BACKGROUND
The scope of the blog is to describe the high-level architecture and the configuration steps required to integrate SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Essentials with the banks using SAP Multi-Bank Connector deployed on Business Technology Platform. SAP MBC connects banks and other financial institutions with corporate customers on a secure network owned and managed by SAP. It creates a multi bank, digital channel between your ERP systems and banks that offers embedded SWIFT and EBICS connectivity.
SAP MBC acts as a single point corporate-to-bank connectivity increasing the visibility and control over all the financial transactions that take place periodically. It provides real time notifications to organizations enabling organizations to track payments, approvals and cash flows in real time. It will help organizations to verify bank payments, debit and credit charges, cheques, track account fees and identify potential fraud and track receivables faster.
There is a lot of documentation available on the internet on MBC but it is not very relevant to SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Essentials. We asked SAP to update their best practice explorer test script documentation during our implementation journey but the test script doesn't describe the end-to-end technical components of the multi-bank connector.
Useful Blogs:
- SAP MBC Overview
- SAP MBC High Level Solution Components
- SAP MBC Supported Protocols
- SAP S/4 HANA Cloud MBC Offerings
SAP MULTI BANK CONNECTOR TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE
MBC is a combination of SAP Managed CPI version deployed on SAP Business Technology Platform that is compliant with the banking security standards and SPRO Configuration that will be activated on SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Essentials backend when you purchase 16R Scope Item on SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Essentials (SPRO won't be available for users on S/4HANA Cloud Essentials).
Steps to configure the connectivity between MBC and S/4 HANA Essentials:
1. Once you purchase the 16R Scope Item, then SAP will provide you SAP Global Account with the below MBC subaccounts on the SAP Business Technology Platform for test and production environments respectively.
3. You will then need to raise an incident to SAP Team to open the connectivity between SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Essentials and Exchange Certificates and assign it to the incident group
LOD-FSN-INT
4. Assign the role BR_BANK_INT_SPECIALIST in SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Essentials to see Manage Bank Messages App
5. If you have an issue with encryption or with seeing messages in the Manage Bank Messages App then you need to again raise an incident and assign it to the incident group LOD-FSN-INT
6. You will need to work with Banks to fill up an SAP questionnaire template that SAP provided to the client
7. SAP will then change the configuration of the bank connection endpoints to the client credentials
8.When a customer goes live, the tenant is monitored by the SAP support team. Any failures /retries /escalations are initially investigated by L1 teams and then L2 teams will be notified to resolve the issue. On top of this, the customer is notified via ticket if the issue is not resolved quickly.
HIGH-LEVEL INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE
The below diagram depicts the high-level end-to-end architecture of the SAP S/4 HANA Cloud Essentials -> MBC -> Bank interfaces.
S/4 HANA CLOUD ESSENTIALS FIORI APPS
The table provides you a list of the Fiori apps that we will be using in SAP S/4 HAN Cloud to process payments and bank statements.
| Interface | SAP Fiori Apps | Functionality Provided |
| Inbound Bank Statements | Manage Bank Statements (F1564) | Pull and Display Bank Statements from MBC |
| Inbound Bank Statements | Manage Bank Messages (F4385) | MBC Tenant to MBC Connector - Automatically uploadS Bank Statements into S4 using a polling job Re-run upload Bank statements if required This new app allows users to monitor the status of messages sent to banks and received from banks via SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity. Users can view failed messages, trigger reprocessing, and download messages to initiate the next steps. This new app allows users to monitor the status of messages sent to banks and received from banks via SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity. Users can view failed messages, trigger reprocessing, and download messages to initiate the next steps. Users can also be notified if a message requires attention. |
| Inbound Bank Statements | Bank Statement Monitor | This app is used to monitor all bank statements received intraday and end of the day. |
| Outbound Payment files | Manage Automatic Payments | Validate Payment files, Generally in this phase test files can contain 1-3 transactions per file. Bank Specific payment media is generated and an accounting document is posted.Navigation to the corresponding batch in "Monitor Payments" and "Approve Bank Payments" |
| Outbound Payment files | Monitor Payments | Display the S4 Payments approval Status- In Approval, Approved, Sent to the Bank |
| Outbound Payment files | Approve Bank Payments | Automatically routes the approved payment messages to MBC Scheduled Job that will push the messages to SAP MBC system in the next step. |
| Outbound Payment files | Manage Bank Messages (F4385) - Verify file sent to MBC - Send Payment Instruction to MBC | Following a payment run, payment messages can be sent to the relevant bank automatically via SAP Multi-Bank Connectivity - Multi-Bank Connectivity (MBC) payment file is created automatically and messages are pushed to the SAP MBC system. This app will show the audit log of all messages received/sent from/to SAP MBC System. |
| Outbound Payment files | Monitor Situations (F3264) | Lists all Bank Statement/Payment Messages that are not processed correctly based on situation type configured according to the client requirements. |
MONITORING MBC Interfaces
SAP S/4 HANA Cloud provides the following apps to monitor bank statements and payments.
Monitor Messages Sent from/to SAP S/4 HANA Cloud from/to SAP MBC:
Monitor Bank Statements:
Monitor Payments:
Monitor Situations
My colleague yoola.ogunbayo will blog shortly on how to set up situations for MBC message failures. Once the situations are configured, you can see a list of deviations, automatically correct the data and reprocess the messages.
- SAP Managed Tags:
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