CFOs Shrink Their Bank Dashboards With Self-Reconciling B2B Payments

The real problem in modern receivables isn’t whether cash moves electronically but that payment and remittance information increasingly arrive separately, through portals, email, enterprise resource planning systems, electronic data interchange and spreadsheets.

With Gemini Enterprise for Financial Services becoming available in preview Tuesday (Aug. 25) for the capital markets and corporate banking industries, chief financial officers are being equipped with new tools to tackle the B2B payment reconciliation information problems disguised as accounting processes.

The sprawling corporate bank account architecture is familiar to almost every global treasury organization. It represents dozens, hundreds or thousands of demand deposit accounts distributed across entities, businesses, countries and banking partners. Although it ostensibly exists to hold money, many of these bank accounts also perform a second, less appreciated function. They manufacture information.

For years, corporate finance has treated reconciliation as the cleanup operation that begins after a payment ends. However, as payment identifiers, virtual account numbers, invoice references and richer transaction metadata become more tightly connected to the movement of money, reconciliation can migrate upstream.

Instead of asking finance to reconstruct the meaning of a transaction after settlement, payment infrastructure can today carry enough context to establish that meaning as part of the transaction itself.

Read also: The Corporate Bank Account Is Becoming an Event Stream

B2B Reconciliation Workflows Move Into the Transaction Infrastructure

CFOs are not simply chasing a more optimized but “automated” reconciliation process. That phrase still implies taking an existing accounting workflow and making software perform it faster. A more consequential shift occurs when reconciliation becomes part of payment design.

A payment that carries a persistent customer identifier, invoice reference, virtual account identity or structured remittance information can arrive already carrying much of the context required to process it. Instead of software searching across emails, bank statements and ERP records to infer what happened, the transaction provides the evidence itself.

“What real-time transaction data is doing is enabling us to have a forward-looking assessment,” Boost Payment Solutions Chief Technology Officer Rinku Sharma told PYMNTS in April. “The question used to be what happened. Now the question is, what should we do about it right now?”

That changes the economics of reconciliation because the objective moves from matching records faster to reducing the number of records that need to be matched in the first place. For CFOs, the consequence extends beyond faster cash application. Better transaction identity can eliminate some of the organizational and banking complexity companies built precisely because their payments lacked it.

See also: The Finance Stack’s Great Unbundling Has CFOs Asking What They Need to Own

Finance’s Unit of Work Becomes Managing the Exception

A dollar appearing in a bank balance is useful. A dollar identified as belonging to a specific customer and invoice is more useful because it can immediately update receivables, collections priorities, customer credit exposure and the cash forecast.

For controllers and chief accounting officers, embracing an orchestrated top-layer AR strategy means the accounting operation can become exception-driven. For AR leaders, it means employees spend less time identifying payments and more time resolving why customers did not pay as expected. For financial planning and analysis, as well as treasury, faster certainty about cash changes when incoming funds become usable information.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Time to Cash™: A New Measure of Business Resilience“ found in October that 77.9% of CFOs see improving the cash flow cycle as “very or extremely important” to their strategy in the year ahead.

There is a broader architectural implication. Finance organizations have accumulated dashboards partly because their systems do not agree quickly enough. Treasury has bank visibility. AR has invoice status. Accounting has the general ledger. FP&A has forecasts. Business units maintain operational views. Management layers reporting across those systems to determine what is actually happening.

Better transaction identity can compress some of those layers. If an incoming payment can be reliably identified, applied and reflected across financial systems almost immediately, finance needs fewer intermediate views explaining the gap between operational reality and accounting reality. The objective is not literally to eliminate dashboards. It is to reduce the number of reconciliation surfaces the CFO organization needs to manage.

That reduction will likely prove to be more consequential as enterprise AI scales across the back office. Research from PYMNTS Intelligence’s “The Enterprise AI Benchmark Report,” showed in April that 71% of executives at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue believe that organizational readiness is the chief limitation on AI performance. Only 11% said they think AI technology itself is the primary barrier.