PNC, Citi and Bank of the West are all offering solutions that automate their business customers’ treasury functions, including real-time payments and cash-forecasting tools, to speed processes and transactions that have traditionally been manual.

Treasurers require access to real-time information to make informed decisions and the $105.4 billion Bank of the West, a subsidiary of $2.8 trillion BNP Paribas, has seen its business customers who are treasurers, chief financial officers and comptrollers take leading roles at their companies since the onset of COVID-19. The question for many of them is: “How much money do we have on [hand] today,” Stanton Miller, managing director and deputy head of treasury solutions at the bank, told Bank Automation News.

For its business customers, Bank of the West this month released the TreasuryNow platform, a cash management portal that features an open, scalable architecture and is based on application programming interfaces, or APIs. The goal in building the new platform was for it to be a flexible, yet simple, automated system that could be expanded easily.

TreasuryNow can be integrated with accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and its payment module handles real-time payments, automated clearing house (ACH) transfers, and domestic and cross-border wires. The platform incorporates a customizable, multilayered security approach and allows alerts to be set up for payment and profile change activities. It also features omnichannel connectivity to support different browsers and operating systems.

PNC

Meanwhile, the $553.5 billion PNC in early November announced a new cash management application, PINACLE Cash Forecasting, as part of its corporate online banking platform offered through PNC Treasury Management. The customizable application uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to construct 30-, 60- and 90-day cash forecasting models using a business’ historical financial data.

The cash-forecasting tool is bank agnostic and can incorporate transaction data from PNC or “any source that the customer can make available to help refine that forecast,” said Chris Ward, executive vice president and head of data, digital and innovation at PNC Treasury Management.

Many business customers manually build forecasts in Microsoft Excel and “spend a lot of time inputting data or gathering things or constructing in Excel the formulas to do the to do the forecast,” Ward told BAN. The PINACLE tool allows those handling business treasury functions to upload information quickly, and the tool then delivers a usable forecast.

“Most businesses spend an inordinate amount of time actually creating their forecast versus actually figuring out what to do with the forecast,” Ward said. PNC’s tool uses AI to “learn” a business and refine cash forecasts over time, he added.

The tool also delivers faster results, Ward noted, as businesses increase their online and digital operations. Transactions and payments are becoming more “real time, 24/7,” and businesses may need to forecast every day rather than every week, he noted.

Citi

Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions division of the $2.3 trillion Citigroup said in early November that its instant payments platform for institutional clients has seen an “unprecedented” growth rate of more than 100% during the past 12 months, fueled by the growth of e-commerce and new business models as consumers turn to digital banking services and sales shift to direct-to-consumer digital channels.

Instant payments increase working capital for institutions while customers get more choice in payment methods, Citi said. The instant payment platform allows funds to be transmitted “within seconds, 24/7” and to be “available to recipients immediately,” according to Citi.

The bank most recently launched domestic instant payments in Brazil, and the platform is now in use in 28 markets across “multiple geographic regions,” Citi said in a release.

ForwardAI

Vancouver, Canada-based ForwardAI, a business data and analytics fintech founded in February, has launched a white-label, brandable cash flow forecasting and planning tool for banks, financial institutions (FIs) and fintechs called Predict-as-a-Service that allows them to offer predictive data solutions for small and midsize businesses.

The fintech has not yet held any funding rounds, according to Crunchbase, but told BAN it is “fully funded and currently has no plans to raise additional capital.” It also noted it provides white-label financial data connections to “financial institutions, alternative lenders and other fintechs,” and integrations for its technology are available for QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, Oracle Netsuite, Xero, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Freshbooks and others.