Digitizing Payments for a Smarter Treasury

By Kevin Garlan – Payments Product Lead, Transaction Banking 

With corporate clients beginning to see the benefits of a simpler approach to treasury management, the future of payments and cash management hinges on continued advancements in technology and a digital-first mindset. The proposition that Goldman Sachs brings to transaction banking is a platform developed from scratch in the cloud, built entirely on APIs—to deliver on that future. We believe that our approach makes transaction banking more secure, seamless, intuitive and data-rich. We are convinced that it can make clients’ lives easier, and much of it starts with digitizing and improving the payments experience. 

Real-time, really

For a corporate client, one of the primary benefits of a relationship with a financial institution that has its system fully anchored in the cloud is availability. Uptime exceeds 99.9% on the Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking (TxB) platform; thus our payments engine, DDA platforms and Virtual Integrated Accounts all operate in real-time. This allows clients to initiate, receive, and report payments instantly, and it ensures a payment will never fail to be processed. Clients will have immediate feedback, even when there’s an error, return or exception issue with the payment.

In the age of digital connectivity, it’s important to note that we are not offering clients a set of APIs arranged atop a legacy, on-premises mainframe that still gets taken down regularly for maintenance and functionality updates. Real-time APIs cannot do the things you need if they rely on a payments engine that’s not available or doesn’t operate in real-time. At Goldman Sachs TxB, our APIs, our managed file exchanges, and even our client user interface are built directly on the state-of-the-art Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud. With local and regional clearing systems around the world rolling out real-time payment infrastructures, the Goldman Sachs platform is being built to be dynamic and flexible, able to present clients with one of the best instant payment experiences possible. 

Our agile development methodology in the cloud allows us to be more flexible and cater to bespoke requirements without jeopardizing our architecture strategy. Rather than having a development cycle locked down months in advance, we are able to pivot quickly and prioritize resources around client requirements. When a specific need such as a custom file specification or message type is identified, the work to build it begins almost immediately. The agility the cloud makes possible also has helped us to build our business quickly, rolling out key features—direct clearing connections, new payment rails, and payment tracking services, among others—at an exceptional pace.

Digital culture

The benefits of our cloud-first approach accrue to clients from the traditional corporate treasury side as well as those who bring us challenges from the world of fintech or online marketplaces.

For corporate treasury transaction banking needs, we are committed to meeting clients wherever they may be in the process of digitally transforming. As every organization matures and begins to replace legacy technologies with new ones, we stand ready to advise and guide. Our goal is to help these clients to adopt API-first solutions and build seamless digital connections for all their payment processes.

At the same time, we recognize that digital-first fintech and e-commerce organizations have their own requirements and expectations. They want their developers and engineers present when the dialogue begins around cash management and payments partnerships. Their typical starting point is to assess our published payment APIs and test out our developer kits, which is a stark difference from the engagement model of years’ past in a traditional corporate treasury experience. When we talk to new clients in this realm, their engineers are usually on the first call—and ours too. These are conversations that we’re prepared and excited to have.

Goldman Sachs has come to the table with robust cloud technology, and perhaps more importantly, we bring a combined product and engineering approach. We have product managers, developers, and testing engineers all under the same organization within our TxB business and this reflects a mindset or culture that’s vital to building services that complement what cutting-edge fintech and e-commerce companies are bringing to market.

Getting rich—data rich

When clients provide us with payments information in our role as their transaction bank, it doesn’t change the fact that the data is theirs. Our view at Goldman Sachs TxB is that we will, at no charge, provide clients with their data—along with robust analytics and data-mining capabilities to help them use it effectively.

We have a dedicated analytics team to provide front-end data tools that are responsive to client needs and easy to use. These tools can help clients perform payment cost analyses, for example, to find the most efficient routing based on the size, geography and other parameters of their business. Our tools can help manage foreign exchange fees or weigh the advantages of account consolidation. They can help clients manage their cash better with payment-on-the-way visibility and drive insights into their working capital needs. When it comes to execution, even the TxB Intelligent Payments Engine runs on a real-time processing basis, allowing clients to flexibly set their payment preferences and parameters when and where they deem necessary.

These data analytic tools are a value-added service we provide to our clients—and another example of how our cloud-based approach and agile methodologies make for a better transaction banking experience. This ethos embodies our way of looking to bring value to clients as part of our relationship-based digital engagement. We’re not trying to sell back to them their own data with a complex set of monthly maintenance and reporting fees; we’re looking to provide a unique set a tools and services to grow and enhance their business.

Continuing to build

Goldman Sachs TxB is here to provide clients with a 360-degree view into the transaction banking they undertake—with us and with their other banks. We are proud that our human centered design efforts have yielded a comprehensive, flexible, omnichannel experience that is instant and responsive in the many ways that our clients need them to be when it comes to payments, virtual accounts and beyond.

And we’re far from finished building. In the coming year, watch for us to develop more features and functionality, always with the aim of bringing more value and efficiency to the clients and partners who honor us with their business.