Glen Solimine, who founded the electronic bank account management (eBAM) software provider Speranza, has signed on at J.P. Morgan Treasury Services as executive director for its eBAM product set. Solimine joins the bank from treasury software vendor Wall Street Systems, which purchased Speranza in 2010.
EBAM, which aims to automate the paper-intensive process of managing corporate accounts, has been a hot topic over the last couple of years, but has yet to be extensively adopted. But Solimine says the work that has b
een done thus far by banks, companies and technology vendors should bear fruit in 2012.
"We've done a lot of pilot testing, so this year is all about production and getting those customers, the innovators, into production now so they can use it on a daily basis," he says.
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In January, J.P. Morgan Treasury Services said it had successfully completed its eBAM central utility pilot with three clients: MetLife, Fujitsu and SWIFT Treasury.
Solimine points out that companies need to have a good handle on their bank accounts globally before adopting eBAM, which might involve consolidating information from a number of different spreadsheets or databases into a single platform. "That kind of box has been checked for a number of companies," he says. "They're in a position now where they can start executing on eBAM."
But he cautions that while big banks are ready for eBAM, many smaller ones are not, which means companies will be working in a "mixed environment" initially. "A large global corporation that might do business with 100 or so banks around the world, their lead banks may be really ready now for eBam, but a lot of times they still have to deal with the smaller banks, whose adoption might not be there now," he says. "That part of the process is still going to be manual."
"The value of eBAM grows as people start adopting it and I think that's the phase we're in now," Solimine adds.
Meanwhile, SWIFT and the banks continue to work on eBAM standards. "One of the challenges is there's still a lot of the information that comes through in attachments, PDFs," Solimine says. "What we're focusing on in the next iteration is, how do we get some of that information out of the PDFs and into XML, the computer-ready part of the standard?"
For Treasury & Risk's most recent look at the state of electronic bank account management, see Shaping EBAM Standards.
And here's a video interview with Glen Solimine from the 2011 AHA Summit.
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Susan Kelly
Susan Kelly is a business journalist who has written for Treasury & Risk, FierceCFO, Global Finance, Financial Week, Bridge News and The Bond Buyer.
