Technology Application | ABC Ruida Treasury Service empowers the digital transformation of enterprises

The Central Financial Work Conference pointed out that finance should provide high-quality services for economic and social development, emphasizing the five major articles of science and technology finance, green finance, inclusive finance, pension finance and digital finance. In order to do a good job in digital finance, Agricultural Bank of China actively embraces the wave of digital economy, accelerates the integration and innovation of financial products, focuses on the needs of corporate treasury management, and launches the ABC Ruida treasury service product system, which strives to meet the treasury management needs of enterprises that are "visible, manageable, mobilized and well used" through the co-construction of "finance + technology" scenarios.

Luo Meng, Vice President of Agricultural Bank of China Financial Technology Co., Ltd

Treasury management is the key driver for enterprises to promote financial digital intelligence

Financial management is the central link of enterprise management, and it is an important foundation and guarantee for enterprises to achieve long-term success. Traditional financial management mainly focuses on capital elements, and focuses on basic cash processing activities such as account management, transaction settlement, and cash pooling, and business and financial operations are relatively independent. With the rise of the digital economy, data elements have become a new driving force for economic development, and a single fund management model can no longer meet the requirements of the digital era.

Treasury management is a management behavior that takes the overall financial resources of the group as the object and the information system as the means to rationally allocate financial resources, identify and control financial risks, and ultimately serve the strategic objectives and values of the group. Under the wave of digitalization, treasury management realizes the efficient coordination of capital flow, information flow and business flow through the integration of modern information technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analysis and cloud computing, so as to comprehensively improve the efficiency of capital operation, reduce capital costs, and prevent and control capital risks, which helps to comprehensively accelerate the digital and intelligent transformation of enterprise finance, and also provides strong support for enterprises to continue to innovate and enhance market competitiveness.

Treasury services are an excellent platform for banks to expand their corporate financial services

In recent years, the development of commercial banks' corporate business has encountered challenges brought about by the phenomenon of financial disintermediation. The low frequency of interaction between traditional banks and corporate customers, and the lack of specific application scenarios, make it difficult for banks to accumulate high-value customer data and build strong customer relationships. In contrast, Internet financial service providers have attracted a large number of corporate customers through more high-frequency, scenario-based and digital services, which has put huge competitive pressure on traditional banking services. More and more commercial banks are aware of the need to transform their business models and product forms, actively integrate into the customer's transaction and operation management chain, and build more agile and efficient services through technological innovation, data analysis and customer experience optimization.

Treasury business is the sector that most closely integrates the production and operation of enterprises with banking and financial services. Banks can not only strengthen the cooperative relationship between banks and enterprises, but also expand their corporate services, export a series of financial products and systematic solutions, and deepen the value of corporate services.

Agricultural Bank of China is one of the earliest commercial banks in China to provide cash management services. As early as 2009, ABC launched the "Xingyun" cash management service brand, formed a complete product system, and launched 12 major industry solutions. In 2022, when the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council clearly required central enterprises to accelerate the construction of a treasury system, ABC has created an open and panoramic treasury service system based on comprehensive cash management services, and innovatively launched the treasury service brand "ABC Ruida" in August 2023, forming a six-dimensional product matrix to comprehensively and deeply serve the construction of corporate treasury.

On the bank side, ABC Ruida's treasury product system takes bank-enterprise direct connection as the main service channel, providing enterprises with personalized, digital and online comprehensive financial services of banks, which can be seen and controlled. Accurate and intelligent "Easy to Enjoy, Collect and Pay Service"; "Enjoy and allocate services" for global resource sharing and inter-bank overall scheduling; "Smart Ticket Chain Service" with one-stop second stickers and chain services; "Preferential investment and financing services" for capital appreciation and cost control; "Sharing channel services" for interconnection and co-construction and sharing.

In terms of enterprise-side deployment, ABC adheres to the principle of "front-end technology, industry-technology integration, total and branch linkage, and joint construction of banks and divisions", and cooperates with ABC Financial Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ABC Group, to build an ABC Ruida treasury service platform to help customers realize the construction of treasury information system, provide services such as multi-bank account management, inter-bank payment and settlement, inter-bank fund allocation, internal bank management, and executive cockpit, empower customers with digital and intelligent operation and management scenarios, and help enterprises improve their treasury management capabilities.

Digital intelligence empowerment to improve service quality and customer experience

ABC Ruida Treasury Service Platform provides "multi-bank, all-round" treasury comprehensive management services for corporate financial personnel and managers. The platform innovatively supports the deployment of public cloud, private cloud, direct connection localization, etc., with a solid guarantee of bank-level security technology foundation, and provides comprehensive services for enterprises at the three levels of business transactions, resource allocation, and decision-making management based on microservices, big data, and business intelligence (BI) technologies.

At the level of business transactions, the platform comprehensively adopts the methods of "bank-enterprise direct connection" and "RPA+OCR" to provide corporate financial personnel with functions such as account management, fund settlement, fund collection, bill management, and overseas fund management, so as to achieve one-stop data viewing and unified collection and payment across banks.

In terms of resource allocation, the platform provides functions such as internal settlement, bill pool management, budget management, and financing management, supports the expansion of funds into financial resources, efficiently coordinates and coordinates internal and external financial resources of enterprises, meets the capital needs of core business, optimizes financing structure, reduces financing costs, and realizes intensive management of financial resources.

At the decision-making management level, the platform adopts big data analysis and BI technology to create functions such as leadership cockpit, mobile decision-making, capital monitoring, and reporting center, and has the ability of capital risk identification and early warning, decision-making and analysis, supports the further integration of financial data, fully explores and utilizes the value of data, and supports the transformation of fund management decision-making from experience-led to data-driven analysis and decision-making.

As of February 2024, the platform has cumulatively connected with more than 400 online customers, helped enterprises achieve one-stop online payment and settlement of tens of thousands of accounts, increased the concentration of corporate funds by 20% on average, and increased the accounting processing efficiency of corporate financial personnel by 300% on average, greatly improving the level of financial information processing.

With the continuous expansion of its business scale, a large central enterprise group finance company is trapped by problems such as a large number of bank accounts, scattered corporate funds, and significant information islands, and hopes to strengthen the unified, efficient and safe management of financial resources such as funds through intelligent means. In order to meet the demands of unified supervision of customer accounts and panoramic visibility of information, we decouple and deploy the "one-point access" service of ABC Ruida Treasury Service Platform separately, and provide unified message, standard format and secure and controllable data interface access for the group's internal system in the upstream. Downstream for banks and third-party institutions, a combination of bank-enterprise direct connection, RPA bot and OCR to achieve account information inquiry, account details inquiry, real-time fund allocation, electronic receipts and other services. For banks that cannot achieve direct connection, through RPA, based on the corporate online banking of each bank, the process robot can query account balances, details, electronic receipts, etc., and combine OCR technology to identify receipt documents to form structured and standardized data. In addition, with the help of BI (business intelligence) and other technologies, we analyze and extract the value of data, and create a visual large screen through the dynamic display of intelligent perception large screens to assist business decision-making.

Through the implementation of the treasury plan of the Agricultural Bank of China, the enterprise can realize the centralized management of the accounts opened by each member unit in various banks and tripartite platforms without replacing the original core business system, realize the centralized visibility and control of accounts and funds, effectively improve the efficiency of financial management, reduce the difficulty of system docking and operation and maintenance, and effectively reduce the capital risk.

Scenario-based finance, building a closed loop of enterprise service ecology

Enabling the digital transformation of enterprises with financial technology has become a major trend in the digital business strategy of the banking industry, and scenario finance is a new position for interbank competition in the future. We will take the digital transformation of enterprises as an opportunity, make full use of ABC's corporate customer base and financial technology advantages, actively expand the application of high-frequency enterprise scenarios, carefully polish product details, deeply integrate financial services, help customers improve quality and efficiency, and build the construction of enterprise digital scenarios into an important position for our bank to serve the real economy and improve financial services.

The first is to promote the extension of the enterprise service chain and build the industrial chain ecology of the upstream and downstream supply and marketing scenarios of the enterprise. In the process of corporate treasury service, it reaches the production and operation business of upstream and downstream and subsidiary companies, and provides financial service solutions for upstream suppliers, downstream distributors and subsidiaries in a targeted manner.

The second is to rely on development services to output services in the form of APIs and function pages to build a partner ecosystem. For example, through the standard ERP docking interface in the enterprise treasury scenario, the efficiency of open service docking can be improved to better meet the data docking needs of small and medium-sized enterprises. Strengthen the existing core service capabilities, connect with mainstream channels such as DingTalk, Feishu, and WeChat, export product functions to the outside world, strengthen traffic introduction with functional output, and build an ecosystem with partners to achieve resource sharing, mutual benefit and win-win results.

The third is to strengthen the construction of private domain traffic in enterprise scenarios and improve the public-private linkage ecosystem. Optimize the customer access channels for corporate treasury and other products, increase access channels such as Zhangyin and Zhixian of the Agricultural Bank of China, take serving enterprises as the starting point, enhance product radiation capabilities, and establish a public-private linkage ecology covering internal and external employees, their families and merchants.

(This article was published in the first half of April 2024)