Two of America’s largest banks have recently sent notices to customers communicating the changes to their services. Multiple global banks are also in the middle of streamlining service lines as they bring additional countries into a centralized global billing system.
The bank billing forecast for 2017 is calling for consolidation across the board. Redbridge Debt and Treasury Advisory has noticed a consistent trend among banks looking to reduce the overall number of individual bank service IDs in their billing systems. Two of America’s largest banks have recently sent notices to customers communicating the changes to their services. Multiple global banks are also in the middle of streamlining service lines as they bring additional countries into a centralized global billing system. These efforts are a start to better transparency in international bank billing.
We have a long way to go, however. Upon closer look, many of the changes simply remove legacy product names or rename existing services. Others combine multiple notification options into a single service line. Global banks that used to maintain separate service lines per country are now consolidating per region instead. While these efforts greatly improve efficiencies internally for the bank, their corporate customers will not necessarily see a reduction in service lines. The benefit for the corporate will be in the comparison, monitoring and understanding of similar services across multiple countries.
Historically, American banks used to price treasury services based on state or region. The evidence of this practice still exists in many regional banks that have not invested in improved billing systems. While some have successfully made efforts to consolidate the remaining state-specific services, cash vault services per location still linger.
While the forecast of consolidation is much stronger in Europe than in the US, the winds of change are blowing. It can be difficult for any corporate treasurer to keep up, even with a software in place. AFP codes and pricing grids need to be manually updated in most systems when a bank makes changes to the way they bill. If not maintained, the value of the software quickly declines. This is one of the main reasons Hawkeye BSB is so revolutionary. The mapping and tagging is maintained by the experts at Redbridge at a master level so a client never has to worry about the ebb and flow of bank billing tides. Will your system be ready?