By Stephen Nellis
Oct 19 (Reuters) - Oracle Corp's NetSuite on
Tuesday said it will put automated banking features into its
accounting software for businesses, with HSBC Holdings Plc
as its first partner to automatically send and receive
money and reconcile accounts.
Oracle NetSuite sells cloud-based software to mid-sized
businesses to track their financials. But many core functions,
like wiring money to pay a bill or reconciling billing records
with bank statements to see how much cash is available for use
at any given time, still requires humans to push buttons and key
in data.
Oracle NetSuite on Tuesday said it has used artificial
intelligence and partnerships with banks to automate those
processes. When a bill or an employee expense report comes in,
the software can read it, file it appropriately and have money
wired.
Evan Goldberg, executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite,
said the goal of the new system is to help businesses get a more
accurate daily picture of their cash position and free up staff
in finance departments to work on more important things like
planning and analysis.
"Labor is at a premium," Goldberg told Reuters in an
interview. "You want your people not working on manual data
entry, but working on stuff that's actually going to add
strategic value to the business."
The Oracle NetSuite system requires integration with banks,
which have also been working to use technology to make business
transactions more efficient. Oracle NetSuite said it aims to
integrate with most major banks and that its first partner is
HSBC.
In a statement, Barry O’Byrne, chief executive officer for
global commercial banking at HSBC, said partnerships like the
one with Oracle NetSuite are "central to our strategy of
supporting our clients’ growth across all regions, from Asia to
the Americas. We envisage this to be the first alliance of
many.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by
Leslie Adler)