Apps are a critical part of treasury’s shift to mobile banking, argues Chad Wallace, head of commercial digital channels at Capital One.
As many as 67% of treasurers and corporate finance professionals said they were particularly interested in improving their mobile banking capabilities, in a recent Capital One survey.
This year, 38% of survey participants reported that everyone in their finance department could complete finance functions from their mobile devices on a regular basis, compared to 23% in Capital One’s 2016 survey.
“More people are using mobile applications in their consumer lives, and feel comfortable with security features and user interfaces. This comfort level has lessened the resistance in the corporate world to mobile apps,” Wallace tells GTNews.
“The growth in broad mobile acceptance has driven the availability of more mobile products for the corporate environment that provide both security and ease of use.
“Apps are a critical part of the shift to mobile banking,” he says.
This demand for mobile services is no surprise. Last week, China’s Alipay announced that 80% of its online payments in 2017 were done via mobile. It has 520 million users in China – around 37% of the country’s population.
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In 2017, 53% of corporate finance professionals planned to implement new treasury management products and services, the survey found.
Wallace expects this to continue in 2018.
“We expect to see continued investment in mobile applications and client facing APIs,” says Wallace.
“Thanks to responsive web design, it has become easier to build out mobile apps that are part of their core web platform than just a few years ago.
“Regional banks are benefiting from the lower cost of entry that responsive web offers to build mobile apps. Larger banks are increasing their investment in native applications, which offer a wide breadth of security and usability features,” he adds.
While strides are being made to make corporate finance operate in real-time, without the technology to do so, treasuries will not be able to do this.
“Many treasuries are using payment rails that settle in batch so therefore some parts of their liquidity management will continue to be less than real-time”
For example, many treasuries are using payment rails that settle in batch so therefore some parts of their liquidity management will continue to be less than real-time.
“As transaction volume continues to move to more real-time alternative rails we will see an increase in the need to support the real-time reconciliation processes,” predicts Wallace.
“We have seen an increase in clients looking to create efficiencies leveraging automation.
“Clients are asking for more innovative ways, such as APIs, to transact with the bank and security continues to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind to protect sensitive data,” he added.