North American Liquidity: Change, Challenge, Opportunity

Over the past year, the interest rate environment in North America has been markedly different from that in regions such as Europe. Coupling this with potential cross-border cash efficiencies associated with NAFTA trade growth and the availability of innovative balance sheet investment options, means that treasurers in the region are not short of opportunities. Michael Havraniak, Regional Head of Liquidity, Global Liquidity and Cash Management, HSBC outlines these opportunities and examines some of the ways in which treasurers can maximise them.

Interest Rates

Interesting Times

While interest rates in regions such as Europe have remained low (and in some cases negative), rates in North America have recently been following a very different trajectory. In the US there have been six rate rises over the past 22 months, with Federal Reserve officials projecting a steeper path for rate rises in 2019 and 2020 [1], while in Canada there have been four increases in the policy rate since July 2017 [2].

Corporate treasurers in North America have been quick to respond to this in their expectations of the credit interest rates they are seeking from their banks. There is now much more emphasis on maximising yield across the maturity spectrum of surplus corporate liquidity. This is the most recent development in the way treasurers’ attitudes to liquidity have evolved over the past decade. Back in 2008, the Association of Finance Professionals (AFP) annual Liquidity Survey [3], made it very clear that treasurers’ emphasis was overwhelmingly on security and far less on yield or liquidity. However, based upon HSBC client discussions, it is evident that treasurers are now also looking to maximise yield and liquidity. Consequently, there is a lot of pressure from North American corporate treasurers on banks to pass on any central bank rate increases in their entirety.

A further incentive for treasurers to maximise yield is that corporate liquidity levels continue to rise. According to annual research by S&P Global [4], US corporate holdings of cash and short- and long-term liquid investments hit a record USD1.9tr as of year-end 2016. In some cases this liquidity increase is causing treasuries issues with the credit risk limits allocated to their banks in their treasury investment policy.

As yet, it is unclear whether this – coupled with lessening emphasis on security – will result in treasuries extending the number of banks they are prepared to place deposits with, or whether they will simply increase the risk limits on banks with which they already place cash.

Changing Buckets

Apart from interest rate rises, another interesting liquidity dynamic at present is the change in treasury behaviour in relation to segmentation of liquidity. Historically, many treasuries have tended to allocate their liquidity into three ‘buckets’: short, medium and long term. Allocation across buckets has usually been done on the basis of availability requirements. Short-term liquidity would need to be instantly available for working capital, while long-term liquidity might only need to be tapped very occasionally and so could be placed in instruments such as 90-120 day notice accounts.

It appears that this behaviour is now changing in two ways. Some treasuries are retaining the same three bucket model but are reassessing the segregation of cash across the buckets.

Others are considering adding new buckets to achieve a more granular approach to their liquidity investment. In both cases, maximising yield is a core objective.

An important factor behind this shift is Basel III. While a few banks, such as HSBC, were quick to draw the attention of their treasury clients to the implications of the forthcoming regulation for efficient liquidity management, others were not.

As a result, a considerable number of corporate treasuries have until recently tended to assume that Basel III was an issue purely for banks, and failed to appreciate the knock-on effect on their own liquidity management.

This situation is now changing and more treasuries now understand the significance for them of Basel III measures, with the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) being an important example. The purpose of the LCR is to support the short-term resilience of the liquidity risk profile of banks by ensuring that banks have an adequate stock of unencumbered high quality liquid assets that can be converted easily and immediately in private markets into cash to meet their liquidity needs for a 30 calendar day liquidity stress scenario [5]. This effectively means that large corporates’ deposits that can flow out a bank within 31 days (and that are not linked to transactional products) have zero liquidity value to any bank accepting the deposit. As a result, banks have minimal incentive to attract these deposits.

Growing awareness of this among treasuries has had two consequences. Firstly, as mentioned above, treasuries are re- examining the way they bucket their liquidity. More specifically, they are considering how much of it they can re-allocate to beyond 30 days. Secondly banks are launching products to target this shift: for instance, HSBC has introduced a 31 day notice account to extend its liquidity product offering, which offers client an uplift in yield over shorter-term products.

NAFTA

Notwithstanding current political uncertainties over NAFTA, the fact remains that it accounts for very substantial trade value: USD1.1tr in 2016 [6]. From a treasury perspective, this means that NAFTA-related trade can easily result in substantial liquidity balances accruing that are distributed across several currencies in several different countries. Given treasury’s fundamental task of ensuring that the corporation has the right liquidity in the right place in the right currency at the right time, this can represent a considerable challenge.

Cash concentration

Dealing with this effectively requires an efficient method for cash concentration. While it is perfectly possible to accomplish this manually, this is inefficient in that this sort of low level transactional activity diverts treasury resources from more important strategic concerns. This applies in two important respects: the actual individual instructions for moving cash, but also the tax-compliant and accurate administration of any resulting intercompany loans.

Automated solutions are available for running cash concentration structures. All the treasury has to do is specify the necessary balance thresholds and sources/destinations for sweeping cash. The necessary movements of funds then take place automatically without requiring further intervention. If there is a need to adjust any of the parameters, the treasury can simply log in and make the necessary adjustments - other than this, operating an automated cash concentration scheme of this type is a comparatively low maintenance affair.

Intercompany loan accounting

The same degree of automation can also be applied to the accounting process for any resulting intercompany loans. A large international corporate operating in different locations across NAFTA is likely to have different legal entities operating across that geographic base. If funds are flowing across the organisation and internal sources of liquidity are being used, then that will inevitably result in intercompany lending.

Historically, many corporate treasuries have opted to handle accounting for this themselves in-house. They have tracked the loans, calculated and applied the relevant internal company interest rates to those loans, and settled them across the bank account. As with issuing individual payment instructions with a cash concentration structure, this is hardly the most efficient approach – especially if a reliable automated alternative is available. HSBC’s inter-company solutions offer this facility, freeing up treasury resources for more crucial strategic tasks.

 

Notes
1 https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate   
2 https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/interest-rate
3 2008 AFP Liquidity Survey
4 https://www.spglobal.com/our-insights/US-Corporate-Cash-Reaches-19-Trillion-But-Rising-Debt-and-Tax-Reform-Pose-Risk.html
5 https://www.bis.org/publ/bcbs238.pdf
6 https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/naftas-economic-impact

 

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Off Balance Sheet Investments

Maximising return and capacity limits

As mentioned earlier, North American treasuries are highly focused on maximising return and they currently have high levels of cash upon which that return must be generated.

In some cases, the sheer volume of this cash is running up against the deposit capacity limits they may have in place for their various banks. This combination of circumstances is driving many of them to reconsider their off balance sheet options.

The ideal here is to have a process that integrates on and off balance sheet investment, so treasury doesn’t have to take on another separate manual process. This was one of the driving factors for the creation of HSBC’s Liquidity Investment Solutions (LIS) [7]. This enables users to automate the sweeping of cash from an HSBC account above a certain trigger level into off balance sheet money funds offered by a range of investment managers. (Automated fund redemptions can also be made if the bank account balance falls below a trigger level.) This gives users the convenience of a single process for managing on/off balance sheet investments.

Further along the curve?

Apart from the quest for greater yield, another factor that could cause a shift in treasury investment behaviour is possible regulatory change in relation to money funds (daily liquidity funds). At present, a great deal of research is being undertaken by asset managers and fund houses into what product changes they may need to make in response to regulation.

In some respects, this situation is not dissimilar to that which applied immediately after the framework of Basel III was first agreed upon in September 2010 [8]. Just as then, treasuries do not as yet have sufficient concrete information to understand the full investment implications for them of the forthcoming regulatory change.

Nevertheless, one possibility is that for longer-term cash where yield is an important objective, some corporate treasuries may start to look at a broader range of instruments, beyond bank deposits and money market funds. Furthermore, if continued high (or even increasing) levels of excess liquidity persist, more liquidity may start being assigned to the longest-term liquidity bucket. This in combination might result in a willingness to look a little further along the yield curve for investment opportunities. However, even if this specific scenario does not arise, the easy and automated availability of a broader spectrum of investment products via a single platform will still be of value.

Innovation

In an environment of rising interest rates and high liquidity levels, sophisticated corporate treasuries are looking to their banks for innovation. Much of the expectation here focuses on the automation and streamlining of liquidity processes that have historically been laborious for treasury to execute manually.

Next Generation Virtual Accounts [9]

Next Generation Virtual Accounts (ngVAs) are attracting considerable attention in this respect. They build upon the existing accounts reconciliation advantages of virtual accounts to add a self-service element. This enables clients to open multiple new virtual accounts beneath a single physical account. The administrative overhead of opening a new virtual account is considerably lower than that involved when opening a new physical account.

This makes it relatively trivial for treasuries to achieve a greater degree of control and flexibility, by being able to create sophisticated account structures using ngVAs, while still benefiting from the visibility, control and reporting advantages of an equivalent physical account structure.

At the same time, ngVAs give treasuries the chance to increase the centralisation of their operations. Using ngVAs, they can build structures that represent (for example) sets of business units or subsidiaries that can be managed centrally by treasury, such as to conduct payments on behalf of (POBO) or receivables on behalf of (ROBO). This sort of structure can provide the transparency needed at the entity or subsidiary level, while also delivering a centralised process for central treasury, plus being potentially more cost-effective to operate.

A central point of liquidity control

While treasuries increasingly expect liquidity management innovations from their banks, they also expect a convenient means for controlling those innovations. Having to log onto multiple separate systems in order to accomplish individual liquidity-related tasks is inefficient. By contrast, being able to log onto a single interface where (for instance) ngVAs can be opened, or trigger levels for money fund (de)investment changed, streamlines day-to-day activities and frees up treasury time for more important strategic activities.

This need for centralised liquidity control has been one of the drivers behind the creation of a new liquidity management portal that HSBC is developing. This is intended to enable granular control of a broad spectrum of potentially automated liquidity management related activities. These include an interface to LIS whereby users can adjust the managers they invest with, as well as the liquidity levels at which investments and redemptions are automatically made. HSBC’s new portal will in due course be connected to the bank’s Global Liquidity Engine. This will deliver much more than just information presentation. It will also enable clients to interact directly with HSBC systems to make settings changes for their liquidity management themselves, rather than having to ask HSBC to make the changes for them.

For example, in the context of a sophisticated cash concentration structure (such as those used across NAFTA by many North American treasuries) clients will be able to log in and adjust the frequency of sweeps or target balances.

If they are using HSBC’s inter-company solutions they could amend the inter-company interest rate that is applied, or adjust borrowing limits between entities if they are breached to ensure sweeps are not affected.

Plug and play banking

North American treasurers have been quick to pick up on the opportunities that financial technology companies (fintechs) can offer. More specifically, they are interested in any possible openings that will increase their flexibility and agility. For instance, a corporate may have complex cash management and liquidity structures in place. These have often been time consuming to implement, but if there are changes to the corporate’s lending or revolving credit facilities, it may be necessary to make substantial changes in order to switch some or all ancillary business to another bank or banks.

Using conventional methods, this would typically be a painful and disruptive process for treasury. To avoid this, corporate treasuries are now looking to fintechs to provide plug and play banking, by effectively acting as a consistent form of banking middleware. Under this model, the corporate is connected to the fintech via a single consistent interface that essentially doesn’t change. However, on the other side, the fintech has connectivity to multiple banks. If the corporate needs to switch banks, or add banks to cover a new jurisdiction, the fintech will simply disconnect/connect the relevant banks on the treasury’s behalf. However, the corporate connectivity to the fintech will remain unchanged, thereby minimising cost and disruption for the treasury.

Conclusion

It is increasingly apparent that North American treasuries are not looking for anything particularly complex to help them manage their liquidity. They are simply in need of innovation that helps them to self-service as efficiently as possible. This not only opens the door to better visibility and control of liquidity, it also removes low grade transactional activity that adds no value from their workflow.

In view of the way that developments such as instant payment systems are boosting the velocity of liquidity, the need for this streamlining of workflow becomes ever more imperative. Treasuries need to be increasingly responsive and agile in terms of liquidity management, while operating in ever shorter timeframes. Solutions that incorporate self-service and/ or facilitate faster and less costly change management are therefore welcome.

The good news is that much of the change needed to deliver this objective is already underway. The caveat is that there is so much change and innovation that for treasury to keep abreast of all developments and pick the most appropriate to adopt is a major workload in its own right. This is where a bank capable of acting as a trusted and consultative partner in a truly global network context helps add real value. It will be able to offer support based on a detailed understanding of the client’s business, plus its possible evolution and objectives. It will thereby assist in maximising the client’s chances of making the right decisions about the liquidity technology and strategy it adopts.  

 

Notes
7 An investment in a money market fund is neither insured nor guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), any other government agency or HSBC.
8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-basel-banks-text/announcement-of-basel-iii-bank-rules-idUSTRE68B1W420100913
9 HSBC is planning to launch Next Generation Virtual Accounts in North America.