Lesson: Managing an Advanced Payment Factory
bank. To increase data quality missing information can be enriched to increase the STP rates
at the bank and therefore costs reduced.
High Transactional Throughput
Payment volumes are significantly increasing, specifically in the B2C business. SAP S/4HANA
Finance for advanced payment management is prepared to manage high-volumes of
payments in all payment scenarios covering as well classical scenarios with FI-CA as initiating
system.
Exceptions Management
Within SAP S/4HANA Finance for advanced payment management error situations can be
handled in a very flexible way. In case an error is detected within the solution or a bank rejects
a payment such error situations can be handled either manually via a repair function or they
can be handled fully automated by reversing payments and informing the respective
subsidiary or even applying automatic corrections which are determined based on machine
learning and former manual corrections. During manual repair users can either change
certain attributes or change other settings and reprocess payments without the need to
reverse the entire process flow.
Monitoring, Reporting and Analytics
In order to gain full visibility SAP provides various levels of information within the payment
factory. Starting with detailed level information on a single transaction and its entire life cycle
which is visualized in a graphical process flow the solution provides as well high level monitors
on all payments and its status leading towards analytical pages allowing business users to
execute ad-hoc queries on the payments executed in the system. The analytics apps provide
insights into questions like how many transactions have been executed towards a specific
bank (account), in which currency or per payment instrument. All based on a snapshot or
throughout a period of time.
In-house Banking
Together with SAP S/4HANA for In-House Cash the payment factory can act like an internal
bank managing internal liabilities, calculating internal fees or interest, offering payment
processing as a service and simplify the bank interaction of the various participants of the
payment factory.
Automation & Integration
A centralization really makes sense in case it is easy to integrate with the central system and
you increase the level of automation. This is fully achieved by implementing advanced
payment management as the solution has an open architecture allowing subsidiaries to
integrated via various channels with the solution. Also other non-SAP solutions can be easily
integrated based on an API layer which has predefined integrations to SAP solutions, but can
work as well with 3rd party products integrated into the payment process.
Message Routing
A cornerstone to optimize payment processing is to add flexibility to the payment routing.
With the solution this payment routing is based on a flexible ruleset defined as master data.
Users can define simple rules based on attributes of a payment like currency, payment type,
beneficiary bank, but rules can include as well more sophisticated attributes like cut-off times,
available amounts, percentage of business / share of wallet, etc.
Central Format Handling
Within an heterogeneous system landscape it gets very challenging to keep each system up to
date to generate the bank specific payment format locally. Based on that SAP's approach is to
generate the target payment format in a central payment factory leveraging the information
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