BNP Paribas Gives Corporate Customers New Transaction Visibility

European banking powerhouse BNP Paribas is giving its corporate clients a new way to provide beneficiaries in international financial transactions real-time information about the payments’ status.

The service is called BENEtracker and operates with BNP Paribas’s Metroline over the SWIFT network.

“The complexity of an international transfer for companies lies in the dependence of a long chain of actors and regulations to complete the transaction,” Marc Spain, head of payments and cash management at BNP Paribas, said in a prepared statement. “BENEtracker makes it possible to trace and streamline international payments. This solution also meets the growing cash management needs of corporate clients in an increasingly complex and globalized operating environment.”

BNP Paribas says the new offering is available to any corporate customers who use its Connexis Cash or Ma Banque Entreprise tools.

In a January 2021 video, in which facets of the new product offering were revealed, BNP Paribas Head of Strategic Marketing Jan Dirk van Beusekom said BENEtracker grew out of workshops bank leaders held with executives from client companies.

In that video, Steven Lenaerts, head of product management for global channels for BNP Paribas, said: “Benefactor is a solution tackling the thorny issue of tracking the thorny issue of international payments, with a focus on beneficiaries and making them aware of the status of specific payments that are due to them.”

The Benetracker process is simple, according to the video: a client initiates an international payment from an account at the bank to a beneficiary; PNB Paribas reports back to the client with a code called a unique end-to-end tracking reference or UNTR; the client gives the beneficiary a web link that lets the beneficiary track the delivery of funds to his or her account.

And if something goes wrong?

Wim Grosemans, BNP Paribas’s head of product management for payments and receivables, adds in the video: “Ultimately, this is a self-service tool for any party involved to follow sensitive transactions or detect irregularities along the process.”

In June 2020, BNP Paribas launched a pay-and-trace service designed to let corporations more-easily track payments between businesses. The SWIFT network-based service was touted at the time as a way to help customer better track cash.

Member institutions use the SWIFT network to send millions of secure messages per day — many of them instructions for the wiring of funds.

BNP Paris says it operates in 71 countries and has nearly 200,000 employees. Of them, about 151,000 are in Europe.