Goodbye swivel chair, hello next-gen bank integrations: How CommercePayments^® is transforming corporate finance processes.

It’s time for the swivel chair to go the way of the green eyeshade in company finance departments.

Just as better office lighting eliminated the need for a special visor to lessen eye strain, new technology means employees no longer must log in to multiple systems to manage their financial operations, often spinning their chairs between two or more workstations. Now, employees can work more efficiently with a cohesive system tied directly to their company’s bank.

The CommercePayments^® team, specializing in everything from simple payments process enhancements to full-scale automation tools, has been investing heavily in innovations that continue to optimize the experience of its business customers. It is redefining business banking through new products packed with data integration capabilities and an ongoing commitment to research and development, exceptional user experiences and rigorous security measures.

“Integration is top-of-mind as we’re building our future strategies,” said Chris Wiedenmann, SVP and director of product management. “The days of swivel chair accounting are over.”

Next-generation data integration

The key to this transformation lies in the data integration capabilities of CommercePayments^®. “We offer a range of payments and treasury management tools to streamline business customers’ payables and receivables processes. Application programming interfaces (APIs) and batch file transfers enable smooth, real-time data transfers between us and our customers’ business systems,” said Wiedenmann.

For example, Commerce Connections® Direct facilitates integration between the enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other accounting systems of the company and Commerce’s payments and embedded banking services. This allows a finance team to pay bills via multiple payment methods quickly, see the status of payments in real-time, streamline their reconciliation process and automate journal entries.

“Our goal is to make it easier for customers by either creating a new data parser on our side, allowing a native file format from a customer’s ERP to transfer, or by working with APIs to integrate directly into that ERP,” said Tom Gregar, SVP of product management for CommercePayments^®. “It creates an ‘Easy Button’ so a customer doesn’t have to do anything other than press that button, and all the payment data comes to us. Then, we can make the payments on their behalf.”

Next up in its innovation cycle, the CommercePayments^® team is finalizing a Visa+^® integration for its PreferPay^® system, which helps businesses that need to pay consumers. PreferPay® automates the life cycle management of payments in situations such as insurance companies that need to pay claims, governments that need to disburse subsidies, or law firms that need to pass along settlement payments, among many other uses. It offers consumers a choice of how they receive their funds: direct to a debit card, direct deposit or even paper checks and, with the Visa+ integration, to their preferred digital wallet.

It will allow money to be sent to a Visa+ tag, which can then be transferred to a consumer’s digital wallet, such as Venmo, PayPal or Cash App. That way, the business can get money to consumers in the form they prefer without having to integrate with each digital wallet platform.

Security first

Maintaining robust security and compliance standards is one of the most critical steps for any business looking to eliminate swivel-chair accounting. The CommercePayments^® technology team keeps this at the forefront of their integration work, Wiedenmann said.

“Integrations aren’t easy,” he said. “They’re always more complicated than it seems on the surface, and when you pair that with the security and fraud mitigation that we have in place with our customers, it can make the integration much more complicated. When we move millions or billions of dollars, everything must be right.”

Investment in research and development

To enhance its API strategy, CommercePayments^® is currently building an outward-facing developer platform. This platform will serve as a gateway for customers and third parties to integrate seamlessly with the bank. It will enable users to develop their own solutions and create custom integration points to various CommercePayments^® products. The platform will also feature a sandbox environment, allowing for thorough testing before deployment.

“It provides customers more flexibility,” Wiedenmann said. “And it will allow us to take new products to market more rapidly and onboard customers more quickly.”

This new platform comes on the heels of Commerce’s multi-year project to replace its Mainframe Core Deposit and Customer Information System with a modern system for storing customer and account information and processing transactions called the Core Banking Application (CBA). The CBA went live in 2020 and was among the first near real-time posting systems installed in the United States.

“That allows us to do 24/7 processing across the bank instead of batch processing,” Wiedenmann said. “More importantly, it allows us to more easily integrate our channels, supporting applications, and products with that core platform. Because it’s on a new infrastructure, we’re able to hook them together more quickly and create products more rapidly.”

Collaborations: The key to great user experience

As part of its innovation strategy, the CommercePayments^® technology team places significant emphasis on collaboration. Its goal is to create the integrations that will help customers the most, as quickly as possible.

“We start with the ideal state and where we want to go, then we work backward to see how we can get to market fastest,” Wiedenmann said. “There hasn’t been an integration that we haven’t been able to figure out. If there’s a market need and a desire for the bank to tackle something, we have the resources, we have the experience, we have the capabilities to be able to connect to anybody to do just about anything.”

CommercePayments^® also actively seeks the voice of customers through initiatives such as client advisory councils. These councils allow the technical team to bounce ideas off clients, present prototypes and gather critical feedback on how potential changes might impact their day-to-day operations. The team uses an agile development process and has a dedicated user experience group that is part of every Scrum team — the cross-functional group working to deliver any given product.

“When we’re building our products solutions, we’re building feedback loops within them,” Gregar said. “That way, as we deploy new features or capabilities to the market, we can get real-time feedback from our customers and quickly respond to that feedback.”

Beyond the swivel chair

The wave of technological innovation goes well beyond eliminating the dependency on swivel chairs. Reducing the effort required to make or receive payments frees up valuable employee resources, enabling businesses to focus on their core mission. When finance employees no longer have to spend time shifting from one system to the next, they can focus on more strategic initiatives.

“It’s pretty cool when a customer says that a feature we rolled out is saving them several hours a week,” Gregar said. “It’s amazing to quantify just what time savings can mean to someone.”

CommercePayments^® solutions are provided by Commerce Bank.