SAP’s FSN Bank Partnerships Streamlines Corporate Transactions

DBS Bank and SAP recently announced a partnership that’s aimed at making the process for businesses to connect treasury and payment systems with the bank more seamless by allowing them to send transactions in real time, according to a Cash & Treasuring Management File article.

As pointed out in the C&TM File article, the launch of SAP’s financial service was slower than anticipated, but this move puts cloud-based financial network back on track with making progress in the corporate transactions sector. Besides the partnership with DBS Bank, SAP and Citi Bank announced a partnership last week (Oct. 28) to connect corporate customers to the bank.

“At DBS, we constantly look at how we can leverage technology to simplify banking for our customers. Trailblazing the use of SAP FSN underlines this effort. In this competitive business landscape, CFOs and corporate treasurers want a seamless, integrated connection with their banks that automates financial transactions and provides them with visibility of their cashflow. With FSN, we are able to provide straight through processing, operating efficiencies, as well as a more streamlined onboarding process for our corporate clients.”

This same sentiment was expressed by Hubert Jolly, managing director at Citi, who explained that having Citi’s corporate customers sign up for the SAP Financial Services Network allows them to send transactions in real-time instead of having to send in segments of files like before.

“One of our clients’ biggest pain points was high-volume connectivity — how to get large files to Citi — and they had to do that multiple times with multiple banks,” Jolly told American Banker. “We knew that if a client wanted to work with Citi across a region, it would take months for them to connect each of their individual ERP instances into Citi. It was a major effort and pain point for them, and an expense for us as well. …The other big benefit is we’ll be able to exchange better data back to our clients.”

The C&TM File article points to a recent survey from SAP conducted with CEOS and corporate treasurers that suggests more as to why this partnership will help better connect treasury and payment systems with the bank and why such connection is needed.

“CFOs and corporate treasurers indicated that responding to the challenges of the daily activities of treasury and financial operations is critical. They wanted not only better risk management and enhanced funding options in response to the complex global environment, but also better and more integrated solutions to achieve their goals,” the article states. “This meant seamless connectivity solutions with their banks to enable them to more effectively execute payments and other financial services.”

Reasons cited by SAP claim that its final services network meets those needs because of three specific reasons: “It does away with the current industry practice today where corporates typically link their systems to their bank through a proprietary host to host connection; provides a standardized integration capability between bank and customer and the standardized interface simplifies the client onboarding process from the industry average of three to six months to as little as a few weeks.”