U.S. Bank today announced the availability of their payment application that enables clients to integrate their SAP enterprise resource planning software with U.S. Bank's payment origination services. The U.S. Bank claim that the SAP Consolidated Payables Link application is the first bank downloadable, consolidated payables application.

Developed by SAP, the SAP Consolidated Payables Link alleviates the need for organizations to spend scarce IT resources on file formats and custom interfaces between the SAP ERP application and their bank in order to originate payments. The single-payment instruction file is designed to contain any combination of check, Automated Clearing House (ACH), wire transfer and virtual card payments.

---

This good example of SAP's strategy to connect their ERP users with their bank - direct or via their Financial Services Network, avoiding the need for SWIFT and/or any SWIFT service bureau or any other intermediary. This is huge, more to come in due course, but the numbers are on SAP's side: they have 186K ERP users while SWIFT has just 1K corporate users!!!