For treasury, collecting statements from multiple banking relationships can be a challenging, manual, costly and time-intensive process. For corporates to remain competitive, the necessity to operate globally has never been more important. Typically, this means you’re faced with managing multiple banking partnerships across the world.

The collection of data in different formats, in different regions, from numerous channels such as SWIFT, bank portals and ftp connections when dealing with large statement volumes with a lack of automation inevitably leads to significant risk and margin for error. The challenges are then compounded further by the impact of increased pressure on ensuring greater auditing and controls are in place, therefore requiring even more resources and time to complete these additional manual checks.

It’s surprising that such high-value data is still being managed using manual processes and archaic control measures while needing to ensure utmost security and adherence to rigorous compliance requirements when simpler, more efficient and cost-effective solutions are available in the market.

As a business-critical function, account statement collection services shouldn’t be the source of any risk, unnecessary cost or burden on your operations. No corporate is the same, but everyone would relish access and visibility of core bank connectivity and statement collection services in one place.

By implementing SWIFT, corporates can benefit from a single highly secure and reliable window to communicate with their banking partners. However, subscribing directly to SWIFT comes with a host of avoidable charges such as BIC maintenance costs, bank onboarding fees, the need to heavily investment in IT infrastructure, ongoing connectivity maintenance and messaging costs.

Every corporate needs to pay a BIC cost to SWIFT to maintain the BIC. On top of that, bank reporting fees can pile up during a project as a one-time fee to set up the channel with recurring fees charged for the ongoing service typically dependent on the number of bank accounts and volume.

Corporates don’t have to subscribe to SWIFT to pay these charges or go through any of the audit or compliance upheaval on their own, however. There is a simpler solution allowing for a single subscription for a small monthly fee to access all statements via one place without any BIC costs.

Treasury and payment solutions require secure and reliable connections to banking partners. A SWIFT services bureau will collect intraday or end of statements from multiple correspondent banks, delivering them directly into corporates backend systems on their behalf. Fully managed solutions bring the benefits of using the SWIFT services bureau’s secure and resilient technology and their own BIC, therefore reducing both risk and operational costs drastically.

If you’re looking closely at margins across your business to identify opportunities to reduce your costs and increase efficiencies while significantly reducing risk, consider looking at your account statement collection services.