Why Your Bank Doesn’t Need Fedline Advantage to Report Wire Transfers

Ever since the origination of the U.S. Federal Reserve Banks, there has been a need to mitigate the risks of fund transfers. In the early 1900s, this consisted of a Morse code system that connected the 12 Reserve Banks in order to transfer balances held at those banks. Today, with that connection as the foundation (though no longer using Morse code), the Reserve Banks deployed modern solutions to help banks post their incoming and outgoing fund transfers to the Federal Reserve, called the Fedwire Funds Service. The Fedwire Funds Service routes and settles payment orders (and reviews them).

The Fed has updated its offerings over time to include different options for banks, as transaction counts and number of institutions rises. Fedline is another branch of the Fedwire Funds Service that offers information and payment service options for banks who process wire, fund, securities, settlements, and ACH transfers. They are able to send and receive ACH and wire payments directly tied to their routing number.

In order for a bank to meet the requirements for fund transfers, an employee would need to check Fedline multiple times per day for inbound transfers to process and post any outgoing transfers to Fedline throughout the day. While this seems a simple enough process at the outset, for a bank with any volume of transfers, this is too much manual work, and if something took the employee away from their desk (like a customer request), the transfers would pile up and not get processed.  

Since every bank has this need to interact with the Fed, FedLine provides a number of paid services that handle these transactions for the bank automatically so that no one has to sit and monitor them. But those monthly costs add up quickly.  With a pricing structure based on the types of transfers and total amount of holdings, the monthly costs can get up into the thousands.

RPA for Wire Transfers

Robotic process automation handles tasks like this without manual intervention, running in the background for financial organizations so that they can get back to value-adding tasks. Automate Plus is the robotic process automation solution from Fortra that can perform the browser automation and data scraping necessary to take payment information from the core banking system and push it through the Fedwire Funds Service. A bot can be triggered from the receipt of outgoing transfer information or can be scheduled to go out to the Federal Reserve system to check for incoming transfers regularly. Some banks have internal SLAs to check these every 15 minutes, which is a problem for someone who has other work to get done but it’s no problem for Automate Plus.

When you use Automate Plus for RPA in banking, you don’t need to pay monthly fees for a solution that may not do exactly what you need it to do. And you’ll achieve ROI quickly.