Bank relationships: How to prepare for an annual bank meeting

Building a good customer-bank-relationship

In addition to working closely with their banking partners throughout the year, finance professionals often have longer, structured conversations with key partners once a year. These annual meetings offer the opportunity to build strong working relationships and take a holistic look at their entire bank portfolio. During this meeting, both sides assess the relationship, discussing day-to-day and strategic treasury challenges, new bank products, and services and plans for the upcoming year. Treasury professionals need to be prepared for these bank meetings, but often struggle to gather all the information they need.

Analyzing your bank relationships

From a treasury perspective, these annual meetings with key bank partners should be used to optimize individual bank relationships and spread counterparty risk across the bank portfolio. Here are the top 5 best practice reports treasurers usually prepare for their annual bank meetings:

• Business with each bank by volume and on a transaction basis
• Transaction analysis by type
• Contract inventory and maturity lists, and credit facilities
• Bank fee analysis: “What´s the value of our company to the bank?”
• Counterparty risk evaluation

For all reports, it is important to consider corporate and subsidiary bank accounts and transactions. Only treasury teams that can make the entire business relationship with all of their bank partners transparent are able to spread counterparty risk among primary and secondary banks efficiently.

Technology to manage your bank portfolio

Dedicated bank account management functionality, either within a Treasury Management System (TMS) or as a standalone solution, enables organizations to collect all financial data in a single place, making the information available for real-time analysis and reporting. These tools offer various reporting capabilities, including interactive dashboards and a library of best practices and custom reports. Treasurers can effectively gather the information they need in preparation for their meetings with their banks, and look up additional details during their discussions.

By using treasury technology, treasurers can better plan for the next business year and build stronger, long-term partnerships with their bank partners.