How can banks offer a stand-out corporate banking solution to their business customers? The answer lies with modernisation, and leveraging technology partners to maximise efficiency and customer experience.
According to McKinsey Panorama, global banking revenues are expected to rise by 9% a year through 2025, with corporate or business customers at the centre of this growth. With the current modernisation drive taking place in the South African payments industry, banks should be examining their offerings. This includes a strategic look at where they can level up their solutions and provide their business customers with optimised services.
Most existing corporate solutions are based on legacy integration systems which lack robustness and agility. With these systems, corporates are not offered an easy solution to access a variety of Automated Clearing House (ACH) payment rails and have limited functionality (such as optimised routing or automated reconciliation).
Coupled with this limited functionality is the risk that, if a bank can’t offer a modern, robust, and versatile solution to their corporate customers, these businesses may start considering participation in other ways with the National Payment System (NPS). This risk may become increasingly significant as regulation changes to allow broader participation in the NPS for non-banks.
Incorporating modernised technology is a critical part of scaling your business partner solution and offering your customers an elevated service. Three factors form part of this modernisation: increased efficiency, offering an improved customer journey, and adding value to your customers.
1. Increased efficiency
In a similar vein to consumers and individual users of banking services, corporate customers want streamlined, user-friendly digital access to banking solutions. And, importantly, this includes onboarding.
As a bank, a significant pain point has the potential to be a slow and ill-defined onboarding process for new customers. This not only delays your ability to start generating revenue after a successful onboarding but can result in a frustrating and negative experience for the customer.
Often, a corporate customer continues to struggle with processing or reconciliation long after going into production with their solution due to incorrect implementation and insufficient testing.
Well-defined, technology-enabled processes make significant strides towards streamlining the onboarding process and creating a smoother journey for your customer. The end result is a much faster onboarding and a more efficient path to revenue generation for both your business and your business customer.
Some examples of increased onboarding efficiency include a corporate solution that offers:
-
Well-defined APIs and supporting documentation.
-
A single API that gives corporate customers access to a variety of ACH streams - resulting in the simple addition of new integrations.
-
Dedicated teams to assist the business customer during onboarding.
-
A self-service, 24/7-available and full-featured testing platform with comprehensive test packs and documentation.
As a result of a more efficient onboarding process, you will spend far fewer resources on assisting corporates with onboarding and production support.
2. Improved customer journey
An improved customer journey begins with seamless onboarding but then continues into everyday processes such as real-time monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting.
One effective way a modernised solution can offer your business customers an improved service is by providing them with automated reconciliation of all transactions. This removes the need for time-consuming, error-prone manual tasks and frees up capacity.
Additionally, by making use of an automated system you can provide a full set of reconciliation reports to your business partner, removing the need for them to rely on bank statements and manual means of reconciliation or invoicing.
3. Added value
Arguably the most important way to add value for your customers is by providing them with new and innovative use cases and payment opportunities.
A comprehensive corporate partner solution will open up opportunities for your customers to quickly add the newest payment services with all supported streams. This makes it as effortless as possible for your partner to participate in new or existing Automated Clearing House (ACH) payment rails - such as PayShap - with the industry. Additionally, this enables businesses to build their own payment solution iteratively by starting with one ACH stream and gradually adding more inbound and outbound streams at a later stage.
One such emerging use case is that of proxy-based payments which can be easily enabled through the right technology. The ability to register your own domain and receive or make payments using that domain will make payments simpler and faster for your customers, and give them the edge over competitors who are slower to implement new offerings.
The technology to offer you a modernised solution
Your bank needs a solution that offers protection to the inner processing systems. By forming a layer of robustness, there will be no risk or impact on core processing when new a feature or functionality is added.
Collaboration with the right technology partner is key to enhancing your offering and staying competitive. Electrum’s Business Partner Payments solution streamlines the integration and processing needed for a partner entity to participate in payments using their sponsor bank’s rails with BankservAfrica.
For a sponsor bank, Electrum removes all the effort required so the bank can simply take care of commercials and tell us when the partner needs to go into production. We take care of APIs, documentation, implementation support, and testing support. For business partners, Electrum will provide the assistance needed to make the onboarding process as pain-free and as quick as possible.
Electrum’s solution includes fully automated reconciliation as well as access to the Electrum Console, providing a single view of all transactions for all your business partners across all ACH payment streams.
Business Partner Payments
Learn how to optimise your corporate banking offering.
