Bank of America has launched three new APIs to support real-time information exchange and processing in corporate treasury.

The APIs, released last week, offer real-time integration in three areas: the foreign exchange (FX) settlement API allows clients to manage cross-border payments by initiating cross-currency FX payments or bundling payments into one FX settlement; the check-image-retrieval API supports account reconciliation and lets clients retrieve multiple images of checks that have been posted to their account; and the CashPro reporting API helps clients pull and schedule data reports from the bank’s CashPro platform. Development on the APIs began earlier this year, and already 120 clients are using them.

The APIs are designed to bring a real-time focus to data, so that Bank of America’s clients can set their cash positions and manage balances and transactions, said Tom Durkin, global product head for CashPro, the bank’s technology suite for companies, and also allow them to execute on their positions with a push toward real-time payments.

“You have a shift of clients that are interacting today with us through different software — maybe they’re using Swift File Act — to exchange reports and data,” Durkin said. “I do see it as an evolution, where those clients are looking to take advantage and they’re going to shift from that original manual [process] where they’re logging on and pulling down data, and leapfrog from that to an API — or they already have some system interface and they’re going to move from a batch to real-time.”

Bank of America, which is ranked as the 10th most innovative FI with assets over $100 billion according to Bank Innovation‘s FI Innovation Rankings, offers more than 50 APIs via CashPro. CashPro is a platform for businesses to manage payments, receive funds, and invest excess liquidity and its APIs span eight different categories, including real-time payments like Zelle and PayPal, information reporting, push notifications and bond trading.

The timeline for clients to build their own APIs to access Bank of America’s depends on client readiness, Durkin said, but in most cases takes four to six weeks. A critical part of client readiness is reviewing Bank of America’s publicly available developer portal, which outlines some of the bank’s technical specifications.

“We want the [integration] time to be measured where you’re not going through the educational phase at the beginning, and a lot of times that has kind of hindered some of the corporate-to-bank interactions in the past,” Durkin said. Rather, that integration time should be spent reviewing security protocols, reconciliation and how the data and content flows through the server.

Looking ahead, Durkin said the next step for CashPro is leveraging data that resides in the bank’s back-office relative to treasury information, specifically around account entity signers.

“There’s a lot of change that’s happening in companies in how they’re doing those traditional steps that would make a lot of sense for us to API-enable access,” Durkin said. That would streamline processes around authorizing new accounts, entities and signers, noting “we’ll probably start with company signers as we look into 2021.” Other areas include risk-mitigation components that drive better fraud solutions for alerting and notifications, he added.

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