The advantages of openness are obvious. Secure, open data connectivity facilitates speed and better, more informed decision-making, encouraging innovation—and stimulating competition for improved services. All of which are key pieces to digital transformation.
You can’t get this enriched data from anywhere else except a bank API—not from bank statements or other channels of connectivity or technology. But it can be difficult for corporates to connect or integrate to bank APIs from their internal systems, especially when they have multiple banks.
Consider the API challenge. The instructions for building a single API connection are often thousands of pages long. That one connection requires an army of resources: skilled third-party software developers, millions in development dollars, and many months of design, testing, reiteration and implementation. And that single connection does not cover all relevant client account data, but is limited to balances or payments or transactions—not the entirety of the account!
Worse, virtually no treasury is confined to one bank partner; most do business with many, demanding multiple bank transaction APIs across financial institutions.
As a consequence of these complexities, treasurers remain frustrated. Without immediate access to real-time data from multiple accounts, they lack a timely single source of truth and the ability to improve their financial data. Drowning in a sea of accounts, providers, banks and finance systems, they rely on manual, time-consuming work-arounds to acquire even the most basic of insights—like their current available balance—to fulfill their most basic duties, such as making payments or moving cash between businesses.
Of course, treasurers have much more to do than basic transactions. But without a simple way to connect to bank APIs, they continue to tread water when they would prefer to be navigating their institution’s finances.