SunGard AvantGard's new electronic bank account management (eBam) offering, AvantGard eBAM, not only gives companies a tool to handle the tasks associated with maintaining multiple bank accounts, but also provides a connection to SWIFT, the nonprofit financial messaging consortium.

“The eBAM solution has the connectivity built in,” says Michael Shields, vice president of product management at SunGard AvantGard. “It is part of our Echos connectivity hub.”

The built-in connectivity means companies that use SunGard's solution don't have to go to the trouble of establishing a direct connection to SWIFT or selecting a service bureau to provide the connection. “We take that pain point away,” Shields says, adding, “It's a faster-entry model, so it's cheaper for corporates.”

Corporations often have hundreds or even thousands of bank accounts, and the paperwork associated with those accounts can pile up. So there's a great deal of interest in eBam software, which promises to manage that work, together with SWIFT's electronic bank account management message set.

Shields notes that while companies are eager, many banks have yet to do the work necessary to automate the processes involved in bank account management. But AvantGard eBAM takes that situation into account.

“We built this in a way that a corporation can onboard their banks when their banks say they're ready,” he says. The SunGard solution lets a company distinguish between banks that should be sent communications formatted in XML and banks that still need the information sent to them in PDF form, Shields says.

AvantGard eBAM is a Web-based offering that can be used in conjunction with SunGard treasury systems, other treasury workstations or other types of enterprise software, Shields said. The monthly subscription fee for the product will take into account both the number of users at the company and the number of active bank accounts that it has.

The extent to which a company will find electronic bank account management software handy depends on how many bank accounts it has and how many staff members it can devote to these tasks, Shields says, adding, “If you have upwards of five-plus people and 20 or more banks, you could certainly benefit from a solution such as this.”