Cash Management Overhaul Planned

Bankers and their corporate clients are gearing up to redefine the standard for cash management reporting.

Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. is to hold a conference call Sept. 2 with several financial companies and corporations to discuss cash management standards.

Cynthia Fuller, the executive director of X9, an Annapolis, Md., forum for standard setting in the financial industry, said the working group plans to update a cash management specification developed by the Bank Administration Institute that is widely used by banks and their corporate clients.

In about a year, she said, X9 expects that it will be able to have a draft standard ready to put to ballot and eventually to be offered to the American National Standards Institute Inc.

The BAI specification dates from 1987 and has not been updated since 2001, Fuller said in an interview Monday. "There have been a lot of changes in the industry since then."

James Wills, a senior business executive at the global financial cooperative Swift, said the X9 standard will incorporate not only BAI codes, but also the cash management reporting messages and code sets from the international ISO 20022 standard, which is used in the Single Euro Payments Area, among other applications.

"A number of financial products have come along since these codes were revised, Sepa being an example," he said.

At least 15 cash management banks and other organizations, including the Federal Reserve banks and Nacha, the electronic payments association, have already signed on, Wills said.

"We are expecting a deluge of people who will want to be part of this," he said.

Bill Lundeen, the group manager of global banking at Procter & Gamble Co., said the Cincinnati company must use a variety of applications to connect its internal systems to its banks worldwide.

"Even we don't use them consistently within P&G, region to region," Lundeen said.

The X9 exercise is to include an exploration of best practices in cash management reporting and implementation guides to smooth out variations in the ways that individual companies and banks use the BAI codes, he said. "This is a way we can learn from the efficiencies that others are creating."