Corporations today are under ever more pressure to devise ways to manage their cash more effectively. Currently, many are managing their payments processing and bank accounts in one of three ways – regionally, at the business unit level or at the subsidiary level. While these methods may offer a certain degree of flexibility, they often result in poor visibility and high ownership costs.

• Driving down banking fees, as it becomes possible to deal with a smaller number of banking relationships across various locations and subsidiaries, resulting in a better negotiating position; 
• Handling larger payment volumes with less staff due to increased automation and straight-through processing (STP); 
• Replacing proprietary e-bank connections that typically cost about US$20,000 a year  per bank connection, resulting in substantial savings; 
• Routing payments to the least-cost option based on configurable rules; 
• Offering flexibility for dealing with many different payment instruments and payment types, adding value to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that are often not capable of dealing with certain instruments and for which building customisations is a costly exercise;
• Centralising the payments business process, resulting in changing the process only once in case of changes required by business and regulatory pressures. Again, this means a substantial cost saving compared to changing many different systems;
• Facilitating compliance with internal control procedures as imposed by regulation such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the 8th European Union directive.