Standard Chartered has tapped the SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity solution and joined as a member bank, aiming to offer an enhanced experience to corporate clients in meeting their transactional banking needs, simplifying the onboarding process, and delivering both traditional and new banking services in real time.
Over the last decade, corporates have demanded more from their banks in terms of connectivity, interface, and the amount of information received to support the integration with their enterprise resource planning, treasury and cash management needs. The global pandemic has further accelerated the shift to digital banking, resulting in a greater need for both corporates and their banking partners to automate and support real time payments.
SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity is a software-as-a-service cloud solution natively integrated to SAP S/4HANA and SAP ERP which is targeted at simplifying connectivity and automating financial transactions between businesses and their financial institutions. By joining the community, Standard Chartered’s clients who are already part of the corporate network can be onboarded into a digital experience including end-to-end payment processes, automated reconciliation, and real time updated cash position.
Standard Chartered is also among the pioneering banks supporting application programming interface (API) with SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity, which aims to offer on-demand real time debit and credit notification when cash is received by clients in their banking account, and trigger a subsequent workflow to replenish a customer’s credit line to enable new purchases or for goods shipment to occur.
Philip Panaino, Global Head, Cash Management at Standard Chartered, said: “We are excited to be a part of the SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity offering, and bring the ease and security of digital connectivity to our clients in an ecosystem that they are already a part of. This collaboration extended beyond historical connectivity to include our first API-enabled account notifications functionality via the SAP corporate-to-bank channel, and we are not stopping here - we will continue to explore a wide variety of use cases where APIs can deliver greater agility, speed and productivity for our corporate clients and partners.”
Eileen Chua, Managing Director, SAP Singapore said: “In this era of the ‘never normal’, organisations like Standard Chartered have embraced a cloud-first mindset to truly become an intelligent enterprise to support its business transformation strategy, and to drive sustainable, inclusive growth as financial ecosystems increasingly becomes more competitive.”
Chua added: “With SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity solution, Standard Chartered can better achieve its goals of leveraging the power of the cloud and a robust digital core, streamlining and automating communications with banks around the world, and simplifying treasury operations and better managing its cash assets.”
Innovation is core to Standard Chartered’s strategy, as outlined at the Bank’s Innovation & Digitisation event on how it is shifting investment to new platforms, partnerships and ventures that will shape the future of the business. The Bank has expanded its relationship with the SAP ecosystem following a strategic collaboration with SAP Ariba in 2019, that intended to build on its ability to offer clients access to an on demand treasury experience within their existing environment and drive rapid adoption of its comprehensive suite of APIs.