BANGALORE: Infosys and ICICI Ltd. 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.

According to press statement, the product 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. It would be available through icicimarkets.com.

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 struck at the 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.

Infosys Banking Business Unit, Head - Product Management (Delivery Channels), Rivi Varghese said, "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."

ICICI joint general manager and head ICICImarkets, Suvalaxmi Chakraborty says, "ICICImarkets.com, the host for ICICISmartPay, is a financial portal developed and maintained by ICICI to cater to information, decision support, solutions, analytics, risk management and financial transaction requirements for Corporates. ICICISmartPay provides transaction settlement services that enable online payments to be made in a secure and risk free environment."

ICICI vice president, ePayments, JK Manivannan, said, " ICICI SmartPay can cater to both online and offline business transactions and is ideally suited for certain segments of the industry, especially the commodities and SME sectors."