In a typical workforce of 1–5,000 people, quite a lot of finance teams are pretty much knee-deep in payments or uploading payments on a daily basis.
The Payments Your Systems Cannot See: The Case for a Dedicated Bank Integration Layer
How Finance and Treasury Leaders Close the Control Gap
This whitepaper is for you if:
- You’re a group treasurer or treasury manager chasing true end-to-end payment automation, not a TMS that stops at the bank’s door.
- You run a shared service centre and your team is still logging into bank portals and re-keying files every day.
- You’re going through an ERP or TMS migration and don’t want bank connectivity to become the last-mile problem that derails the timeline.
- You’re scaling or acquiring, and every new entity, bank or file format means another manual workaround.
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Summary.
Bank connectivity or bank integration is the unseen gap in many finance transformation projects. Most transformation projects focus on critical, high-value Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Treasury Management System (TMS) implementations and assume that these systems will readily connect to banks. In reality, ERPs and TMSs were never designed to handle the full operational complexity of corporate-to-bank connectivity.
Adopting a three-part architecture that includes a specialist bank connectivity layer in its own right helps each component of the finance and treasury architecture perform at its optimum.
Bank connectivity enables payment and bank statement data to flow between ERPs, TMSs, other back-office systems and banks without manual intervention. In doing so, it unlocks end-to-end payment automation, improves cash visibility, reduces the risk of fraud and errors, and helps finance and treasury teams achieve AI readiness.
In contrast to expensive ERP or TMS extension projects, specialist bank connectivity solutions can be implemented in weeks. Crucially, they can also accommodate changes to the finance and treasury setup: new back-office systems, banks, payment types and entities can be added with ease rather than triggering a new IT consultancy project.
The result? CFOs and Group Treasurers have much greater flexibility to scale and adapt finance and treasury infrastructure to accommodate their organisation’s needs, rather than being hamstrung by manual workarounds and vendor lock-in.
The Bank Connectivity Gap in Finance and Treasury Operations
End-to-end payment automation is often cited as a primary objective of finance and treasury transformation, yet for many organisations it remains out of reach.
Despite making large-scale investments in Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERPs) and Treasury Management Systems (TMSs), many organisations are still running manual processes around them, including:
Logging in to multiple bank portals every day to check balances, make payments and download statements.
Managing a host of mechanisms, such as shared logins, smart cards and card readers, to access various online banking portals and authorise transactions.
Manually transferring data between banking portals, TMSs and ERPs.
Troubleshooting failed bulk payment file and bank statement uploads.
Uploading cash data into a middleware layer to get visibility of cash positions across the business.
Why end-to-end automation isn’t a given
The problem doesn’t lie with the ERP or TMS. These platforms are fundamental elements of a finance or treasury transformation strategy and excel at their core tasks.
Rather, the issue is often the lack of a reliable, automated connection between those systems and their banks to handle the full complexity of operational payment flows.
ERPs and TMS systems are not designed to provide comprehensive multi-system and multi-bank connectivity. Where they do offer some degree of integration, it is typically limited to certain banks and payment types.
Some organisations attempt custom projects to extend ERP and TMS capabilities. However, these projects can be costly and protracted. Even when some degree of payment integration is achieved, they can raise the spectre of vendor lock-in. If the ERP or TMS supplier changes, existing connections may need to be rebuilt from scratch.
A specialist bank connectivity approach separates the connectivity function from the core ERP or TMS, providing a more flexible foundation for payment integration and automation.
Putting a name to the problem
Many finance and treasury functions intuitively recognise this gap in their financial infrastructure, but don’t always understand its cause.
Often, it appears in the last mile of an ERP or TMS implementation, when there is a dawning realisation that the goal of end-to-end payment automation won’t be achieved because the back-office systems and banks don’t talk to each other.
AccessPay calls this missing piece of the puzzle bank integration or bank connectivity.
Bank integration is a specialist, agnostic layer that sits between back-office systems, such as ERPs and TMSs, and the banking estate. It provides secure, automated routing of clean, structured payment data and bank statement information between all systems and banks.
In practical terms, bank integration connects the systems that create and manage financial data with the banking infrastructure responsible for executing payments and returning transaction information.
AccessPay acts as an agnostic layer that sits in between all of your different back-office systems and all of the banks. The benefit of this architecture is that systems changes don’t impact the automated payments process.
Why bank integration deserves its own layer
Bank integration addresses the last-mile problem in ERP and TMS implementations and serves as a powerful facilitator of end-to-end payment automation.
Rather than leaving bank integration until the last mile, it is best to treat it as a standalone component of finance or treasury transformation projects from the outset.
By implementing bank integration as a specialist layer in its own right:
Finance and treasury teams can focus on strategic activities: teams spend less time troubleshooting manual workarounds and more time acting as strategic partners to the business.
Finance functions can scale more efficiently: increased automation means growth isn’t tied to headcount needed to support manual processes.
IT architecture and banking relationships become more flexible: new ERPs, TMSs, payment rails and banks can be added into the ecosystem without requiring extensive ERP consultancy projects.
The risk of fraud and error is reduced: automated data flows remove opportunities to manually manipulate payment files or bank statements, while additional controls such as account name verification can reduce the risk of error.
Finance teams become more AI-ready: the clean, structured data layer provided by bank connectivity creates a stronger foundation for AI implementations.
Read on to find out why the bank connectivity gap exists, what it costs the business, and how a three-part architecture that treats bank integration as its own platform helps businesses maximise their existing investments in ERPs and TMSs, removing structural inefficiencies in their operating model
Why the Bank Connectivity Gap Exists:
Broad Platforms, Specialist Problems
Connecting back-office finance systems to one another and to banks may seem simple in theory, but it is often challenging in practice. From scoping gaps to technical challenges and formatting limitations, there are multiple reasons for the bank connectivity gap.
The scoping gap
ERPs and TMSs both fulfil crucial roles in the finance and treasury architecture, but this does not necessarily include comprehensive bank connectivity, as is often assumed.
- TMSs are built first and foremost for treasury management, including cash forecasting, FX, risk, investments, debt and accounting, plus all of the associated high-value treasury payments.
- ERPs are designed primarily to support procurement, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and financial accounting operations.
In short, neither platform was designed to manage the full operational complexity of corporate-to-bank connectivity across multiple payment schemes, countries, entities and file formats.
The decision organisations need to make, therefore, is whether to close this gap between their ERP and/or TMS with a custom extension project, which is not a simple exercise, or recognise bank connectivity as a separate function within the architecture.
Don’t some ERPs and TMS platforms include connectivity?
Some ERP and TMS vendors include a degree of bank connectivity within their platform. However, this is typically a ‘lite’ level of functionality that is not as rich or flexible as specialist bank connectivity solutions. For organisations operating across multiple banks, entities, countries and payment types, specialist bank integration can provide a more scalable approach to payment integration.
The technical challenges of bank connectivity
Building secure bank connectivity is more difficult than it first appears. It is not simply a matter of establishing host-to-host (H2H) connections between back-office systems and banks. It requires access to relevant technical expertise and investment in the infrastructure needed to build and maintain those connections over the long term.
For many organisations, the technical challenges involved make bank connectivity a stretch too far. Often, there is little appetite for this additional expense, given the initial outlay for an ERP or TMS implementation.
Even when projects to extend ERP and TMS capabilities do get off the ground, there are multiple technical and operational considerations that need to be addressed.
Host-to-host connections explained
Host-to-host (H2H) connections are a foundational technology underpinning many bank connectivity solutions. They are specialist Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) connections designed to support multiple payment and statement file formats. They facilitate the direct transmission of payment instruction files and the retrieval of payment status reports and statements.
Host-to-host implementation
To establish H2H connections, companies need the appropriate servers, network connections, firewalls and databases. Depending on their existing infrastructure, these requirements can involve significant investment.
Often, the biggest expense lies not in developing the SFTP connection itself, but in having the resources to develop a user interface to manage the connections and understand the associated data flows.
Alongside the infrastructure required to develop H2H connections, companies need to consider security and data storage. They must adhere to each bank’s security protocols, such as PCI DSS and ISO 27001, to ensure transaction data submitted through the connection is adequately encrypted and implement a Key Management Service (KMS) to manage cryptographic keys.
Finally, all data transmitted over the connection must be stored in encrypted form for three to seven years, in accordance with applicable local data privacy laws and encryption requirements.
Governance and audit requirements
Beyond data transformation and exchange, governance and audit requirements must also be factored into H2H implementations. For example, connections must provide proof of file delivery, with file signing, message receipts and digital timestamps built in as standard. Immutable and exportable audit logs of user actions, system events, approvals and rejections are also required. These requirements add another layer of complexity to an in-house payment integration project.
Host-to-host implementation timelines
The extent of the custom work required to establish H2H connections can take several months. A standard H2H bank connectivity implementation for a TMS takes 6–18 months or longer for a single-bank deployment, and every additional bank, entity or new platform requires a new statement of work. In contrast, a specialist bank connectivity layer can be added in 4–12 weeks thanks to pre-built integrations. Additional entities, banks and ERPs can also be readily added to the scope.
Host-to-host maintenance
Ongoing maintenance costs also present significant barriers to custom bank integration projects.
Firstly, there is a change management aspect. Banks and back-office systems may change their specifications, which can affect connections. Similarly, new payment types and payment rails may need to be added as a company expands into new markets or launches new products.
With a specialist bank connectivity solution, these changes can be handled as part of the service. With a custom connection, they can trigger a new IT consultancy project.
Secondly, organisations need the resources to support 24/7 monitoring, ensuring H2H connections remain operational and secure. This includes conducting continuous penetration testing to identify security gaps and updating code to remediate vulnerabilities.
Additionally, organisations must monitor Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) keys, which expire every two years, and create new ones to prevent connection failures.
Finally, from a governance and audit perspective, message receipts proving file delivery need to be stored, as do audit logs. Compliance documentation also needs to be maintained for auditors, including change logs, test evidence, system architecture diagrams and operational policies.
Formatting limitations in payment integration
One of the most challenging technical aspects of bank connectivity is managing formatting and file transformations.
Payment files and statements are generated in multiple formats, including .xls, .csv, .xlsb and .xlsc. However, the files used by ERPs, TMSs and banks are not always compatible, which can cause issues when moving data between systems.
This creates a significant challenge for payment integration, particularly for organisations working with multiple banks and payment types:
I have uploaded a bulk payment file, but a payment file is highlighted in light red. What does this mean?
Is there anyone else with an alternative code for the MT940TXT-to-MT940XML.xslt file that I can use to import an MT940 file that does NOT require a “/” before the account number? (Disclaimer – I am not a developer)
I’m importing an MT940 file using a Financial Institution. The import is successful. I go to the Match Bank Data page, and the successfully imported transaction doesn’t show on the bank statement side (left). I opened the MT940 file to look and validate that the account number, etc., were all correct. I’m not even sure where to start looking to find out the issue. Any ideas, anybody?
I’m getting a blank screen/error message when importing a Bulk BACS file. What can I do to fix this?
ISO 20022 transition
The transition to ISO 20022 will reduce some of this complexity. However, the market is currently in flux, with some banks working on different timelines for when they will require customers to move to the new formats. For the foreseeable future, any automated bank connectivity layer needs to have file and formatting transformation capabilities built in, so that data can flow seamlessly between systems.
This is where in-house projects to create custom connections often fall down. The complexity of supporting multiple formats and banking requirements demonstrates the value of specialist bank connectivity solutions.
What the Gap Costs:
The Real Price of Manual Processes
The consequences of the bank connectivity gap are far-reaching and costly. Organisations are paying for additional headcount to conduct manual processes, and their ability to scale is tied to staffing numbers. Meanwhile, manual data manipulation increases the risk of fraud and error, while Accounts teams are exposed to other risks such as bank portal outages. By addressing the connectivity gap, organisations can move closer to genuine payment automation and reduce the operational burden created by manual payment processes.
Increased staffing
and infrastructure costs
From a staffing perspective, there is a demonstrable Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) employee cost associated with manual banking operations.
To put this into context, consider a scenario where a 10-person shared services team spends 40% of its time logging into bank portals, formatting files and uploading payment files across multiple banking portals. This represents four FTEs, each of whom comes at a cost.
The cost per accounting FTE at an India-based outsourcing provider ranges from approximately £13,000 to £33,000, depending on seniority, representing a total cost of up to £132,000 for four FTEs.
However, a specialist bank connectivity solution could automate 60–80% of this effort, resulting in annual savings of up to £105,000 in direct staffing costs.
Running leaner teams can also yield cost savings on infrastructure, reducing office expenses, as the NSG Group case study demonstrates:
Apart from some of these developments [payment factory and bank connectivity], achieving payback in fewer than 12 months, the overall scale of NSG’s new efficiencies meant the group no longer needed to invest in constructing a second building at its Shared Services Centre in Poland. Instead, the existing team was able to take on more work with fewer people thanks to the automation delivered by the payment factory.
Limited scalability
and M&A challenges
Manual operations also act as a brake on business growth. Tying scalability to headcount can lead to bloated teams and inefficient processes.
For organisations that are acquisitive, these challenges only compound.
When an organisation acquires a new entity, it inherits new ERPs, TMSs, banking relationships and file formats that the incumbent TMS may not be configured to handle.
Often, this results in parallel payment processes running simultaneously, some automated and some manual, as well as a heightened risk of duplication and reconciliation errors.
A specialist bank integration layer is much nimbler than an ERP or TMS. It can absorb new systems, banking relationships and formats to provide finance and treasury teams with better operational oversight without requiring an all-or-nothing ERP or treasury integration project.
Consequently, new finance and treasury teams can be integrated much more quickly, working to consistent group procedures and reducing the inherent risks of temporary controls.
Heightened risk exposure
In addition to extra staffing costs and limited scalability, manual processes increase organisations’ exposure to fraud, errors and payment failures.
£258m
stolen through UK APP fraud in H1 2025
79%
of organisations hit by fraud attempts (AFP 2024)
800+
hours of bank outages across 9 UK banks (2023-2025)
36%
of UK businesses cite admin errors as cause of late payments
Fraud risks
The latest fraud statistics show that fraud is increasing. Cifas reported record levels of fraud in 2025, with total reported cases in the UK reaching 444,000, up from 421,000 in 2024. It also highlighted the growing insider threat with a 22% increase in cases between 2024 and 2025.
Payment fraud in particular remains an omnipresent challenge. According to the Association of Finance Professionals, 79% of respondents globally were subjected to payment fraud attempts in 2024.
From a finance perspective, authorised push payment (APP) fraud is a particular concern. According to UK Finance, £258m was lost to APP fraud in the first half of 2025 alone.
Automated payment integration can help reduce some of the manual intervention that creates opportunities for fraud and error.
Human error risks
Beyond fraud, there is also the risk of human error.
The UK government’s research into late payment practices found that 36% of UK businesses cited administrative errors as the reason for late payment to suppliers, highlighting the impact of incorrectly inputted information.
Automated payment processes using bank connectivity can significantly derisk payment operations. They eliminate the potential for miskeyed data and remove opportunities for internal fraudsters to manipulate bank statements and payment instructions.
Moreover, when overlaid with account name verification technology, automated payment workflows can reduce the likelihood of APP fraud.
Payment failure due to bank portal outages
Reliance on bank portals to submit payment files and download statements also increases the risk of payment failures and delays due to portal outages.
Data from the UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee shows that between January 2023 and February 2025, nine of the UK’s top banks and building societies experienced more than 803 hours of unplanned outages, totalling 33 days.
For finance teams dependent on manual portal-based processes, outages can directly disrupt payment operations.
Corporates have spent millions of pounds building payment processes around their ERP and treasury systems, only to find those processes have to flex and change as the business evolves. For any large organisation, that is genuinely difficult to do. I experienced it directly running Royal Mail’s data operations. Getting budget for something like GDPR was a nightmare, and everyone assumed it was just the project cost. But the internal costs are normally ten times the external project cost. That is the reality organisations are not accounting for.
The Specialist Bank Connectivity Layer:
An Architecture That Works
An Architecture That Works
Rather than grappling with a two-pillar architecture comprising an ERP and TMS supplemented by manual processes, a three-part architecture offers an alternative approach.
This model includes bank integration as a specialist layer alongside the ERP and TMS, enabling end-to-end payment automation and delivering numerous other benefits.
The three-part architecture
How it works
In this three-part model, each platform does what it does best. The inclusion of a third bank integration layer doesn’t replace existing platforms. Instead, it helps them perform at their optimal level by providing the connectivity they were never designed to include and that custom projects often fail to deliver.
ERP: Used by Shared Services, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable to support procurement processes, customer billing and payments.
TMS: Used by Treasury for cash management, FX optimisation and liquidity risk management.
Bank integration layer: Sits between the ERP, TMS, other back-office systems such as payroll or reconciliation solutions, and banks to handle connectivity, file transformation, payment scheme routing, controls and data.
This architecture creates a more flexible foundation for payment integration while enabling greater automation across finance and treasury operations.
Benefits of the three-part approach
Adopting a three-part architecture delivers benefits across finance and treasury, from daily efficiency through to cash visibility and AI readiness.
- Automated payment flows enable finance teams to focus their efforts on transactions that need greater scrutiny rather than troubleshooting file uploads.
- Free-flowing bank statement feeds allow automated reconciliation for a greater proportion of transactions.
- Automation across workflows provides additional protection against fraud and error by reducing opportunities for manual manipulation.
Together, these capabilities help organisations move towards genuine payment automation rather than simply automating isolated steps in the payment process.
Optimising cash visibility and treasury operations
From a treasury perspective, bank connectivity and improved data flows mean treasurers have real-time visibility of the organisation’s cash position, enabling better decision-making.
Treasurers also have much more flexibility to work with different banks.
With an ERP or TMS extension project, adding new banks can trigger a new scope of work. However, with a specialist bank connectivity layer, companies can access thousands of pre-built bank connections, and where required, a custom connection can be created in weeks.
At the same time, from a structural perspective, bank integration gives treasurers the opportunity to refocus on strategic activities.
All too often, when operational payments are routed through an extended TMS, treasury teams act as a support desk for the wider finance function, helping users troubleshoot file uploads and payment processes.
Bank connectivity helps eliminate this scenario.
Avoiding vendor lock-in
Decoupling the bank integration layer from the ERP or TMS also helps organisations avoid vendor lock-in. As an agnostic layer that can work with any ERP, TMS or bank, a specialist connectivity layer gives finance functions greater flexibility when changing their finance architecture. When connectivity is tied to the TMS or ERP, moving to another vendor can mean rebuilding existing bank connections.
A separate bank connectivity layer protects the connectivity investment and allows organisations to change other components of their finance technology stack without starting the payment integration process again.
Achieving AI readiness
Finally, a specialist bank integration layer helps finance and treasury functions achieve advanced AI readiness.
A global McKinsey survey of CFOs in late 2025 reported that 44% of respondents had identified five or more AI use cases, compared with just 7% in 2024. Gartner research also demonstrates how AI agents are starting to feature in finance workflows.
Ultimately, finance professionals will increasingly work alongside AI agents to perform repetitive tasks.
However, for this approach to be successful, the underlying data needs to be in order.
AI agents require structured, real-time data to function effectively. Manual workflows for transferring data between systems can make this difficult, while an automated bank connectivity layer provides a stronger foundation for AI-enabled finance operations.
What Specialist Depth
Actually Looks Like
What does a specialist bank connectivity solution look like in practice? This section explores the practical realities, from implementation and configuration depth to payment coverage and scalability.
Implementation speed and cost
In contrast to protracted custom projects to extend ERPs and TMSs, which can take at least 6–18 months for multi-bank connectivity, AccessPay’s specialist connectivity solution can be implemented in weeks:
- Automated bank statement retrieval only: 2 weeks
- Bacs connectivity: 1-4 weeks
- Full multi-bank connectivity: 4-12 weeks
IT consultancy costs are also minimal for standard implementations.
Although consultants may need to be engaged for specific scenarios, such as when an ERP needs updating to produce certain file types, standard bank connectivity implementations can avoid the lengthy development cycles associated with custom payment integration.
Bank configuration depth
AccessPay has one of the most extensive configuration libraries, currently 20,000+.
These pre-built configurations rapidly reduce implementation times and allow requests to add new banks and entities to be accommodated quickly.
If there isn’t a pre-built configuration, AccessPay has the expertise to develop one more quickly.
Projects to extend ERPs and TMSs rely on much more limited configuration libraries. As a result, every request to add a new bank can create a new project, incurring additional costs and effort.
Extensive payment coverage
In addition to an extensive bank configuration library, AccessPay covers a wide range of payments as standard.
This includes UK schemes such as:
- Bacs Direct Credits
- Bacs Direct Debits
- CHAPS
- Faster Payments
International and cross-border payments are also supported, including:
- SWIFT
- EBICS
- SEPA
Broad payment coverage is important because effective payment integration needs to support the different payment schemes an organisation uses rather than creating separate manual processes for each bank or payment type.
Fraud controls as standard
AccessPay’s bank connectivity offering also includes fraud controls as standard, meaning they are built into the workflow rather than added as an afterthought. Controls include multi-factor authentication, role-based access, approval workflows, account name verification and sanctions screening. These controls complement payment automation by reducing the opportunities for manual manipulation while maintaining appropriate approval and governance processes.
Platform scalability
Finally, AccessPay has demonstrable scalability, having processed 371M+ payments at £480B+ value for over 1,000 customers in 2025 alone. As such, it is a proven bank connectivity solution that can be implemented at scale in weeks, compared to the many unknowns of a custom extension project, which can take years to get up to speed.
The Business Case for Bank Connectivity
The impact of the bank integration gap is clear: high staffing costs, structural inefficiencies, increased risks and a brake on growth.
Ultimately, the question is not whether the bank integration gap needs addressing, but whether to spend 18–24 months trying to extend an ERP or TMS or deploy a specialist bank connectivity layer within weeks.
The right architecture protects existing investments in TMSs and ERPs, eliminates manual processes, reduces risks and removes the structural vulnerability of single-vendor bank connectivity dependency.
Many organisations have independently discovered the benefits of a three-part architecture comprising:
- An ERP.
- A TMS, including any extensions to these platforms, such as payroll systems.
- A specialist bank connectivity layer for all aspects of money movement.
By separating bank connectivity from the ERP and TMS, organisations can create a more flexible architecture for payment integration, improve payment automation, strengthen treasury operations and build a foundation for future finance transformation.
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