BofA Merrill takes another step towards AI adoption by introducing CashPro Assistant
CashPro Assistant uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytic capabilities to assist the bank’s commercial and corporate clients in accessing and analyzing their banking information.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the global banking business brand of Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC), is apparently stepping up its efforts with regard to adopting artificial intelligence solutions.
On Tuesday, BofA Merrill announced the launch of CashPro® Assistant, a novel solution seeking to deliver a unique experience to clients of CashPro, the bank’s comprehensive electronic platform for managing banking relationships, making payments, receiving funds, investing excess liquidity and viewing account balances in real time.
CashPro Assistant uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytic capabilities to help commercial and corporate clients easily access and analyze their banking information.
At the center of the CashPro Assistant is CashPro Assistant Analytics and Forecasting, which enables clients to use BofA Merrill application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate directly with Microsoft® Excel to populate account data on demand from CashPro Online into configurable spreadsheets. Additional tools in CashPro Assistant include transaction research, automated alerts, educational content, live chat and help by phone.
Hubert J.P. Jolly, head of financing and channels for Global Transaction Services at BofA Merrill explained that the new solution reflects the fact that companies are looking to their banks to not just execute financial transactions, but to provide information they can use in a hands-on fashion to inform their decision-making. Mr Jolly also noted that the bank is examining additional ways to more closely integrate with its clients, moving beyond assistance to advisory capabilities.
Just a couple of months ago, BofA Merrill announced the adoption of a new solution that uses artificial intelligence (AI). The solution, called Intelligent Receivables, is powered by fintech company HighRadius and aims to free bank staff of the tedious task of matching incoming payments with invoices.
This AI-based solution identifies payers and associates their payments to remittances that are received separately. It also extracts remittance data from emails, email attachments, electronic data interchange (EDI) and payer web portals, matches payments to open receivables using the enriched remittance data, and creates a receivables posting file that the client uploads to their ERP system.
The AI solution may require the help of human staff, as there are certain situations where automatic invoice matching is impossible. If this happens, an exception portal allows the receivables staff to upload supporting data or make other adjustments to enable matching.
