The results are in and reveal an important area of opportunity neglected by corporate treasurers and cash managers. On average, the financial officers responding to our Bank Fee Analysis Flash Survey spend in excess of $250,000 per year on bank services and maintain millions of dollars of deposits.
Only 25% of treasurers surveyed use automated tools to conduct their bank fee analysis and only 21% use external services and benchmarks such as NDepth, our bank fee analysis solution. Although these figures are much higher than in prior years, most companies still have a long way to go in their bank fee management programs.
72% of corporate respondents analyze their bank account statements monthly, a best practice. However, three quarters of respondents say the review is simply a cursory eyeball or internal spreadsheet review of bank service charges, earnings credit rates and balances. Since these statements generally are a dozen pages or more per bank, that hardly seems adequate.
A few firms ignore these valuable monthly account analyses. 12% of companies say they review their statements infrequently or not at all.
New technology is now available to help corporate treasurers put in place world class bank fee management programs. These bank fee analysis solutions such as NDepth empower financial officers to manage and benchmark their bank service fees, compensating balances, earnings credit rates and balance assessment fees.
In the past, companies had to wade through dozens of pages of account analysis statements or use early generation tools driven by complex bank service codes and EDI 822 files. With our NDepth Bank Fee Analysis solution, companies can now simply drag and drop their account analysis PDF files and see their results.