Why paying for performance when trying to cut bank fees may not hold water.
The pain point of bank fees is not significant enough to justify paying vendors who promise to analyze and reduce them on a performance basis. This was the consensus of NeuGroup members discussing bank fee management—one of their top priorities—at a recent meeting.
While in theory it might make sense to pay a contingency fee based on how much a vendor saves a company, treasury operations managers are understandably reluctant.
- “We pay our banks a lot in fees, so paying a vendor a percentage of savings would amount to a significant payout,” one NeuGroup member said recently.
- Charging 30% of the savings as payment—what one vendor making the rounds has been quoting—is too high.
On a pure cash outflow basis, treasury has some idea of what it’s paying banks, but the full picture is murky since much of what banks earn off each client in the transaction banking realm is embedded in foreign exchange and interest-rate spreads. Indeed, sometimes an effort to reduce visible fees can lead to uneconomic decisions.
- If your bank fee analysis vendor has an incentive to reduce fees, they may do so at the cost of better interest or FX rates, earnings credit rates (ECRs), or may push other economically irrational decisions.
Further, treasury needs to step back and consider how much it is paying in fees versus the level of bank service it is receiving, including the credit commitment. In other words, it needs to look at the total wallet. Here are three points to consider:
- Is this worthwhile? One banker with experience in transaction banking at a global leader told me he thinks that the relentless focus on bank fees is akin to being obsessed with finding all the coins in your couch cushions.
“Competition among banks has driven fees down, so it should not be as big a concern,” he said. NeuGroup members shot down this notion, however.
- More clarity needed. The wallet considerations with bank fees for transaction banking services need to be clearer and banks do themselves a disservice by failing to adopt global standards to make them more transparent and comparable.
- Rate environment is conducive to it. Now is the time to get a handle on fees. With persistent negative and lower interest, flatter yield curves, across much of the major developed economies, transaction banking is becoming more reliant on fees to sustain their businesses.
The bottom line. To fix the pain point of bank fees, banks and bank fee solution providers needs to:
- Establish more clarity on what bank fees represent, and the market price for them.
- Put them in the context of overall wallet management so treasurers can assess if the upcharge to pay for other services that are not market priced, like credit commitments, is acceptable.
This is the game being played: Banks deliver a range of services for which their corporate customers pay them X, aka the wallet; the allocation of that wallet to various services and fees is used to justify a credit commitment that is otherwise not fully paid for.
- To pay a bank fee analysis vendor on contingency to reduce bank fees may be a fool’s errand unless the contingency fee is reflected in the total wallet picture.
