Financial messaging network Swift has gone live with its new standard for electronic bank account management (EBAM).
EBAM combines the use of ISO 20022 XML compliant standards with Swift's messaging platform, allowing banks and corporates to streamline the manual process of bank account management, including account opening, closing, maintenance and reporting.
EBAM's live release followa a successful pilot phase, involving the participation of three corporate customers, three banks and three software vendors.
Carola Van Limbourg, cash management architect, Shell, comments: "EBAM's standardised messaging helps us to improve our account management processes with our banks. It will save costs and effort, by eliminating large parts of the paper flow between ourselves and the banks. This is a tremendous benefit for companies with global treasury operations."
The platform will now be made available to all potential customers, says Swift.
EBAM is also set to feature in an emerging business offering from the banking co-operative, dubbed eBiz, which centres around the creation of a virtual interactive vault for business to business communication and storage.
The idea picks up on the eMe pitch that won the Innotribe event staged at Swift's annual conference Sibos in October last year. While eMe was initially conceived as a business-to-consumer vault, Swift has since decided to refrain from entry into the retail space and instead handed the concept over to a consortium of Belgian banks and government bodies for further development.
In the business-to-business pace, however, Swift is looking at the potential uses for eBiz as a virtual safekeeping tool for corporate and multi-bank use under EBAM and in another proof-of-concept trial involving asset keeping and corporate actions.