JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s wholesale payments business has seen an increase in demand for open banking integrations from corporate clients during the coronavirus pandemic, prompting the bank to invest in and diversify its open banking and digital payments offerings.

Sairam Rangachari, the bank’s global head of digital payments and open banking for wholesale payments, told Bank Innovation, “Our business customers want to have a process where they manage by exceptions, as opposed to keeping track and managing every step of the way. They’re trying to create agility for their business needs as their own customer experiences are changing.”

JPMorgan’s wholesale payments business moves more than $6 trillion around the world daily for corporate clients and is building out its open banking offerings to streamline its business customers’ payment flows. Beyond providing integration points that support open banking, the bank is investing in tools that reduce the amount of work required by corporate clients to establish the connection.

“More and more customers are looking for plug-and-play solutions, where they don’t have to make huge capex investments,” Rangachari said.

The bank is investing in building plug-ins that sit on top of its APIs so customers can install the plug-in, and thus connect with an API without needing to write code to support the integration, Rangachari said. JPMorgan has already developed these types of plug-ins for enterprise resource planning software providers, treasury-management systems and Microsoft Excel, he said. “We are continuing to double down on partnerships … that allow our customers to take advantage of our latest innovations with the least effort possible.”

The pandemic has highlighted a shift in the industry standard for digitizing payments and leveraging real-time data to make business decisions.

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“Depending on manual tasks to look at week-old data does not cut it anymore,” Rangachari said. The bank’s business customers are trying to transition to frameworks that afford them real-time visibility, automated workflows and digitized payments. “A lot of them have come to realize if they have counterparties that are dealing with checks and physical branches, those things don’t work very well right now,” he said. “They’re looking for ways to digitize those workflows”

Despite looking to grow its open banking capabilities via partnerships, JPMorgan is being deliberate about how it’s integrating and with which companies it’s partnering.

“You can’t take data stewardship for granted — the more pieces you add in the puzzle, the more the customer data has to traverse through those pieces, and you’re only as strong as your weakest link,” Rangachari said. “We take a very careful view of this and choose to work deeply with select partners,” after they have been vetted by several stakeholders, from the investment and business groups to the cybersecurity team, he said.