Virtual Reality to Actuality: the Way Ahead for Virtual Accounts

Sub-accounts and virtual accounts are not new, but interest from large corporates has increased in recent years. Pioneered with multinational companies in Europe and Asia-Pacific, virtual account management (VAM) enables a flexible structure of sub-accounts (virtual accounts) rolled up to a physical bank account.

Banks implemented VAM largely at the behest of their most influential large multinationals, or those corporates that manage client monies. Naturally, these are the bank clients that would initially gain the most value from the advanced liquidity management and working capital tools. However, the value proposition isn’t restricted to the largest clients, but the path to broader adoption is challenging. My latest report, Demystifying Virtual Accounts: New Opportunities to Drive Adoption reviews the use cases, challenges, and barriers to adoption.

Based on conversations with banks and treasury practitioners, Celent has identified the following challenges that can limit adoption by corporates.

• Treasury-wide impact
• Setup issues with ERP platforms
• Cash management reporting data
• Regulatory restrictions about use of virtual accounts
• Lack of guidance and advice

Perhaps the last item is the biggest stumbling block. Larger corporates likely engaged treasury consultants to scope and define pros and cons of virtual accounts for their organization. Mid-sized companies that could still benefit from VAM often don’t have that resource available. VAM is not a simple proposition, nor in many ways a traditional banking product. From sales to implementation, corporate clients need and want advice from their banks about the benefits of a virtual account structure, and guidance on how to define and set up a virtual account hierarchy.

Demystifying Virtual Accounts: New Opportunities to Drive Adoption also looks to the future. Beyond liquidity functionality, a new generation of VAM capabilities is emerging that should change the value proposition for banks and their clients. This includes:

• Open banking and the use of virtual accounts to engage in the fintech ecosystem and to deliver Banking as a Service (Baas) capabilities to third parties.
• "Programmable” virtual accounts that allow clients to control the flow of funds and provide more granular validation of receivables before acceptance and posting.

Innovative examples include one-time use and programmable virtual accounts that have embedded logic to control the flow of monies into the account. These can be used as new ways for a company to influence “better behavior” from their trading partners. For example, to set an expiry date for an account, or to restrict the transaction amount. Clients that are in the habit of paying late and taking a discount might find their payments rejected; thereby forcing discount-takers to pay on time.

Despite the adoption challenges of virtual account solutions for treasury operations and for payments management, new opportunities and use cases are emerging. It is early days for these solutions, but virtual and sub-accounting can open a new set of possibilities for innovative transaction management. Banks should evaluate current capabilities and product roadmaps to determine how the next generation of virtual accounts can provide bank and client value.