What is Corporate-to-Bank (C2B) Connectivity?

At its most basic level, Corporate-to-Bank connectivity is about the methods by which companies and banks communicate key information between each party electronically.

Corporate Treasury departments often juggle multiple priorities: maintaining liquidity, optimizing cash, securing finance, controlling risk and managing bank relationships. To manage these priorities effectively requires complete, timely and accurate financial data from financial partners. Payment instructions, lockbox reports, intraday transaction files, foreign exchange trades and securities confirmations are all essential to monitor and manage your organization’s financial health.

However, many Corporate Treasury departments struggle with automating and integrating the data they need regarding cash positions, interest rates, payables, receivables and foreign exchange rates. The good news (or bad news, depending upon your point of view) is that there are many different options available to choose from in order to connect to your financial counterparties.

Below are some of the different channels for corporates to access data, and within those channels, some of the different connectivity options.

  • Online cash management portal
  • Direct host-to-host connectivity via various security and communications protocols
  • SWIFT network connectivity

This website focuses on direct, host-to-host connectivity and connectivity via the SWIFT network. Corporations today seldom rely on a single banking institution, maintaining relationships with several banking partners, which can require a myriad of different communications methods, based on a variety of protocols, proprietary standards and processes, further adding to existing complexities.

Payments within the Single European Payments Area (SEPA), for instance, need to comply with the European Payment Council’s SEPA directive requiring provision and maintenance of International Bank Account Numbers (IBAN) and SWIFT’s Bank Identifier Codes (BIC) with other bank details in vendor and customer records. In some countries, to leverage the benefits of low-cost national clearing systems, payment data must be in the local language, such as Chinese, requiring specific character sets to process payments. Taken together, these and other challenges require the highest quality connectivity and integration solutions to drive complex accounting, financial supply chain, treasury, and managerial accounting functions.

Host-to-Host Connectivity

Host-to-host (H2H) is an automated solution for high volume data transfer between banks and their corporate clients. Sophisticated H2H connectivity solutions give banks the flexibility to exchange information in their corporate clients’ preferred file formats, network protocols, and security standards. Key components of H2H connectivity are:

  • Message and File Delivery
  • Translation and Transformation
  • Data Aggregation, Enrichment and Validation
  • Client Onboarding
  • Program Management
  • Technical Support

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