“We ensure monitoring bank fees is easy and accessible for medium-sized companies”

Why are bank fees a top priority for finance departments in 2025?

Gaelle Parquic: Companies are facing increasing uncertainty – volatile interest rates, pressure on financing and unpredictable business forecasts. In this kind of environment, understanding your banking relationships becomes vital if your business is to prove resilient.

In times like these, cash management fees need to be monitored very carefully. This isn’t an optional or secondary task – it’s a core responsibility of any treasury team. Every euro paid to a bank should be justified. And yet in many companies, it is not – not due to a lack of interest, but because finance departments often lack the resources, skills or time to devote to a task still seen as highly onerous.

As a result, bank invoices are underanalyzed, discrepancies between negotiated rates and billed prices go unnoticed, and both central and local treasury teams lack insight into their banking relationships.

What’s your take on the tools currently available for analyzing bank fees?

Many companies believe they’ve “ticked the box” by implementing a Treasury Management System (TMS) with a dedicated bank fee module. Doing so is a logical step – finance departments want to centralize their tools. But by refusing to consider additional or complementary specialist solutions, they may be sacrificing operational efficiency.

In practice, these modules are often difficult to implement, provide limited coverage and, worst of all, don’t provide a consistent view of invoices from different banks. Without a unified fee structure and terminology, meaningful analysis is nearly impossible.

At Redbridge, we believe that monitoring bank fees should be treated as a discipline in its own right. It requires a level of granularity and a dedicated approach that few systems on the market currently provide. It’s not a case of replacing what you already have, but enhancing it with a dedicated tool designed for this specific purpose. Sometimes, taking a small step forward in terms of improving your technology can result in a giant leap in performance.

Was that the logic behind creating HawkeyeBSB?

Exactly. HawkeyeBSB was initially developed to meet a very specific, on-the-ground need: treasurers wanted greater visibility of and control over their bank fees. The tool was co-created with them, in close collaboration with our specialist cash management advisory teams.

These experts needed a robust solution to help them analyze bank invoices, identify discrepancies against negotiated or market rates, and simulate potential savings.

So HawkeyeBSB wasn’t born from a typical spec sheet – it resulted from shared needs among practitioners. Today, it’s used by over 100 international groups and analyzes bank invoices from more than 110 countries and 575 bank-country combinations.

What new features have you added to the tool 2025?

is the integration of PowerBI reporting, a ready-to-use dashboard built by our team to answer the key questions treasurers face.

This dashboard offers a quick, clear and standardized summary of the most important data, such as costs by bank, country and service type. With just one click, users gain a clear view of the banking services they are using. This format makes it easy to share internally with local treasurers and senior management, and externally with banking partners.

It’s both a management tool and a communication aid, delivering consistent and reliable information at every level.

 

Usability is a key priority. We’ve redesigned the entire interface to ensure it can be used autonomously, without extensive training.

We’ve also built a multi-user framework so that local treasurers can get involved. That’s essential – they have the best insight into what’s going on in their local markets, and they need to be able to track their costs, detect anomalies and engage more effectively with their banks.

You’ve also broadened the range of companies that can benefit from the tool?

Yes, the idea is that our technology shouldn’t be reserved for large, multi-banked corporations operating in dozens of countries and that have multiple subsidiaries. Our solution now delivers a strong return on investment even for companies with only a few banking relationships in a single country.

Are there any more new features planned for the platform?

We’re currently revisiting the way we analyze discrepancies between negotiated terms and the actual fees that are charged. Our goal is to offer dynamic, more fluid and intuitive discrepancy detection for users.

This new feature will provide users with an instant, summarized view of fee discrepancies – by service, by bank and by amount. It should improve transparency, make a bank more responsive in the event of a discrepancy and help between the bank and the treasury department.

This functionality is set to launch in the autumn and marks a major milestone in our mission to help treasurers take back control of the quality and auditing of their banking relationships.

What’s your vision for the future of bank fee monitoring?

Our ambition is to make bank fee tracking as strategic and automated as budgeting or cash forecasting. We need to move away from one-off audits and towards continuous, collaborative, well-documented oversight.

With HawkeyeBSB, we aim to give treasurers the analytical and communication tools they’ve been missing – not just to cut costs, but to take ownership of a domain that’s been overlooked for too long. And this is no longer just for large enterprises: we’re making it accessible to everyone.