SAP S/4HANA Cloud Essentials: MBC Bank Payments Automation

The scope of this blog post is to describe the high-level architecture and the configuration steps required to integrate SAP S/4HANA Cloud Essentials into banks using SAP Multi-Bank Connector (MBC) deployed on SAP 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 ERP systems and banks that offers embedded SWIFT and EBICS connectivity.

There is an abundance of documentation available on SAP MBC, but unfortunately, it is not very relevant to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Essentials. However, we asked SAP to update its best practice “explorer test script” documentation during our implementation journey as it does not describe the end-to-end technical components of the MBC.

SAP Multi-bank Connector – Technical Architecture

MBC is a combination of SAP Managed CPI version deployed on SAP Business Technology Platform, which is compliant with the banking security standards. Plus, SPRO Configuration, which will be activated on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Essentials backend when you purchase 16R Scope Item on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Essentials. (SPRO won’t be available for users on S/4HANA Cloud Essentials).

Steps to configure the connectivity between MBC and S/4HANA Essentials:

1. Once you purchase the 16R Scope Item, SAP will provide you with an SAP Global Account with MBC subaccounts on the SAP Business Technology Platform for test and production environments, respectively.

2. Once SAP Team provides the subaccount, you will need to give SAP Team full BTP Developer and CPI permissions for accessing and testing MBC FLOWS. You can give yourself permissions as well, but you don’t need to do this unless you want to check the messages or conduct end-to-end connectivity tests along with SAP Teams.

3. You will then need to raise an incident to SAP Team to open the connectivity between SAP S/4HANA 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/4HANA Cloud Essentials to see Manage Bank Messages App.

5. If you have an issue with encryption or seeing messages in the Manage Bank Messages App, you need to raise an incident again and assign it to the LOD-FSN-INT incident group.

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. L1 teams initially investigate any failures /retries /escalations, and then L2 teams will be notified to resolve the issue. On top of this, the customer is notified via ticket if the problem is not quickly fixed.

High-level Integration Architecture

The below diagram depicts the high-level end-to-end architecture of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Essentials -> MBC -> Bank interfaces.