Bank of America Merrill Brings Artificial Intelligence to Accounts Receivables

Matching incoming payments with invoices has long been a frustration for companies. Many valuable hours are spent trying to determine who’s paying for what. Bank of America Merrill Lynch is pleased to announce a new solution – Intelligent Receivables – that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and other software to help companies vastly improve their straight-through reconciliation (STR) of incoming payments to help them post their receivables faster.

Intelligent Receivables is designed for large or complex companies that are seeking to reduce costs, decrease days-sales-outstanding (DSO), and improve cash forecasting and their end-customer experience. The new solution is ideally suited for companies that manage a large volume of payments where the remittance information is either missing or received separately from the payment.

Incomplete remittance information typically leads to an arduous and costly reconciliation process, explained Rodney Gardner, head of Global Receivables in Global Transaction Services at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “Our solution brings together AI, machine learning and optical character recognition (OCR), setting a new bar in accounts receivable reconciliation and payment matching,” added Gardner. “We’re excited to be working with leading fintech provider HighRadius to add Intelligent Receivables to our suite of solutions.”

Intelligent Receivables, which is powered by HighRadius, a fintech enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, achieves improved straight-through reconciliation through four steps:

• Identifies payers and associates their payments to remittances that are received separately.
• 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.
• Creates a receivables posting file that the client uploads to their ERP system.

Additional functionality provided by Intelligent Receivables to help companies improve STR includes:

• In cases where an invoice cannot be automatically matched, an exception portal allows the receivables staff to upload supporting data or make other adjustments to enable matching.
• A client can set up automatically generated emails to payers, asking them to identify which invoices they wish to pay.
• The solution’s dashboard reporting can assist in cash forecasting and help clients better understand payer behavior.

“Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Intelligent Receivables solution, powered by HighRadius’ cutting-edge machine-learning technology, will enable their corporate clients to accelerate the adoption of electronic payments from their end-customers. We are extremely excited to work with BofA Merrill on modernizing treasury management services and streamlining the receivables-to-cash cycle,” said Sashi Narahari, CEO and president of HighRadius Corporation.

“There are many meaningful, measurable benefits that clients will receive from using Intelligent Receivables,” said Hilani Kerr, head of North America Corporate Global Transaction Services at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “We are committed to working alongside fintech companies to bring more innovations like Intelligent Receivables to our clients, and create practical applications of new technology that will help them achieve greater efficiency and cost savings.”

Intelligent Receivables is currently available in the United States and Canada. It will become available in other countries and regions later this year.

About Bank of America
Bank of America is one of the world’s leading financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving approximately 47 million consumer and small business relationships with approximately 4,500 retail financial centers, approximately 16,000 ATMs, and award-winning digital banking with approximately 34 million active users, including 23 million mobile users.