After working with many institutions over the years, we’re convinced that there are a minimum of 12 online banking features that are essential for business success. One of the most important systems your institution invests in is your Online Banking Platform (OLB) – yet many of our clients have purchased OLB systems that are missing several features and are not able to offer them as services.

The Online Banking Platform is the primary delivery mechanism through which business customers access your treasury management services. It is the foundation of your business-focused digital banking strategy. Your Online Banking Platform, at a minimum, must be available 24 hours per day and offer complete access via web and mobile interfaces. Today, we’re focusing on the web-based online banking capabilities and their integration with treasury management services.

Let’s Evaluate your Current Business Offerings:

1. Does your Online Banking Platform integrate well with your core system?
   1. Rate your institution from 1-5 with a 1 having no integration and a 5 with a completely human “hands off” integration.
2. Does your Online Banking Platform integrate well with each of the TM services you offer your business customers?
   1. Rate your institution from 1-5 with a 1 having no integration to backend TM services and a 5 with a completely human “hands off” integration.
3. Do you have a separate OLB Platform for consumers and businesses?
   1. Rate your institution from a 1-5 with a 1 having one platform for both and a 5 for two separate platforms customized for each customer type.

If you scored less than a 5 on our evaluation, read on, we’ve got some great advice for you. If you scored a 12-15, either you are one of our clients or you have a very robust OLB/TM system.

Let’s discuss the 12 Online Banking Features That Are Essential for Business Success:

Let’s start with the minimum expectations of your Online Banking Platform for business customers:

• The system allows multiple users with multiple security levels under a single business entity.
• The system allows multiple businesses under one umbrella (i.e., holding company and subsidiaries).
• The system offers multifactor authentication (MFA) options (hard token, soft token, or biometric).
  • Side note: We no longer consider text messaging safe for business OLB system access. It is still too easy to SIM swap a mobile phone.

Your business customers should be able to conduct all or most of their banking business on this platform.

Basic Banking Functions

1. Initiate internal transfers. Businesses need to make transfers between their main operating account and other accounts such as payroll and savings accounts. Initiating internal transfers is a must. Certain business owners who have their personal accounts with you may need to transfer funds between personal and business accounts. These businesses are typically solopreneurs or Single Member LLC entities. Your OLB system should allow this function and it typically occurs via the consumer platform.
2. Initiate stop payments. Businesses with high check writing activity may need, from time to time, to place stop payment on a check. Your OLB platform should allow them to initiate the stop payment with all the appropriate information and submit it online. Often we see clients with a completely manual process behind the scenes as if the customer showed up at a branch. Instead, the system should be able to automatically place the stop payment and process the charge.
3. View current and previous day transaction information. The ability to download previous day information has been available from the early days of online banking. Businesses should be able to download their bank information to their accounting software anytime. The next step will be to download real time transactions (items that post that day).
4. Electronic Bank Statements. Businesses expect the ability to download their monthly bank statement via PDF format for at least the last 18 months. Many institutions offer longer availability, but most businesses usually need 18-24 months’ worth of data.
5. View check images. Along with statements, businesses need to view images of checks that cleared, or items deposited. It is especially important to be able to view checks deposited via remote or mobile deposit capture. Again, the expectation is a minimum of 18 months availability.
6. Originate payments via BillPay. Small businesses enjoy the capability of issuing payments via the BillPay service which is typically free. As their volume of payments increases, you can offer other ways of paying their bills like ACH origination (see below).

Many of the above basic banking functions may be for smaller businesses with low transaction volume. We typically see these types of customers enrolled on the consumer (retail) OLB platform. Your large customers may also as for these functions, so be sure your business OLB system can do them also.

Treasury Management Services

7. Initiate domestic and international wire transfers. As your business customers grow or as you acquire larger commercial customers, they will need Treasury Management services. They will need the capability to initiate domestic wires and international wires. It is important to offer this service with multifactor authentication and the ability to set up multiple authority levels. The more robust OLB platforms allow the business customer to do self-administration where they assign the authority levels to their users.
8. Account Reconciliation service. The ability to download daily account transactions also allows the business customer’s accounting software to reconcile to the bank daily. Account Reconciliation is one of the oldest TM services; however, not all OLB platforms offer it.
9. View PDF Account Analysis Statements. Your TM customers will expect to receive their monthly Account Analysis statement via the OLB platform. This capability is a big challenge for certain core systems that do not produce the Account Analysis statements digitally. They look like a “raw statement” and is not presentable to the customers without major manual work. Some institutions even have to print them to statement paper first and then digitize them because the core is antiquated.
10. Originate ACH payments. One of the top-selling TM services you must offer to your business customers is ACH Origination. For businesses that pay lots of bills via check, the ability to pay bills via ACH saves them time and money. Your TM business customers should be able to upload their ACH batches via your OLB platform.
11. Access Check and ACH Positive Pay. Your business customers should be able to upload their Check or ACH batches via your OLB platform. This is another important TM service that typically is not integrated (or not well) with the core. Therefore, operations staff must do a lot of manual workarounds to make it work correctly. All done behind the scenes so customers “feel” like the system is working as intended. This process can be costly and inefficient for the institution.
12. Connect to Remote Deposit Capture. Finally, your RDC customers should be able to connect to their RDC service through the OLB platform. Again, it takes integration between the core system, the RDC provider (if other than the core provider), and the OLB platform.

It is important to continually offer convenience and safety to your business customers when using your OLB platform. I hope this list of 12 online banking features that are essential for business success will serve as a foundation to improve upon.

Looking for assistance with refining your Treasury Management department? As always, we’re here to help.

One of the most powerful ways to build additional traffic to your institution’s treasury management portion of your website is to create a weekly blog with content focused on customers who use treasury management services. Below, we’ll continue our series how to start a weekly treasury management blog in 10 steps.

In part one of this three-part series, we examined some technical aspects of getting a blog up and running. This time, we’ll touch on some practical day to day processes.

Note: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase an item or subscribe to a service, we will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Step 4: Define Your Blog’s Purpose

You need to keep the blog “on the rails” at all times and the temptation is to use it for selling purposes. Sorry, your blog goal is not to sell something to the reader. Here are some guidelines for maintaining the consistency of the blog:

1. Deliver value
2. Educate
3. Inform
4. Entertain
5. Give the reader a reason to act

Step 5: Set Up Your Editorial Process

Having a simple editorial process is critical in maintaining consistency in the blogging process.

1. Focus on creating blogs around 600 words. You want them over 400 words, but less than 900 words. If you go over 900 words, consider splitting them into two blogs (part 1 and part 2) and post them on subsequent weeks. We are big fans of multi-post content as it makes consumption easier for the reader and SEO seems to respond well to multi-part content. Plus, you get weeks of content without extra work!
2. During the writing process, the author needs to note where photographs, images or infographics need to be placed in the document.
3. Once ready, the author sends the final blog over to the person designated as the editor. Ideally, you have all agreed on the “voice” of the blog so the editing process is easy.
4. If compliance wants to review at the posting before going live, send the edited version to them for review.

Step 6: Create a Posting Checklist and Standards List

Every post needs to be consistent with the rest of the postings, so we’ve got some ideas to create your standards list from:

1. All text is reviewed by at least two people – the writer and the editor.
2. A search phrase and META text is generated sometime in the posting process. All that matters here is that your search phrase is unique across your entire site and does not compete with any other page.
3. Hashtags are no longer needed for blog posts except in certain situations where you want your post to show up in a national or international awareness campaign.
4. At a minimum, you’ll need a primary, featured image for each blog posting. If you can’t create your own image (custom photography or infographic), we recommend you use a stock photography service such as Unsplash, Adobe Stock, Getty Images, or Shutterstock. If you need custom infographics, we recommend 99Designs for assistance.
5. Create other graphics or screen shots for your blog posting using your design guidelines for image size.
6. During your featured image creation process, we recommend you also create several other image sizes from the same image and save them in a consistent place where the marketing team has access to them. At Malzahn Strategic, we always create these images:
   1. Featured Image
   2. Universal Sharing Image (1200×628)
   3. Instagram Image (1080×1080)
   4. YouTube Thumbnail (optional – in case you create a video from this blog in the future)
   5. We document everything in a spreadsheet, so we know where it has been posted. We document the: Posting Date, Name of Blog, Keyphrase, SEO Title, META Description, which images were created for the post, and then where we’ve posted it (Blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.). This spreadsheet is handy for confirming we don’t create duplicate content – a quick search confirms if we have ever run that topic before.
   6. Tip on image names. Use the SEO title in lower case separate by dashes (never underscores) for the name of the files. For instance, if your SEO title of the blog is “positive pay and manufacturing companies”, your images would be along the lines of positive-pay-and-manufacturing-companies.jpg.
7. We recommend a set folder structure so you can easily find assets for older posts. Here is a sample:
   1. We have a folder just for marketing files and the blogs are under this structure: Marketing -> Blogs -> YYYY -> MM
   2. Inside of each of the month folders, you’ll have another folder for each blog entry that month. For instance, we do a blog every week, so we generally have four folders in each month folder. Each blog has the source Word document, an edited Word document and then all the source and finalized/scaled images.
8. Consistency is key. We recommend posting your blog the same day of the week at the same time. Make it a goal to post 50 blogs each year.

In part three of this series, we’ll work on your blog’s search responsiveness, promoting the blog and ideas for re-purposing content.

We hope you learned something about creating weekly treasury management blog to help drive leads to your institution. What treasury management projects are you working on? We’re always here to help.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.