BofA Turns To AI For New Payment Reconciliation Tool

Bank of America Merrill Lynch announced news on Tuesday (Aug. 22) of Intelligent Receivables, a new service that relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and other software to improve companies straight through reconciliation of incoming payments.

In a press release, the corporate banking firm said the new tool is aimed at large or complex companies that are seeking to reduce costs, decrease days sales outstanding (DSO) and improve cash forecasting and their end-customer experience. The new solution is ideally suited for companies that manage a large volume of payments and eInvoices, where the remittance information is either missing or received separately from the payment, the company said in the press release.

“There are many meaningful, measurable benefits that clients will receive from using Intelligent Receivables,” Hilani Kerr, head of North America Corporate Global Transaction Services at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said in the press release. “We are committed to working alongside FinTech companies to bring more innovations like Intelligent Receivables to our clients and create practical applications of new technology that will help them achieve greater efficiency and cost savings.”

According to the corporate banking firm, incomplete remittance information typically leads to an arduous and costly reconciliation process, but the new accounts receivable solution addresses that, said Rodney Gardner, head of Global Receivables in Global Transaction Services at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, in the same press release. “Our solution brings together AI, machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR), setting a new bar in accounts receivable reconciliation and payment matching,” said Gardner. “We’re excited to be working with leading FinTech [SaaS] provider HighRadius to add Intelligent Receivables to our suite of solutions.”

Intelligent Receivables, which is powered by HighRadius, a FinTech enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, achieves improved straight-through reconciliation by identifying payers and associates’ payments to remittances that are received separately; extracts remittance data from emails, email attachments, electronic data interchange (EDI) and payer web portals; matches eInvoices to open receivables using the enriched remittance data and creates a receivables posting file that the client uploads to their ERP system.