Interfacing with Banks Worldwide
To supplement its expense management solution – Concur CTE – the global corporation had to implement an in-house capability for submitting reimbursement payments in each country where the corporation has affiliate offices. The company has adopted SWIFT payment protocol with ISO 20022 XML as a remittance format and had to work with several major banks in different regions of the world.
During the implementation, the team has faced several major challenges:
– each participating bank has implemented different subsets of that specification and even different treatments of the commonly used elements of the specification
– each bank operates within requirements of banking authority in each country including legal and cultural environment of those countries
– the selected transaction method has to be appropriate for the expense reimbursement
– collecting information: which information is available and known to people in the country and how to communicate that to employees, including validation requirements.
Our team was instrumental in collecting requirements from all banks for all required countries,
work with affiliate business units in each country to determine what information needs to be provided by the employee and translate those requirements to the detailed specification for the vendor to generate the appropriate ISO 20022 XML.
Besides internationally recognized formats for bank codes (SWIFT BIC) and account numbers (IBAN), each country has its own standards. Some countries require beneficiary’s personal identification such as Tax ID.
The team has designed and developed the dynamic rule-based solution that prompts for relevant banking information using local terminology, specific validation rules and localized user interface. Such guided process allowed for speeding up the registration process, significant reduction of support calls, and ensured the banking information is correct hence improving the flow of reimbursement payments.