A payments hub consolidates payment streams from ERPs, finance, treasury, legal, capital markets and decentralised teams. The consolidated stream is transformed into a single source of record for all outgoing payments. A payments hub also converts payment data into bank-specific file formats and connects directly with global banks. In centralising and standardising corporate payments, payment hubs improve efficiency and reduce fraud.
Key Features of Payments Hub
Payments are a growing area of focus for CFOs, CIOs, controllers, purchasing managers and treasurers because inefficient payment processes can inhibit supply chains, cash flow and profitability. To remedy these issues, payment hubs feature:
Standardised Workflow and Controls
Payment workflow and controls ensure manual payments activities align to the organisation’s payment policy and standardised payment controls.
Payment Screening and Fraud Protection
Real-time screening of payments and fraud detections act as a line of defense against unauthorised payments.
Global Bank Connectivity
By integrating with banks across the globe, payment hubs deliver out of the box, host-to-host and regional network bank interfaces.
Pre-built Format Libraries
Payment hubs are able to meet the needs of various global banks and can accommodate thousands of format variations.
Two-way Communication
Receipt of payments acknowledgments, payments tracking and bank status reporting are communicated to all parties for status reporting and visibility.
Data Visualisation and Business Intelligence (BI)
With BI-enabled data visualisations, finance and treasury can gain in-depth insight into global payments and have access to enhanced analytics.
The Benefits of a Payments Hub
Payment hubs deliver a wide range of benefits for treasury and finance leaders, including:
Cost Savings
A payments hub reduces the number of systems that need to connect to a bank, thus reducing bank service fees and software costs
Central Responsibility
With the use of a single system to request, initiate, approve and transmit payments, a single team is responsible for all payments and the risk of mistakes and unauthorised payments is less
Fraud Detection
All outgoing payments are screened in real-time against external sanction lists and a digitised payments policy to ensure only authorised payments are transmitted
Global Visibility
By centralising payments via a payments hub, treasury has complete visibility to all outgoing cash flows in one place, allowing for the optimisation of cash balances and enabling more effective decisions on cash and liquidity deployment
Eliminated Reliance on IT
Since payment hubs are hosted in the cloud and feature bank format generation and integrated bank connectivity, there is no need for IT to build and maintain bank connections