One of the least surprising findings of the third annual GTreasury/Strategic Treasurer treasury technology survey report, published in late July, was the continued high level of adoption of new technologies, with growth fuelled by smaller corporates.
However, this commitment contrasted with respondents’ desire to hold onto older data formats, such as MT940 and BAI2, rather than adopting newer, enriched versions that use XML.
Just over half (56%) of the corporates surveyed offer XML formats such as CAMT, with a further 11% planning to do so during the next 12 months.
However, almost one third (31%) had no plans to implement the enriched data format, even though it makes it easier to decipher critical transaction information by enabling systems to parse these details into separate fields, expediting processing and routing.
“Unfortunately, many banks don’t yet have the logic in place to leverage this feature of CAMT and still largely lump information into unstructured tags,” says Pete Srejovic, chief technology officer at GTreasury.
“Standardization is also fairly lax – CAMT formatting can vary across different banks, limiting its utility – and customer systems still function using BAI2 and MT formats, contributing to an ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mentality.”
XML-based
