter of 2021, 23 sessions attracted nearly 8,000.
The bank argues that it is more than a decade of investment that has prepared GTS for a situation like the pandemic. And that investment accelerated during 2020 as the pandemic took hold.
“Global transaction services was the single largest recipient of tech dollars in the global banking and markets division for driving innovation last year,” says Davies. “We had our biggest budget in one of the most challenging years.”
Rolling out that investment meant upping the pace of upgrades. In the first quarter of 2021, there were 17 upgrades to CashPro, more than twice what would be seen in a typical quarter. Payments on the platform more than doubled from the previous quarter.
Part of Bank of America’s strength comes from a level of integration that allows for information to flow swiftly between its GTS teams and others in the consumer, wealth management, global banking and global markets divisions.
Complete AP is an example of how the client base feeds what you prioritize
Stephanie Wolf
From the start of the pandemic the GTS teams were feeding data on trade and payment flows to colleagues and clients. Bank of America’s senior management wanted daily reports of all transaction data, including deposits and payments, to provide a barometer of the economy.
To do that, new analytic models had to be built, but within 48 hours the report was generated. It has since been automated and is now what the bank calls a “business-as-usual deliverable.”
There have been dozens of other initiatives. The bank launched a real time cross-border payments solution with a fintech that used distributed-ledger technology, soon used by a client managing payments between the US and Mexico. It was also one of the first banks to send Zelle payments over the real-time payments network. And it launched a cross-border payment tracker as a tool on CashPro Assistant, a Swift gpi module that allows clients to monitor their international payments.
One notable innovation was an accounts payable solution called Complete AP, aimed at digitizing supplier invoices. Its first client was a small real estate company that was sending out 500 cheques a month and now the platform is being rolled out to others.
“Complete AP is an example of how the client base feeds what you prioritize,” says Wolf. “With the pandemic making it increasingly difficult for clients to handle physical processes like cheque issuance, we partnered with a fintech and a card network to develop a solution allowing companies to automate their accounts payable departments.”
And there looks like being no let-up in the pace of innovation. In 2020 the bank filed 722 patent applications with the US patent office – its biggest number ever. That’s not bad for a workforce largely stuck at home.
