Bain Warns Of $150B Missed Opportunity For Banks

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Financial institutions that don’t accelerate their implementation of blockchain technology are exposing themselves to the threat of falling behind the competition, according to a new analysis from Bain.

The consulting firm released its report late last week as a warning to banks, as many of those that have invested resources into exploring the technology have yet to actually move from an experimental phase to making use of the tools they develop.

“The wave of investment in digital currency startups clearly signals that payments channels are attracting a new degree of interest, and new competitors are changing customer expectations,” said David Gunn, who leads Bain’s EMEA payments team. “Innovation is upon us, and doing nothing is not a viable option. Now is the time for banks to move from experimentation to action.”

Being left behind could be costly for these banks, Bain also found.

According to the firm, FIs stand to lose out on $150 billion in revenue. The biggest areas of opportunity remain in cross-border payments and trade finance.

The latter, which yields about $23 billion in revenue for banks across the globe, according to Bain, poses a chance for banks to switch from manual, expensive and error-ridden letters of credit to a more streamlined, secure and efficient distributed ledger.

While the benefits of distributed ledgers have been much discussed, Bain concluded that actual tools using blockchain for international payments and trade finance remain in their early stages as banks remain challenged by scaling the technology, along with uncertainties surrounding digital currencies and privacy issues.

“Change will not come easily for banks,” said Bain Global Payments Head Glen Williams. “They recognize that distributed ledger technology has the potential to improve the speed, transparency and efficiency with which payments are made, but the current market structure gives them a powerful incentive to stay the course.”

Stampli to Roll Out Procure-to-Pay Solution

Stampli

Stampli introduced a procure-to-pay solution that brings all procurement processes, documents and conversations between finance team members, employees and vendors together in one workflow.

The new Stampli Procure-to-Pay software provides a single platform that includes purchase requests, purchase order (PO) creation, invoice processing, payments and discussions, the company said in a Thursday (Jan. 30) press release.

The solution will be made generally available to all Stampli’s accounts payable (AP) automation customers during the first quarter, according to the release.

“Everything happens within Stampli: Every step, every approval, every budget review and every conversation, in perfect harmony with your ERP,” Stampli CEO and co-founder Eyal Feldman said in the release.

Stampli Procure-to-Pay is designed to eliminate the challenges finance teams face when dealing with disconnected systems and conversations that take place across email, chat and meetings, according to the release.

The platform supports any type of purchase request, automatically creates POs in the user’s ERP, provides dynamic and fixed approval workflows, delivers real-time budget tracking and validation, and offers a complete audit trail across all activities, the release said.

Like all Stampli products, the procure-to-pay platform is powered by the company’s artificial intelligence copilot, Billy the Bot, per the release. In this case, the AI copilot has a newly added ability to transform free-text employee requests into the structured data required by finance.

“Stampli adapts to your processes and implements in weeks, not months, giving you complete control without disrupting your business,” Feldman said in the release.

Most retailers and manufacturers are either already investing in upgrades to their procurement technology or planning to do so, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Digital Payments: Modernizing Procurement Processes.”

The report found that 31% of retailers and 42% of manufacturers are investing in procurement technology, and another 53% of retailers and 44% of manufacturers plan to do so.

In another development in this space, FISCAL Technologies and Proservartner said in December that they partnered to offer tools and consultancy services to help organizations reduce payment errors, supplier fraud and inefficiencies within procure-to-pay processes.

In October, Spendesk launched a procure-to-pay solution that it said was designed alongside the company’s existing spend management platform and provides a fully integrated procurement and spend management tool for European small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

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