Treasury teams should be consolidating account structures, strengthening security controls and focusing on digitization initiatives that result in quantifiable efficiency benefits, according to JPMorgan’s latest 'Forecasting Payments' report.
There is no doubt that corporates have made much progress in areas such as multi-factor authentication, encryption and behavioural analytics to protect payment data and reduce fraud while minimising customer friction and strengthening compliance and risk controls.
However, these kinds of initiatives should be business-as-usual, according to Toine van Beusekom, strategy director at Icon Solutions.
“Expanded automation and services such as leveraging virtual accounts are rapidly becoming table stakes, but there remains much to improve,” he says. “A large proportion of effort and budget is still spent on manual processing, whether it is on outgoing payments for a new vendor or reconciling incoming payments.”
Gaps remain in payments processes, with manual data entry and manual file uploads to e-banking still prevalent. If not managed correctly, fragmented technology and connections to multiple banks' proprietary systems can mean inconsistent or non-existent controls – leading to opportunities for error and fraud, says Richard Ransom, strategic customer success manager for corporates at Bottomline.
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