Gresham, a leading provider of real-time financial transaction control and enterprise data integrity solutions, today announces an upgrade to its Account Receivables Management (Clareti ARM) offering. The proven ‘white label’ technology, which enables banks to offer receivables management services to their corporate customers, can now receive and process remittance advices, whether in email, excel, word or pdf format.

Remittance processing has traditionally been a manual, document heavy and time-consuming process. This problem has been exacerbated by the increase in data brought by digital processes, particularly Faster Payments. This near real-time movement of funds dramatically increases the speed of credit transfer from one account to another. However, this benefit is soon lost if the underlying transaction settlement infrastructure and remittance processes are not able to keep pace and provide the associated information equally quickly.

Clareti ARM combats this challenge through its integration with Enterprise Document Management Systems & Content Management Systems, allowing remittances to be both pushed and pulled from these systems for an auditable trail.

Banks must be able to pinpoint who each and every payment is to and from, and which invoice each payment refers to. Without this information, regulation often decrees that this money is sent back. Not only does this disrupt the streamlined experience for the customer, but it also presents a liquidity issue. Faced with Basel II capital adequacy requirements, financial institutions cannot afford to lose control over when they are able to release deposited money to clear. The intelligent engine in Clareti ARM can intelligently identify both who is paying and what they are paying for with the tiniest amount of remittance information. 

This automation – and continuous improvement through learning from how clerks manually match invoices to payment – is critical. The more quickly payments can be recognised, the faster credit risk is lowered and credit lines can be refreshed allowing more goods to be shipped. 

Neil Vernon, CTO, Gresham said, “Currently, most corporates and SMEs are relying on remittances because of an archaic payment infrastructure that is no longer fit for purpose. With 140 characters to identify each payment, it’s little wonder that it’s difficult to match and reconcile corporate invoices.

It’s not just the corporate that benefits from the insight delivered by Clareti ARM. For the first time a bank now has complete insight into the receivables process of its customers, bringing  the ability to price (e.g. invoice factoring) at the optimal level and build innovative insight based products.”

Bill Blythe, Gresham Business Development Director, said, “Since the financial crisis, Transaction Banking has emerged from the shadows and is now a strategic area of focus for many banks. As corporates are charged with more efficient management of working capital, liquidity and risk, banks are seizing the opportunity to maximise these ‘sticky relationships’, in line with regulatory requirements.  These developments present significant new revenue opportunities for the Transaction Bank.  The ability to automate and streamline the remittance advice process is a major development, allowing our banking partners to assist their corporate clients in eliminating unnecessary manual labour, and focus instead on strategic growth activities.”