Infosys, ICICI unveils B2B financial fulfillment product

Infosys Technologies and ICICI have announced that they have jointly released ICICI SmartPay, a B2B financial fulfillment product, which enables a bank or financial institution to link the buyer, seller and the B2B exchange. This facilitates effective, efficient, risk-less and fraud-free transactions between buyers and sellers of B2B transactions, even when the parties are not regular customers of the bank. This financial fulfillment product has been jointly developed by Infosys and ICICI and makes ICICI the first financial intermediary to be live with this B2B model of transaction. It would be available through icicimarkets.com, the gateway for corporates to
ICICI.

The first phase of this B2B model of transaction uses an escrow route for financial fulfillment. In this route the buyer's funds are parked in an escrow account in the bank and are disbursed to the seller when specified conditions are met.

With this B2B model of transaction, a deal that is struck at a B2B exchange is acquired by the bank electronically. The bank then takes over the entire process of the deal, from issuing multi-level approvals, providing alerts on the status of the deal and ensuring the structured release of payments, to monitoring the various status such as approval, remittance, dispatch of goods, rejection, etc.

According to Rivi Varghese, Head - Product Management (Delivery Channels), Banking Business Unit, Infosys Technologies, "B2B transaction enablement is the space to watch out for, as all parties tend to gain tremendously by lowered transaction costs, quicker turn around time and reduction in buyer and seller risks. For banks, this opens up a lucrative revenue stream itself. Banks are the natural choice for fulfilling the trust gap, which exists in a B2B deal. We believe that products of this nature will boost the uptake of B2B transactions, as traditionally this was hamstrung by lack of strong financial fulfillment and bank intermediated
products."