Considerations to be made by Organizations during Bank change

Recently, one of our clients made a business decision to change their existing bank. The client thought that it will be a simple change with minimal efforts and cost. As their IT partners, we made them understand the complexity of the change and substantial efforts involved in the process. Needless to say, any Oracle Applications support team should know the Client’s End to End business process before offering advice.

The Big Idea

With digitization in every field, traditional methods of Banks have changed drastically. Almost all transactions with banks are online and we can handle them remotely. Changes in the banking sector have been successfully adopted by all the ERP’s and Oracle Applications is not an exception.

When any organization wants to build a relationship with a new Bank, it requires a lot of homework. One needs to look for factors like Bank’s Financial position, Bank’s Credit history, Service quality, Bank’s Network/technology, Financial charges, etc. The following steps will help your organization to understand the impact of changing the existing Bank and moving to a New Bank i.e. change from Bank A to Bank B.

Changing the existing Bank is a very crucial decision for an organization and involves Cost, Efforts and Time.

The Audience:

If your organization uses Oracle Financial modules or wish to move from another ERP/legacy system to Oracle Applications, the following steps will be useful.

Pain Points

Visit the Bank, open a new account and you are done! Do you really think it is that simple creating a New Bank account in Oracle Applications? The answer is NO. Any change in your bank impacts various Oracle Applications Modules, Interfaces, Programs, reports, etc. So apart from just opening the new account, it needs a systematic approach to deal with the challenges that come along.

Reasons to change the Bank:

Organizations will not take this decision unless there is a problem with:

• Service quality
• Outdated Technology / Network
• Heavy Financial Charges
• Complications in managing the Bank Accounts

When you change the bank, these Oracle Applications modules/areas will be impacted -

• Cash Management
• Accounts Receivables
• Accounts Payables
• Expenses
• Payroll
• Integrations (if any)

Here is the list of Functionalities that need attention.

Integrations: Choose the best suitable middleware i.e. TIBCO, Dell Boomi, SOA which can handle

• Positive pay
• Bank Interfaces (Inbound)
• Bank Interfaces (Outbound)
• Travel Card
• Pcard

Cash Management: End date the existing bank and define

• Internal Bank
• Internal Bank Branches
• Internal Bank Accounts

Account Receivables: You need to

• AR Invoices - Modify the existing AR invoices with new bank details
• Create new Receipt Method and Class, assign it to New Bank
• Reports – Change the reports that could be impacted

Accounts Payables: Payment to vendors is not possible without

• Defining Payment Process Profile with new bank details
• Changing Payment Process Request
• Changing Check Printing Program/format

Payroll: Update New Bank for

• Employee Payroll processing (direct deposits)

Essentials for Project efforts estimation

• Consider huge dependency on Bank and its IT Team
• Consider the Bank Format, Field mapping, Design Inbound, and Outbound interfaces, coordinate between Bank and Functional and Developer Teams. Here a Solution Architect plays a crucial role
• Execute a detailed End to end testing
• Consider different middleware options for the Integration Read the blog: Have You Evaluated All Options to Retain Your Investments in Oracle BI Applications (OBIA)?

Conclusion:

To summarize, change of Bank may look simple but it might be a disaster if you don’t follow the systematic approach as highlighted above. Make sure you discuss with your IT partners before you consider this change, as there might be some additional areas that get affected due to the specific nature of your business.