Cash & Liquidity Management
Published  7 MIN READ
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Positioning for a New Era at Commerzbank

How is the new ‘Cash Management & International Business (CMIB)’ division structured and what are its key responsibilities and products/services?

CMIB is a highly innovative business division that integrates all the key transactional activities for our corporate clients, not simply in cash management, but also trade finance such as letters of credit and structured exports. We recognise that managing and processing cash, wherever and however it originates, is key to our customers. Consequently, our sales and product teams are responsible for designing solutions that extend across our clients’ financial value chain, address their requirements and optimise the creation, collection and use of cash. Structured export and trade finance is particularly important, and our customers frequently require solutions that enable them to sell their products. This was a priority during the financial and economic crisis, but it remains critical today. At Commerzbank CMIB, we are delivering export finance services in domestic and international locations, and we have developed close links with the relevant export credit agencies.

In many banks, trade and cash are often segregated, at least from a product management and support perspective, which makes it difficult to deliver integrated solutions across the entire financial value chain. Our approach is entirely relationship-oriented, based on a commitment to understanding and responding to our clients’ needs at a detailed level, according to their industry, customer profile, geographic coverage, supplier base and future strategy. We are then in a position to devise and deliver comprehensive solutions that address our clients’ transaction processing, liquidity, counterparty risk and currency risk management needs, without being hindered by internal product silos with separate profit & loss and financial targets that hinder the efforts of many banks.

There are other benefits to the new CMIB organisation in addition to our integrated approach to cash and trade. For example, our sales strategy and product management units are closely aligned under single leadership, resulting in a short decision process with few interfaces, enabling us to respond to changing customer demands in a flexible and responsive way. We recognise the vital contribution made by each individual and every department, and we ensure that everybody’s roles and objectives are closely aligned, under a single functional head, to ensure that we are devising, delivering and supporting innovative and pragmatic solutions to our clients.