Lloyds and Virgin Atlantic Develop Host2Host Banking Solution
Lloyds Bank Corporate Markets has developed and implemented a cost saving Host2Host banking solution for Virgin Atlantic, in partnership with enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider Bellin.
First-to-market with the forward thinking cash management product, the company has worked with Virgin Atlantic to create a streamlined system for its UK BACS payments that harmonises and integrates the nine varied ERP systems used by the transatlantic travel company globally.
Implemented within six months, Host2Host operates across Virgin Atlantic’s multiple business units and locations and uses a centralised Bellin solution as a single payment gateway to standardise the different file formats created by the company’s multiple ERP systems.
Through this single payment gateway, Virgin Atlantic’s ERP systems converse natively with Lloyds’ transactional banking process using SWIFTNet to provide connectivity.
Triggered by the discontinuation of Virgin Atlantic’s existing solution for UK BACS payments and collections, Host2Host has delivered a wide range of benefits for the company, from creating a streamlined payment approval and release process to increasing cash flow visibility for group treasury and providing more in-depth transaction and incident reporting. The system’s streamlined approach, speed and efficiency have enabled Virgin Atlantic to significantly reduce administrative and operational costs by a predicted £100,000 per annum.
Edward Collis, group treasurer at Virgin Atlantic, said: “The number one thing for us in replacing our legacy BACS system was the need to ensure that whatever solution we selected allowed us to achieve the standardisation of payment processing without duplication of effort and with leveraging our ERP system. We have now realised a number of significant project benefits as a result of Host2Host. It’s saving a huge amount of time in terms of our processes internally and our administrative costs have dropped dramatically as we’ve been able to move away from a lot of the manual processes that we were doing previously.
“We have had very positive feedback from our users since implementation and this is enabling us to drive better business processes in payroll and accounts payable. We have reduced system changes, as we’ve moved away from a system that we were running in house to a hosted system, and, by implementing alongside it a contingency payment channel, we have also reduced our ‘single point of failure’,” he added.