CBI has launched a Request to Pay service for corporates, supported by EBA CLEARING and Nexi, covering Italy and the SEPA area.
CBI is extending its Request to Pay (R2P) service to the corporate market through its community of participating payment service providers (PSPs), reinforcing its collaboration with EBA CLEARING and Nexi. The solution introduces a digital model for managing collections between businesses and their customers, allowing companies to send structured payment requests that integrate directly into their enterprise systems.
Through Request to Pay, PSPs can offer corporates the ability to send digital payment requests to customers across Italy and the SEPA area, using EBA CLEARING's R2P infrastructure service together with Nexi's technology. Requests are delivered through internet and mobile banking applications and can be settled in a few clicks, without manual data entry.
Moreover, the service is already operational for payments to the Italian Public Administration, built on the same infrastructure now being extended to corporates. CBI said the new development confirms the solution's capacity to address use cases ranging from the public sector to the corporate world.
Liliana Fratini Passi, Managing Director of CBI, said that bringing Request to Pay to corporates provides a tool to simplify and improve the efficiency of collection and payment processes. She added that the solution, based on pan-European standards and real-time message exchange, allows companies to strengthen control, improve traceability and increase the conversion rate of payment flows, with real-time reporting.
Reconciliation and liquidity management
According to CBI, the service offers faster and more predictable collections, optimised control over due dates, and reduced exposure to fraud and errors through pre-filled data and timely notifications. The payment request remains separate from the final authorisation, giving the payer full visibility and certainty over the requesting party. At the same time, the solution also supports automated reconciliation that can be integrated into accounting systems, reducing operational costs through the process of digitalising processes and removing paper-based workflows, which CBI said helps corporates with liquidity management and cash-flow forecasting.
Erwin Kulk, Head of Service Development and Management at EBA CLEARING, said the company is collaborating with CBI and its PSPs to extend Request to Pay to new customer segments. He added that Italian PSPs will be able to expand value-added services for corporates at national and European level using EBA CLEARING's R2P service.
Renato Martini, Digital Banking Solutions Director at Nexi Group, said the extension of Request to Pay to the corporate world strengthens the company's collaboration with CBI and EBA CLEARING and represents a strategic lever to digitalise companies' financial processes.
The solution is aligned with European standards and electronic invoicing processes and is expected to support cross-border use cases, as well as synergies with other CBI digital payment services such as CBILL, used for the consultation and payment of bills through banks' and PSPs' digital channels. Furthermore, CBI described Request to Pay as a key enabler in the transformation of collection and payment processes between businesses and their customers, making them simpler, faster and easier to control, as well as a strategic building block within the European vision for secure, interoperable and user-controlled payments.
