SunGard Study Reveals Almost Half of Corporations are Willing to Switch Banks for Better Payments Services

New York, NY (PRWEB) April 30, 2012

SunGard today released the results of a recent Corporate B2B Payments Study: “Consolidated Payables Solutions: What do Corporations Want from their Banking Partners?”. The study captured perspectives from 171 respondents representing a wide cross-section of corporations from multiple industries and ranging in size from under $250 million to over $5 billion in annual revenue. Among the key findings, 45% of those responding to the question said they would be willing to leave their current bank if they believed another bank offered better payment services.

The study found that a typical corporation sends thousands of payments to hundreds of vendors each month, with some spending upwards of 80 hours a month processing payments internally and, altogether incurring tens of thousands of dollars in annual direct and labor costs. Amid this effort, the study revealed that many corporations simply do not know about their current bank’s payments options: 48% either did not know what payments services their bank offered or skipped the question. Among those who did respond, more than 80% reported that their current bank does not offer both of the payments services they wanted most: an integrated solution and vendor enrollment services.

The apparent willingness of corporations to consider alternatives means banks can help reduce attrition risk and potentially gain new customers by expanding their payments offerings to include the services most important to corporations.
SunGard’s AvantGard PayNetExchange payments platform is available to corporations directly or to banks as a white-label service that can be integrated into a solution portfolio to offer a full spectrum of payment solutions from outsourced check printing to Automated Clearing House (ACH), SWIFT, wires, and virtual card payments. The service includes a vendor enrollment program that helps each corporation’s vendors migrate from paper check to ACH or virtual card.

“Globally, banks continue to focus on their payments franchises,” says Nancy Atkinson, senior analyst with Aite Group. “Payments are fee-based, and were strong contributors to bank revenue during the economic crisis. By implementing the key solutions most sought after by business customers, banks will achieve cost savings and greater revenue opportunities going forward.”

“Our resellers recognize that providing corporations with the payments offerings they want most can help keep their current customers satisfied and attract new clients. We have worked with our resellers to help ensure that our PayNetExchange solution provides these features and services,” said Rob Jacobson, senior vice president of payment services at SunGard’s AvantGard.

About SunGard’s AvantGard
SunGard’s AvantGard is a leading liquidity and risk management solution for corporations, insurance companies and the public sector. The AvantGard solution suite includes credit risk modeling, collections management, treasury risk analysis, cash management, payments system integration, and payments execution delivered directly to corporations or via banking partners. AvantGard solutions help consolidate data from multiple in-house systems, drive workflow and provide connectivity to a broad range of trading partners including banks, SWIFT, credit data providers, FX platforms, money markets, and market data. The technology is supported by a full range of services, including managed cloud services, treasury operations management, SWIFT administration, managed bank connectivity, bank on-boarding, and vendor enrollment, and is delivered by a team of domain experts. For more information, visit http://www.sungard.com/avantgard.

About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 17,000 employees and serves approximately 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With annual revenue of about $4.5 billion, SunGard is the largest privately held software and services company and was ranked 434 on the Fortune 500 in 2011. Look for us wherever the mission is critical. For more information, please visit http://www.sungard.com.

Trademark Information: SunGard, the SunGard logo and AvantGard are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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