Overstrained with paperwork? - Why you should ask your bank to provide you with eBAM

Are you sick of the time required to open, close or manage your existing Bank accounts? If you are looking to optimize your treasury processes, you should already be looking to get up to date with eBAM.

eBAM ?

Electronic Bank Account Management (abbreviated as eBAM) is a Financial Services Messaging standard defined by Swift, and will allow you to get rid of the time consumed by the head aching paper based bank account management you are used to nowadays.

Corporates around the world are waiting to digitalize and standardize the way they communicate with their banks for many years now, and not just payment files … all the processes.

And in Switzerland, as well as in other European countries, with the arrival of EBICS, and the ISO 20022 standardization, the urge to switch everything to XML format is even bigger.

How will you benefit from the eBAM standard?

Let’s be honest. The first benefit that comes to mind would be: « getting rid of paper ». Now that we manage to send our daily business to our banks via standardized channels in a digital way, it would be a big step backwards to keep managing our bank accounts with paper in a slow, insecure and non-standardized way.

The eBAM standard will help corporates to optimize and automate their processes, by providing a multi-bank standardized ISO 20022 File format which will allow the electronic opening, maintenance, closing of accounts. Even the reporting on account and mandate structures. Account maintenance also includes the maintenance of the operational mandates on accounts. Having the same electronic procedures for every bank will result in a noticeable gain in efficiency.

But eBAM does not stop there. In fact, it will provide you with a global visibility on your bank accounts - no more sleeping bank accounts you are not aware of! Having all this bank provided information, in a central repository will help you to manage your compliancy tasks easier than ever before.

From a security viewpoint eBAM will support digital signatures like the famous 3Skey provided by SWIFT which will make possible to identify the authorized users who manages the bank accounts and to add a whole new layer of security.

Since the format is ISO based, it is fully compatible with most of the communication standards used today, like SWIFT FileAct, Host to Host connections or EBICS, which is commonly used in France, Germany and Switzerland. Having said this, it will be easy to connect your existing systems and to feed them with eBAM files.

What about you? Are you already working on a way to manage your bank accounts in an efficient and secure way?

If not, please do not hesitate to contact us  we would be delighted to give you some more insights on this technology and the ways we think are best to implement it.

Posted by Julien Lacombe, PPI Schweiz

Julien is an expert for Cash Management and Payments. He has extensive international experience and knows the needs of corporates and financial institutions.

He currently supports customers in projects to harmonize payments in Switzerland, for example in the areas of ISO 20022 and EBICS.

 #DigitalBanking #eBAM #EBICS #Finance #ISO20022 #SWIFT