The B2 Group, provider of financial systems integration solutions announced today, its advanced Multi-Bank Integrator™ automated banking platform for corporate cash and treasury management will now integrate with a number of African banks.

Whilst individual African banks often offer excellent on-line or file based payments integration and reporting services, comprehensive treasury automation with multiple banks in multiple countries has traditionally been a challenge for companies. A roll-out to banks in a number of different African countries planned by the B2 Group (themselves no newcomers to the African transaction banking landscape), commencing Q2 2016, will help overcome that challenge. Multi-Bank, which offers powerful cash management capability by integrating seamlessly with TMS or ERP systems, provides automatic payments and statements processing with major banks in Europe.

Multi-Bank users will now also be able to access African banks to gain a more complete picture of their treasury operations. The flexible and open underlying Multi-Bank technical architecture, developed over two decades (and most recently with African requirements in mind), breaks down traditional barriers to comprehensive banking integration by overcoming issues such as network stability, lack of standardisation or cost of deployment. Multi-Bank can be run on-site or accessed as a fully hosted service, can communicate securely across any network (SWIFT, Internet etc.), and is very much designed to complement a company’s or bank’s existing payments systems rather than replacing them. With Multi-Bank, existing IT investment is enhanced rather than needing to be thrown away, companies without a full ERP or TMS solution can still effectively utilise the service, and minimal IT infrastructure is needed.

“At B2 we have serviced the African market for a number of years now, on-boarding household name corporates for our banking clients. That experience has been key to the way we have adapted Multi-Bank for the particular banking integration needs of African companies. This is in turn good news for those companies’ corporate treasurers, who, regardless of how many banks they deal with or where those banks are, can now enjoy simplified banking independence, automation and control. And the combination of our local African partners and easily accessed business and technical expertise at B2’s centres of excellence means a powerful, cost-effective and easy to use service”, comments Phil Boland, CEO, The B2 Group.

“ITQ Business Solutions has enjoyed a successful partnership with B2 for a number of years now, delivering value to banks and corporates in Africa through the combination of our strong banking and IT solutions capability and in-depth expertise with B2’s market-leading software products. Our staff are fully trained to deploy the latest B2 technology and we watch the on-going Africa focused evolution of B2’s payments systems with interest, keen to further help our clients gain benefit from these exciting new developments,” noted Marc Schrader, Managing Director, ITQ Business Solutions, Johannesburg (South African distributor of B2 software and services)

Early adopter participating African banks have now been confirmed for linkage to Multi-Bank from April 2016 onwards, and B2 staff will be available to give an in-depth view of the advantages the service can offer companies operating in Africa at the forthcoming ‘EuroFinance Effective Finance & Treasury in Africa’ conference in London on 8 March 2016. For more information please contact Anthony Campbell at The B2 Group.