Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking is focused on eliminating friction in the global payments space, including user experience, onboarding and accessibility.  

The $1 trillion bank identified three areas of friction that it has addressed using automation, Brinda Bhattacharjee, chief operating officer for Transaction Banking in platform solutions at Goldman Sachs, said last week at the Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2023 in Charlotte, N.C. 

The following are three methods Goldman Sachs used to reduce client friction: 

1. Automating onboarding processes

One pain point the New York City-based bank worked to mitigate was the onboarding process. To accomplish this, the bank began defining specific rule sets to move clients through a more fluid onboarding process, Bhattacharjee said.

“The automation of the onboarding process from a regulatory and compliance angle was the first thing we focused on. Once we had that down, empowering our clients to be able to self-serve and do this for themselves was the second layer of that,” she said.  

“Bringing those two things together has been pretty powerful in terms of taking what would be a 180-day process and making it a one-day process.” 

2. Omnichannel access for clients

Providing an omnichannel platform for Goldman’s Transaction Banking clients was another area the bank improved. Within Transaction Banking, clients now can use APIs and other technology with ease — just as they would use files in other legacy payment networks. 

“The ability to be an omnichannel platform is really important,” Bhattacharjee said, adding that while omnichannel may be the standard now, it is a departure from how legacy transaction banks had done business for the past three decades. 

“One thing we focused on earnestly from an automation angle was how can we be as low-touch for our clients as possible in terms of how they instruct us,” she added. 

3. Improved payment tracking

As payments continue to evolve, knowing where the money is in the payment process can be crucial for liquidity, another area defined by Goldman Sachs as in need of improvement, with a major challenge being lack of interoperability, Bhattacharjee said. 

“This concept of ensuring interconnectivity within the system instantly was core to how we developed to be able to meet that [need],” Bhattacharjee said. This involves “having real-time visibility in an automated way into … where our clients’ liquidity sits in the global payment system at any point in time.” 

Stay up to date with all the news out of the Bank Automation Summit US 2023.