JPMorgan Treasury Services, a unit of JPMorgan Chase and a leader in global payments, trade finance and treasury management, announced that it will offer a new image-enabled, state-of-the-art receivables platform powered by J&B Software.

"As a result of the merger between Bank One and JPMorgan, we are now able to offer the best technology solutions from our combined organizations, further demonstrating our commitment to receivables management and the delivery of outstanding customer service," said David D'Silva, senior vice president and receivables business executive for JPMorgan Treasury Services.  "The heritage organizations have been leaders in lockbox innovation for over 60 years, and we are making the investment to continue to lead the industry."

JPMorgan is converting its national lockbox processing centers to J&B Software's TMS image-enabled hub-and-spoke processing platform.  The new platform is powered by a centralized processing engine to facilitate the automated capture and integration of images and data from remote locations.

"We are extremely pleased to be working with one of the largest payment processors in the nation," said Bala Balasubramanian, president and CEO, J&B Software.  "We believe our proven software technology and remittance processing expertise will be invaluable to JPMorgan's continued leadership in receivables services."

Multi-site Lockbox Processing

Traditionally, lockbox service providers have made significant investments in IT to bring about work process improvements through automation.  This is especially true for large, multi-site service providers, who have been investing in multi-location but independent sites to build a large processing network.  Larger networks ensure a means to provide processing services close to the customer's geographical collection zones.  Leveraging the advantages of a single vendor with a nationwide reach has been a successful strategy for attracting profitable lockbox business.  Until recently, this geographical strategy for winning business required lockbox processors to adopt a technology replication strategy.  As a new wholesale lockbox service location was added to the network, the IT investment in technology was more or less replicated, similar to the addition of any other site.  Replication at a nearby site meant that the increasing scale of operations did not translate into a significant reduction in the cost, since 'cost per transaction' was almost the same.  Multi-site wholesale lockbox processors have been challenged to consider various means to increase their footprint, while lowering the 'cost per transaction' without sacrificing service quality.  Decreasing check volumes, brought about by the adoption of electronic alternatives, has also increased the cost per transaction and reinforced the need for change.

The Hub-and-Spoke Solution

Today, adopting our hub-and-spoke architecture is the means to address the needs of multi-site lockbox service providers.  It solves many problems associated with typical multi-site, independent distributed processing centers.  The benefits to lockbox service providers include:

• Reduced time & cost to add a new spoke 
• Faster extension of wholesale lockbox service to a new location
• Scalable at a lower cost than traditional business models
• Optimization of manpower; as load distribution and leveling across multi-sites becomes feasible for centralized hub-based processing activities
• Movement of data entry and other hub-based processing activities to a lower-cost geographic location - as these operations can be performed remotely - even offshore
• Easier software migration as a result of centralization
• Easier and less costly maintenance support, upgrades & change management through centralization
• Reduced cost per transaction, leading to better competitiveness & margins
• Management of business changes at a single point to ensure that the service provider quickly adapts to the evolving receivables market
  

This architecture can be extended beyond the lockbox environment to our Enterprise Payment Solutions (EPS) and Check 21 for business.  It enables capture & scanning at the source of presentment, payment & deposit and moves information to the hub for data completion and centralized electronic clearing of checks.