Choosing you Banking Partner
Managing your Banking Relationship

As a finance manager, managing banking relations has been both a difficult and challenging task. Many treasurers inherited banking relationships that had to be maintained with the various banks that composed the corporation’s core group while achieving their main objective: to ensure that all the company’s needs were met reliably and within a reasonable cost (Zietlow and Maness 289). But what are the things that a finance manager should focus on when trying to determine what bank(s) to chose? Is it based solely on cost? How often so finance managers shop around? Or is it better to just sit tight with the current option as the familiarity with your current bank and their way of doing business is worth the “potential” cost savings of going elsewhere and having to learn their system. Historically, CFO and finance managers were prompt to consolidate their banking needs and services within one banking institutions but as the banking landscape keeps morphing/merging and more banks keep adopting AFP standards, it has become increasingly easier to understand the workings of not only your banking institution, but all others as well – which leads to shopping around for cheaper alternatives for different services. From June to September of 2012, Ernst and Young conducted telephone interviews with treasurers, CFOs, and other senior financial executives. The companies interviewed were spread among 9 industry sectors, throughout 11 countries and they ranked the importance. The interview consisted on the 8 categories that were most important offerings by their financial institutions and the how well the financial personnel thought that their banking partners were performing. The categories found most important were: | Degree of importance | Bank Performance | Service Quality | 89% | 73% | Product