Bank of America has worked with fintech startup High Radius to apply artificial intelligence to corporate processing of accounts receivables.
The application is designed for large or complex companies that manage a large volume of payments where the remittance information is either missing or received separately from the payment.
Incomplete remittance information typically leads to an arduous and costly reconciliation process, explains Rodney Gardner, head of global receivables in Global Transaction Services at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "Our solution brings together AI, machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR), setting a new bar in accounts receivable reconciliation and payment matching"
The High Radius software helps to streamline the receivables-to-cash cycle by automatically identifying payers and associated remittance data which may be sent separetly. The remittance data is extracted and used to match payments to open receivables ready for uploading to client ERP system.
In cases where an invoice cannot be automatically matched, an exception portal allows the receivables staff to upload supporting data or make other adjustments to enable matching.
Clients can also set up automatically generated emails to payers, asking them to identify which invoices they wish to pay, and use an inbuilt dashboard to better understand payer behaviour and to assist in cash forecasting.
Hilani Kerr, head of North America Corporate Global Transaction Services at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says: "We are committed to working alongside fintech companies to bring more innovations like Intelligent Receivables to our clients, and create practical applications of new technology that will help them achieve greater efficiency and cost savings."
Intelligent Receivables is currently available in the United States and Canada. It will be rolled out to other countries and regions later this year.