Using Technology to Optimize Bank Relationship Management

Importance of Bank Relationship Management for the CFO

Today’s Bank Relationship Management (BRM) supports effective corporate governance of an organization’s bank accounts as well as driving a more efficient banking strategy. Many modern BRM programs streamline the number of banks, bank accounts and bank fees to support the organization’s growth more effectively. Hamza Benamar, CFO for Kyriba, discussed the importance in his article: “CFOs must ensure the bank relationship is being leveraged to its full potential.”

BRM Technology Delivering Competitive Advantage

Optimizing BRM technology results in big wins; often as much as a 30% reduction in bank fees alone, in addition to productivity improvements such as automated audit tracking and reporting including FBAR disclosures. To deliver operational value, BRM technology must include:

• Enhanced Security – All banking data is fully auditable with strong controls to lock down sensitive data, ensuring real-time security
• Bank Fee Reporting – reduce costs by eliminating bank fee mistakes and inefficient services from your bank relationships
• Compliance and Regulatory Reporting – automate FBAR reports, audit compliance, and drill down dashboards to track all banking activity and updates
• Application communication — Real-time, leading integration with banks and your core ERP offers an end-to-end BRM process, ensuring accounts are accurate and synchronized across your enterprise.

Emerging API Use Cases for Real-time Bank Account Management

APIs not only connect banks to internal finance platforms for real-time reporting and payments, they also offer the potential to support bank account management in real-time. Many banks, as they open their platforms via API, are considering supporting account opening, notification, and signatory management activities. Some of the more specific use cases include:

• 24/7 Delivery – On-demand access for foreign subsidiaries and employees to process requests and updates for BAM or other requests on their schedule
• Immediate updates – banks can deliver more real-time account updates, signatory card updates, mandates, authorizations, and more with enhanced API-driven security
• Signatory reconciliation – synchronize internal signatory databases with bank records to ensure that departures, new hires, and other signatory changes are immediately updated
• Scalability – mass processing of all bank account management processes are expedited by API integration so treasury can support the business more effectively

Finance and treasury must look to continually improve operational efficiency to maximize strategic decision making. Bank Relationship Management is key to minimizing bank costs and streamlining banking footprints to effectively support liquidity needs across the enterprise.