The solution was developed in collaboration with a fintech that specializes in applying machine learning to cash forecasting to help solve a top pain point for companies: how to measure future cash needs without a significant manual effort or a costly technology investment.

“Many companies today rely on manual, repetitive work to forecast their cash needs, leaving little time to analyze the data for making strategic decisions, which is the actual objective of the forecasting exercise,” said Ken Ullmann, co-head of Global Commercial Banking, Global Transaction Services at Bank of America. “With CashPro Forecasting, companies can automate their forecasting process while improving the accuracy of their predictions, all without making any IT investment.”

CashPro Forecasting is available to clients already using CashPro®, the platform that the bank’s corporate and commercial clients use to manage their everyday treasury and borrowing needs. “Unlike competitor solutions, CashPro Forecasting requires no onboarding since it’s fully integrated into the platform, allowing it to automatically plug into the client’s historical cash flow information,” said Jay Davenport, head of Product Structuring Sales in Global Transaction Services at Bank of America. “A client can activate the service themselves from their CashPro settings, and begin using it immediately.”

CashPro Forecasting uses a variety of ML models to learn from a client’s historical cash flows, automatically selecting the most accurate one for each account and using it to forecast future cash positions. At the end of each day, the models are retrained based on the new cash flows from that day, allowing them to continuously learn and adjust for changes in seasonality and other operational impacts specific to each company.

“The economic repercussions of the pandemic have underscored the importance of first, cash visibility, and second, accurate cash flow forecasts. Many corporations experienced a harsh spotlight on the shortcomings of their cash flow forecasts regardless of source. As a result, pacesetter banks have been accelerating enhancements to their cash flow forecasting offering,” said Alenka Grealish, Senior Corporate Banking Analyst at Celent.

The key features of CashPro Forecasting include:

Improved accuracy - Machine learning technology automatically learns from historical cash flows
Scenario analysis - Users can create their own forecast scenarios by taking trailing averages or assigning growth rates
Multibank reporting - The service forecasts cash flows across Bank of America and bank accounts held at other third party banks
Transaction mapping - Users can create simple rules to automatically classify and forecast individual transactions into categories such as Collections or Payroll
Simple setup - Zero implementation. Companies can enable the service directly within CashPro and begin using it immediately
Customizable - Companies can forecast by account, currency, transaction type, or choose their own cash flow categories. These can be done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, up to a year in the future

Backed by a team of innovators, Bank of America is a leader in treasury and transaction services, with CashPro Forecasting being the latest innovation brought to market. Others launched over the last year include: Account Validation, Recipient Select, Complete AP, the Executive Explorer travel card and an enhanced Intelligent Receivables. Learn more about the bank’s Global Transaction Services capabilities.