Beyond the Bank: Bank of America’s Strategic Shift to FinTech Collaboration

Digital innovation has sharpened the knife of inertia, and the collaboration between traditional banks and FinTech companies is becoming crucial for competitive differentiation.

The partnership between banks and FinTechs allows each party to focus on its core strengths. Banks can continue to offer the right products and services, while enterprise resource planning (ERP) and treasury management system (TMS) providers can optimize their own software solutions.

“Companies can remain focused on running and growing their business without spending a ton of time on technical bank integration,” Meg Garand, head of CashPro Payments and CashPro API at Bank of America, told PYMNTS.

Business needs around data reporting and payments have never been greater, making simplifying the integration of solutions that can support those needs crucial to growth.

“When we think about cash flow and the payment insights and other insights that clients can have based on their transactional data through API, that same data is integrated into the client’s ERP and TMS, so the insight can be gained within their ecosystem as well,” Garand said.

Bank of America’s CashPro team has evolved its approach to partnering with FinTechs over the past three years, and according to Garand, a key driver of this evolution is a customer-centric strategy that focuses on understanding and addressing client needs.

“Our clients’ experiences are core to our strategy,” she said. “We want to ensure that clients have easy access to meet their working capital needs, and faster integration with cash flow really enables those capabilities and puts them right there at their fingertips.”

Garand noted that Bank of America’s CashPro team serves over 40,000 business clients, ranging from small businesses to global multinational companies. It has partnered with large-scale ERP and TMS providers across the globe as part of its CashPro network. This network simplifies integration for clients, meeting their data reporting and payments needs efficiently.

Despite the benefits, establishing and maintaining these partnerships between banks and FinTechs comes with challenges. Given the wealth of options populating the landscape, prioritization is an issue, as it involves selecting the right providers to partner with based on the greatest potential benefit to end customers.

“We rely on our clients to advise us here to tell us where we should prioritize our resources and what we want to bring to market to best meet their needs,” Garand said. “Our goal is to serve our mutual clients and to ensure that we outline a path toward the integration that ultimately leads to client adoption so that they can see those benefits.”

“We also want to make sure that we are in alignment with the ERP and the TMS providers’ strategic roadmap,” she added. “Much discussion goes into making sure that we’ve got that alignment and that we are truly focused on the right ones.”

One of the most compelling benefits of successful partnerships between financial institutions and FinTechs is how they can shorten implementation timelines and roadmaps.

As Garand said, “shortening the ‘yes’ to ‘use’ timeframe” (from agreement to implementation) tops many end-customer wish lists when it comes to digital transformation.

“A typical client is one that is focused on having their data reporting automatically fed into the ERP or TMS,” she said, noting that while, historically, that process has taken four to six weeks, “we’ve had numerous clients go live with current-day reporting and/or previous-day reporting across all of their accounts within one week.”

“The time saving is absolutely huge,” Garand added.

The ease of integration provided by bank and FinTech collaborations also results in the reduction of manual work, allowing staff to focus on strategic efforts. Garand noted, as an example, one entertainment company that was previously spending 10 days on monthly reconciliations and can now complete the process in two and a half days because of the integration of CashPro API with its ERP system. This automation not only saves time but also allows staff to allocate their efforts toward more value-added activities.

Ultimately, the collaboration between traditional banks and FinTech companies represents a step toward scaling digital innovation in the financial industry. By using each other’s strengths, banks and FinTechs can provide superior solutions, streamline processes and deliver enhanced value to their clients.

Looking ahead, Garand emphasized the importance of banks not just as providers of products and services but also as advisors and consultants, helping clients improve automation and adopt the right payment technologies.