The bank's enhanced payment outsourcing service now provides corporate clients with a way to deliver both payment and detailed payment advice to all of their trading partners electronically, regardless of the trading partner's size or technological sophistication.

Corporate-to-corporate payments often include vast amounts of detailed information that may be truncated by today's electronic clearing systems. Until now, few options existed for trading partners who could not or did not want to receive remittance information via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).

The detailed information can be easily downloaded from the Web in a common format that allows trading partners to update accounts receivable systems, says the bank.

The service features proactive e-mail notification to trading partners of incoming payments information and has the ability to aggregate all payment information for trading partners doing business with multiple Bank of America clients. Future enhancements will include payroll, travel and expense reimbursement advices.

London-based consumer goods company Diageo is currently piloting the system in Europe for Bank of America. "The ability to deliver timely, detailed remittance information to our trading partners, which they can view and download from the Internet within a few minutes of the payment instruction being received by Bank of America, provides a simple, cost-effective process for Diageo. It's a significant improvement over fax or paper advices," states the company.

Clients using Bank of America payments outsourcing services with Global Advice can choose to control the enrollment set-up process for their trading partners or allow the trading partner to self-enroll.