Execute complex payments more effectively with the Celonis Cross Border Payments App

A bank lives and dies on the efficiency of its payment processing capability. But this core service is being tested as clients’ operations expand across the globe. Convera’s Fintech 2025 report reveals the surge in cross-border payment flows is expected to reach $290 trillion by 2030.

Meanwhile, cyber threats are rising and regulatory demands are increasing. And there’s disruption to contend with too: evolving technology is transforming legacy systems; fintech entrants are fragmenting the value chain.

Any one of these challenges can pose a risk to on-time payment — and with it, the chance of attracting new corporate and business clients. So the imperative for banks goes beyond providing a competitively priced payment service. Today, it’s about absolute visibility across their processes, so they can make it as easy as possible for customers to execute these complex cross-border and trade payments.

Fortunately, help is at hand. Banks now have a dedicated process intelligence solution to call on as part of our newly launched Celonis Platform Apps Program. Powered by ProcessLab, the Celonis Cross Border Payments App is designed to improve the experience for clients making these transactions, and reduce the costs for banks to serve them. Here’s how.

How the Celonis Cross Border Payments App works

The app transforms data from banks’ source systems into real-time operational dashboards — from holistic, at-a-glance overviews to granular drill-downs, all brought together in one centralized view. These data models and visualizations give banks a clear, live and objective picture of performance metrics in four key categories:

• Revenue: Reducing duplicate payments, ensuring on time payments and avoiding canceled payments

• Manage spend: Channel optimization, team performance and reducing working hours

• Productivity: Improving straight through processing rates (STP), increasing automation rates and optimizing recurring payments

• Customer satisfaction: Reducing cycle time and enhancing customer touch points

The dashboards offer different use cases with analysis showing historic KPI breakdowns. The benchmarking function allows banks to compare process data against their own targets and best-in-class statistics, instantly highlighting any sub-optimal performance.

Cross-border and trade payments involve multiple systems. The Celonis Cross Border Payments App gives banks complete end-to-end visibility across them all.

How banks benefit from the Celonis Cross Border Payments App

With absolute visibility and insights into payment processes, the app enables banks to precisely target opportunities for improvements and automation. This includes prioritizing payments or identifying bottlenecks and delays so they can reduce cycle times and increase processing capacity. Eliminating duplicate payment processes also lowers the cost to execute each transaction, generating operational savings.

To illustrate the potential of the app, a major bank used it to increase their payment processing capacity by 18% and reduce their cycle time by more than 30%. This translated to $2.4M annual cost savings from re-engineering their payment process.

The app takes advantage of the fact that the majority of cross-border and trade transactions involve the same customers paying in the same currency to the same beneficiary multiple times. Being able to pinpoint these repeat payments and standardize how they’re processed allows banks to significantly streamline their operations.

Customers don’t just feel the benefit from more efficient payment processing. Their interactions with the bank are also simplified thanks to the app enabling accurate payment status to be communicated in real time. Customers can upload a source document such as an invoice, with the bank processing the payment in the most cost-effective, automated way to minimize friction.

Finally, the app reduces regulatory risks by giving banks an up-to-date dashboard for monitoring and reporting on conformance across their workflow. They can also automate regulatory requirements to establish a clear control framework.

Keeping banks in control

The Celonis push API gives banks control of the app’s integration layer through our secure cloud interface, so they have full visibility of the data they submit.

The app is system-agnostic, meaning it’s compatible with each client’s environment providing the minimum data is available. And once the data has been submitted, the app seamlessly and automatically converts it into the dashboard visualizations, keeping them up to date at a frequency determined by the bank.

The result is a fully automated app, with a data exchange that simplifies implementation and maintenance.

Celonis Platform Apps Program

With an initial offering of four purpose-built apps, including the Cross Border Payments App, powered by ProcessLab, the Celonis Platform Apps Program demonstrates how the strategic combination of process intelligence and industry-specific partner expertise enables companies to maximize performance, drive transformation and generate value at speed and scale.

To learn more about the Cross Border Payments App and how the best-in-class professional services and software solutions from Celonis’ partner ecosystem can help find and capture the value hiding in your processes, visit our partner page.

Bill Detwiler

Senior Communications Strategist and Editor Celonis Blog

Bill Detwiler is Senior Communications Strategist and Editor of the Celonis blog. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, where he hosted the Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET’s popular online show. Bill is an award-winning journalist, who’s covered the tech industry for more than two decades. Prior to his career in the software industry and tech media, he was an IT professional in the social research and energy industries.