Cash managers who had decided the "e" in eBAM stood for "eventually" can take heart. "We've reached the floodgate moment," says Dan Gill, director of corporate solutions for Weiland/Open Solutions, a tech vendor for bank account management in Bannockburn, Ill. "The testing is done. The message formats are set. And live, production-level messages will be moving by January."

Open Solutions is implementing its first electronic bank account management (eBAM) client, a large insurance company, using SWIFT to communicate with three banks—J.P. Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Gill reports. "We picked this company to be the pioneer, and we have a line of others ready to follow quickly. A lot of the 100 clients using our eBAM-ready BAweb™ solution are ready to go, but we'll pace the implementations and add more banks when they are ready."

Traffic started a few years ago on banks' proprietary eBAM platforms, but Open Solutions is introducing multibank connectivity through SWIFT, using Fundtech as its service bureau, Gill explains. "More treasuries are moving to adopt eBAM and SWIFT in tandem and sending the messages over the SWIFT network," he says.