This autumn to coincide with the conference season, there were a number of presentations and Press Releases by the banks and corporates progress of eBAM - electronic Bank Account Management.

At the Association of Finance Professionals annual conference Microsoft and P&G presented with Citi's Sabine Mcintosh on 'Realizing Efficiency: Utilizing eBAM in Shared Service Centres'. They reported their experiences:

• Citi recommended:
  • one solution will not fit all clients or countries
  • companies need to implement bank account management first and later, only when it is cost-effective, implement the 'e' in eBAM - the digital identities
• Microsoft showed how:
  • it is essential in a centralised treasury to distinguish between bank account signer and authoriser roles
  • they were able to reduce time taken in the signature cycle
• P&G showed how they are using eBAM to manage the signatory changes (most of which are due to personnel changes at the SSC).

Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) reported on their successful eBAM pilot with IBM. As part of the pilot, IBM created account opening and maintenance requests using standardised XML messages, signed these messages using digital signatures and sent  them to RBS via the SWIFT eBAM web portal.

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Key feature of these reports is that even Citi, the most enthusiastic of eBAM believers, recommends implementing BAM first and then eBAM.