The solution is built on the Open Payments Platform, which enables corporate customers to manage any type of payment through their payments portal with Fifth Third, ranging from account transfers to – over time – international and domestic ACH and wire transactions. This provides customers with one view on all payments initiated through the portal and it allows for approval workflows to be shared across payment types.

Fifth Third equally benefits by being able to manage all payment types for these clients through one single application, whilst facilitating smooth integration with payment execution systems across the various payment channels. The project went live in October 2013 to a limited client base with account transfers first, followed by ACH and wire. A full-scale roll out to their 16,000 medium and large business customers started in April of this year. This implementation is viewed by both parties as the cornerstone project upon which the bank will continue to build toward a data-enriched, channel agnostic, single view on customer transactions of any type.

Jeff Siekman, Director of Payments Products at Fifth Third, commented, “As the Curious Bank, we strive to reflect our customers’ needs in our payments strategy. As customers seek ways to streamline payment operations and grow working capital, our payment strategy has evolved. We have focused on streamlining the payment initiation processes, capturing payment history and using this data to build better decision support tools. This allows our customers to more effectively manage their payment trends, operations and working capital across their business units. FIS Clear2Pay Open Payments framework has been a natural fit with our payments strategy, providing the payment initiation framework and flexibility necessary to deliver on our integrated payments strategy.”

Doug Gross, General Manager Americas for Clear2Pay, concluded, “We have always enjoyed a tremendous working relationship with this large regional bank, headquartered in Ohio, which puts a strong emphasis on customer centricity. Our FIS Clear2Pay Open Payment Framework and the applications derived of this state-of-the-art technology are uniquely built to enable customer facing organizations to offer more insight, lower costs and enhanced flexibility in an era when consumerization reigns supreme in all walks of life, from booking air travel to doing business payments at work.”