Bank of America has debuted an analytics tool for its CashPro digital banking platform.
CashPro Insights, announced Tuesday (Jan. 9), is designed to let the bank’s corporate and commercial clients glean insights that help them make more informed treasury decisions.
“In treasury and cash management, data continues to be an untapped resource that has the potential to reveal trends, weaknesses or opportunities,” Jennifer Sanctis , head of CashPro App, said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.
“This potential can only be realized when data is thoughtfully organized and analyzed, which is the key objective of CashPro Insights.”
According to the release, one of the first features of CashPro Insights is the Security Insight, which is displayed as a “security meter” that assesses and then makes recommendations on how user can improve their security controls. From there, users can complete a recommended task within the platform by clicking the “CashPro Click to Action” commands.
Bank of America says CashPro facilitated 340 million client payments in 2023, up 8% from the prior year, “with each one carrying a robust amount of transactional data.”
The release of CashPro Insights follows September’s announcement that Bank of America had added new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to the platform.
“Finance teams today need access to information quickly, at any time of day, and from any location. Whatever we can do to eliminate friction will help them respond better and faster to real-time events and demands,” Tom Durkin, the bank’s global product head of CashPro in Global Transaction Services, said at the time. “This latest enhancement to CashPro Chat is a great demonstration of how we’re doing just that.”
CashPro’s newest update follows a year in which many businesses found themselves under financial pressures. For example, the first nine months of 2023 saw nearly 1,500 small businesses filed for bankruptcy under Subchapter V, almost as many as in the entirety of 2022.
“The need for capital continues to be strong, even urgent,” PYMNTS wrote in November, noting that past research had shown that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) “have had trouble tapping sources of credit.”
In fact, 53% of SMBs reported having no access to credit, a problem felt more acutely by the smallest of small businesses: Among companies with $150,000 or less in annual revenue, the lack of access exceeds 64%.
And only about a third of the more than 500 SMB owners interviewed by PYMNTS said they had access to both business and personal funds.