Bank of America Optimizes AP Supplier Payment Channels

Bank of America is rolling out a new solution for professionals in accounts payable departments to automatically choose which payment method to pay their suppliers.

An announcement issued late last week said Bank of America is launching its Accounts Payable Optimization offering, a tool that analyzes corporate clients’ supplier basis to decide which payment method is most appropriate for which vendor. The solution supports commercial card, wire, and ACH payment rails, or can also initiate supply chain financing for invoice payments.

Bank of America will initiate payments based on that analysis, using its Bank of America Merrill’s Card, Payments, Supply Chain Finance and FX Payments offerings.

According to BofA Merrill Head of Channels and Global Commercial Banking for Global Transaction Services Hubert J.P. Jolly, the solution addresses the challenge that accounts payable professionals face when manually analyzing their supplier payment needs and preferences.

“Besides releasing our clients’ treasury teams from manual tasks, the tool delivers actionable data that helps improve a company’s own cash flow and supplier relationships,” he said.

Corporates using the tool will upload a single file for all treasury payables, including supply chain finance invoices, via the BofA Merrill’s CashPro Connect file payments platform.

Bank of America noted that its Accounts Payable Optimization solution was first piloted earlier this year with select corporate clients, and is now available to all corporate customers of the bank.

Last month Bank of America announced that it was joining the blockchain-powered Marco Polo platform to enable supply chain financing for its business customers.

Last year, Bank of America’s Jolly spoke with PYMNTS for its March B2B API Tracker, explaining the opportunities of APIs to support B2B payments optimization.

“In the past, clients would have to manually download the same data every day and rearrange it so they could track it in whichever format they typically use,” he said. “Now, they can just call upon those APIs and download the data in whatever format they want to use. That’s a better service experience for our clients.”