Technology that allows a company to get paid while reducing internal payment management sings in any economic environment, but it’s number one with a bullet for corporate treasurers under orders to increase efficiency while taking a razor to overhead.
That's why Sierra Atlantic's BankON is right on for the widespread institutional efforts underway to improve linkage between a corporation's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and a bank's treasury management operation. The product automates payables, receivables and cash reconciliation for corporates while devouring manual labor - giving banks an opportunity to build stickiness with business clients anxious to simplify payments processing operations that are still filled with cumbersome reconciliations, interoperability issues and costly document transfers.
"The complexity of the payments process can get magnified quickly," says Raju Reddy, chairman and CEO of Sierra Atlantic, which estimates companies can save up to $10 per transaction by making processing and reconciliation seamless and electronic. BankON will have plenty of targets: Aberdeen Research says nearly two-thirds of corporates now consider integration of payments and accounting systems as a top strategic initiative.
The six-month old product, available on premise at the corporation or hosted by the bank, has already attracted the attention of Standard Chartered Bank, which is deploying BankON in 70 countries. Sierra Atlantic has also sold the solution to three other banks in the global top ten. Another coup for BankON was a recent deal to provide the ERP integration piece to Seamless STP, a joint SaaS-based offering with Oracle and Fundtech.
Demand for ERP integration is also increasing downmarket. Firms with less than $20 million in sales - a segment that typically can’t afford customized ERP integration solutions - become amenable to newer SaaS-style pay-per-usage models that are quick to deploy. "Increasingly you are going to see use of 'on demand' [ERP] integration solutions," Reddy says.
