SMBC Americas has introduced a new digital platform aimed at modernizing how corporate clients manage cash and payments, as its Tokyo-based parent company Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. aims to strengthen its position in global transaction banking.

The platform, SMBC Connect, is designed to enhance control and transparency in clients’ operations by allowing them to track payments globally in real time, and to boost efficiency by letting corporate treasurers customize the platform in a way that best fits their roles.

SMBC executive Craig Vaream said cash management systems should be as frictionless to corporate treasurers as smartphone apps are to the masses.

With that in mind, Vaream’s team built out SMBC Connect with personalization at its core.

Users can choose which widgets – such as payment activity or outstanding loans – they want front and center on the SMBC Connect program, based on what’s important to their job functions.

“You can do it from a receivables and a payables perspective. While I only want to see what we're receiving, [someone else] may only want to see what we're paying,” Vaream said. “It gives those within the treasury function the ability to customize based on what their needs are, and today, many of the systems in the market don't allow customization.”

The drive toward personalization – which will also soon include a tagging function in which clients can create their own tags to further organize payments by geography, sector, or other preference – was “not just client-led but client-built,” Vaream said.

His team interviewed more than 50 corporate treasury clients throughout the buildout of SMBC Connect to make sure it was being created not based on what the SMBC Americas team thought was useful for its clients, but based on what its clients knew was useful for themselves.

“The interviews yielded one common theme,” Vaream said. “People want to live their professional life like their personal one – on their phone, where it's configurable, where it applies directly to them, and it's personalized.”

During SMBC Connect’s development, the tagging function was the most universally desired among the clients it was tested on, Vaream said.

The client interviews also allowed his team to bring SMBC Connect’s cash management capabilities to market faster, he said. The team built them in about a year.

Additionally, SMBC Connect plans to roll out real-time, cross-border payments tracking.

SMBC Connect will be able to show clients where their payables and receivables are within a payments chain to optimize their capital management.

SMBC has a 400-year history, with its origins in the Sumitomo family copper mining business, established in 1590. But to build SMBC Connect’s fresh technology, Vaream said he created a startup team inside the bank, co-creating in the ways of yesteryear: intimately, in person, on a whiteboard.

The team was built on the idea that “[w]e are the best version of ourselves outside of our comfort zone,” he said, and that mindset brought together a wide array of people.

The team that built SMBC Connect includes several former corporate treasury professionals but also individuals with unique hobbies – the lead singer of a band, a weekend fashion student, and Vaream himself, who a few years back climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa.

Vaream, whose career has spanned established banks and fintechs, was keen on hiring a team with diverse creative outlets to “to form an environment where you get different inputs for people, as opposed to traditional bankers, because what banks have traditionally provided our clients, based on the conversations with our clients, is not necessarily what they want,” Vaream said. “It’s a 400-plus-year-old bank, but we’re trying to lead the way on how we can maintain innovation in this organization.”

“The cross-pollination of ideas and backgrounds has been critically important to the success of this program, and I can’t overstate that,” he said.

More capabilities will roll out over time within SMBC Connect, including artificial intelligence tools. Vaream's team seeks to alert clients to potential fraud, ways to lower a bill, or trends the bank has observed.

“Using AI to do some of that pattern recognition and machine learning in terms of identifying opportunities for our customers, so they don't have to run through their Excel sheet to see it themselves, is an area that clients identified that we're looking forward to delivering,” he said.