SunGard’s AvantGard launches new Web-based eBam product.
It took a while for eBam to be realized but it certainly isn’t taking long for service providers to bring their eBam products to market. The latest entrant is SunGard’s AvantGard, which today announced the launch of its new Web-based tool for companies to manage their bank accounts.
For many treasurers, eBam, or electronic bank account management, is mana from heaven because of its ability to modernize the archaically manual and paper-intensive processes associated with opening, maintaining and closing bank accounts—a major source of pain for treasurers and bankers, too. After years of talk, the much hoped-for and much-hyped eBam finally came to fruition in 2009 via a consortium of banks, corporations and tech companies that worked together with SWIFT, starting in 2007 (see related story here), to develop a messaging infrastructure within the SWIFT environment to bring paperless automation to bank account management. By late 2009 it had arrived with SWIFT had announcing that arrival in 2010. Companies have quickly jumped in to eBam development, including IT2 and Wall Street Systems, which acquired Web-based bank account management provider Speranza in April (see related story here).
Now enter SunGard, through its AvantGard unit. AvantGard said its eBAM product will help corporations connect to their banks via Echos, its EcoSystem communication service, in order to route messages and facilitate the automation of bank account management. In its press release, the company the offering can be used with or without SWIFT connectivity and is delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that is built on SunGard’s Infinity Application Framework. With this, the company said it will introduce “standard workflows and formats for corporations and banks to leverage when opening, amending, closing and maintaining up-to-date mandate and signatory information for bank accounts.”
The promise of eBam is exciting and a smooth process will certainly save banks and corporations loads of time and money. However, as always when it comes to researching the capabilities of any new system, it’s always prudent to give the literature a good read. In an eBam system, treasury will want a robust “full eBam facilities” and not just simple bank account reporting.