Great Expectations from Bank Account Management

by Ben Poole, Ben Poole Editorial Services

The quest for end-to-end cash visibility is critical for today’s treasurer. However, without a full view of all bank accounts being used by the organisation, this is always going to be nearly impossible to achieve. Because of this, bank account management has never been more critical for corporates. A workshop on day two of the 8th BNP Paribas Cash Management University explored this topic, with perspectives from treasurers, bankers and third parties.

The current landscape

Carsten Jäkel, Partner Finance & Treasury Management with KPMG, opened the workshop by reporting some interesting results from a recent survey on bank account management carried out by the firm. Three-quarters (75%) of the survey respondents have a revenue of €1bn or more per year.

A key finding of the survey is that the treasury landscape is quite scattered. Some 42% of respondents have an in-house bank (IHB) or payment factory established. Twenty-nine per cent have either partly implemented, initiated or plan to initiate this kind of project, while the remaining 29% don’t have anything like this in place. The variety of banks used for payment execution also differs. At the lower end, 37% use between one and five banks and 21.7% use between six and ten banks. At the same time, 19.6% of treasurers are using 11-20 banks for payment execution, while a not-insubstantial 17.4% use over 20 banks. The survey results also highlighted that a large majority of treasurers (over 90%) recognise the need to reduce the number of bank accounts that they hold around the world.

Download our Free Treasury App for mobile and tablet to read articles – no log in required.

Download Version Download Version