By Alex C
United Bank for Africa (UBA) plc has unveiled a web-based banking platform, U-Direct Corporate, a cash management and transaction services platform designed to aid small and large firms maximise their payments, collections and liquidity position.
U-Direct Corporate, which is operational in UBA Nigeria and across 18 African subsidiaries of the UBA Group, offers an integrated, single sign-on product suite, through which UBA provides to corporate clients cash management and transaction banking services.
The new web-based U-Direct Corporate, designed for SMEs, large companies, institutions and government, requires only a password to access all its 8 modules on the platform.
The 8 modules include – payments, collections, multi-bank multi-regional balance viewing, liquidity management, cash forecasting, e-Trade, e-Treasury, and value chain management.
U-Direct Corporate offers a mobile app, the first of its kind for corporate customers in the industry that enables access to the platform for payments and approvals on mobile phones. The mobile app is available for Android, IoS, and Blackberry smart phones.
“The mobile application offered by U-Direct Corporate is ideal for executives who are always on the go. They can track and monitor transactions and balances, initiate or decline approvals even while on the move on business or personal calls. No important business has to wait until they get back to the office,” explains Emeka Uzoigwe, product manager for U-Direct Corporate.
U-Direct Corporate will also enable companies speed up receivables processing, resulting in reduced financial exposure, lower borrowing costs and maximised cash flow.
Corporates who sign on to the platform will get consolidated view of all corporate account balances in the native country and anywhere in the world, plus consolidated real-time view of all collections via branch, web, and PoS on a single dashboard.
Access will be given for cross-border payments and collections views, instant value payroll implementation, vendor, pension and tax payments, as well as instant payment to mobile phones.
“What U-Direct Corporate has done is to aggregate all the financial transactions of our corporate customers into a single platform, enabling them to carry out all these transactions from the comfort of their offices or anywhere, thereby boosting efficiencies, accountability and transparency.
“It puts the corporate customer’s financial transactions right at his fingertips and in essence, results in better financial control,” said Yinka Adedeji, divisional head, e-Banking, UBA plc.
It must be noted that U-Direct Corporate is easily integrated into existing company’s accounting platform. “This is a world-class solution for both large and small companies as it offers unrivalled convenience in handling their transactions and cash management across all parts of their operations, whether they are operating in a single country or are multinationals with multiple cross-border operations. U-Direct Corporate is great as a liquidity management tool for corporate customers seeking to efficiently manage cash-flows, credit facilities and working capital across accounts, banks and geographies. With U-Direct Corporate, you can sweep liquidity balances across subsidiaries into a single account to reduce cash overhangs, and also net off accounts to reduce cost of finance across subsidiaries and the parent company in a Group,” explains Adedeji.
Plans are underway to further launch U-Direct Corporate in its business offices in New York and Paris as well as in its London subsidiary in United Kingdom. UBA is a pan-African bank serving over 7 million customers in 19 African countries with business offices in New York, London and Paris.
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