Is There A Pressing Need for Mobile Commercial Payments?
From a consumer perspective, I wholeheartedly believe mobile is a necessary service channel. I am all about mobile, but we are not hearing a pressing need from the wholesale banking community to provide a commercial payments framework on the mobile platform. Outside of commercial cards and check, ACH and wire transfer are the minimum payment mechanisms ripe for web services. Banks need to offer a comprehensive online commercial payments solution to the corporate customers they serve. We discussed strategies to extend mobile services for commercial banking in our payments webinar on Wednesday. You can view the on-demand webinar and the presentation on Slideshare here.
If a bank has a wholesale banking division, commercial online payments is a recommended service you must offer, if you don’t already offer it today. Even if commercial payments are presently an online services offering with your bank, you must ensure it is functionally comprehensive and structured to manage down cost along with risk to the bank. Different methodologies can be used to implement new commercial payment functions or redesign your current online capabilities. Hence, I won’t discuss methodologies concerning project management and software development. 
To ensure your service offering is comprehensive, the following components are recommended:
Pre-Planning: Creating a blueprint of the functions (consumer and bank-facing) your commercial web payments platform will provide is essential to getting the business and IT on the same page.
Business Functions: Leverage business experts who understand the operating attributes of payments such as FedWire and ACH Operating Guidelines. The payment functions should incorporate a workflow capability for corporate users to initiative, review and approve payments which will vary depending on the role of the corporate user.
Administrative Functions: To manage down costs to the Bank, an administrative console for enabling bank customer’s to manage personnel involved in the workflow, user roles, payment threshold relating to user roles, alerting, .
Security: Of course the session with the bank must be secure, but the online services framework also needs an entitlements framework so that personnel from the same company are not using the same account for sign-in to initiate, review and approve payments.
Fraud Prevention: Including a capability to prevent fraud in payments is essential and usually too complex to build in house. These platforms typically incorporate predictive analytics models and engines to work with two dimension models.
Payment Hub: Integrating with FedWire and the ACH Operator will require technology that can “glue” your online platform to these external service providers. Ranging from proprietary technology to open source capabilities, the bank’s information technology team should design and implement a cost effective solution.
