Commonwealth Bank of Australia's New Zealand subsidiary, ASB, has worked with online accounting software provider Xero to streamline business-to-business payments and other data flows across 30,000 accounts. The resulting system has been road tested by business owners and the bank over recent months. In the latest stage of this collaboration, small business owners, or their bookkeeper or accountant, have been able to prepare payments using Xero accounting software and send them securely to ASB's FastNet Business platform, where they sit until the business owner authorises the transaction to be sent out. Its proponents claim this will save several hours per month.Russell Jones, executive general manager of technology at ASB, said the process was created through a "strategic alliance" with Xero and other technology providers almost 18 months ago. "We work with a number of firms and have provided data feeds to Xero, BankLink and MYOB for a while now, but the work we have done with Xero as part of our strategic alliance has taken that up a notch or two," Jones said.Jones said that a big part of the motivation, from the bank's point of view, was about "taking some friction out of the system" for its customers, rather than looking for cost savings on his side. He also suggested that this time and cost saving alone would make accountants more likely to recommend ASB to their clients.Jones also said the first three stages were showcased two months ago at an industry conference. "The first piece of work was extending the accounts for which data feeds could be made available online, changing from basic transaction accounts to just about every account that we have. The second was around provisioning of bank feeds so that these can be set up same day or overnight. The third advance has been automating business-to-business payments."Xero's banking and payments expert, Matt Vickers said the new approach allows will "improve and simplify the workflow process between accounting and banking, making life easier for small business owners."With customer consent, data held by businesses and their accountants on one side, and banks' transactional data on the other, could be passed back to the bank for a variety of services: for payments; for a loan application; or for signing-up to additional services."We see this model as the future of banking and believe it's a logical step for Australian banks to incorporate this technology and become a standard banking service over the next few years," said Vickers.