The modern executive must arguably be more accountable than any before them. The need for effective regulation of markets, financial and otherwise, was laid bare by the GFC, and governments around the world have used the intervening years to ensure that executives face comprehensive regulations, and often harsh consequences if they fail to abide.
With instances of audits at all-time highs, organisations have had to create clearer and more comprehensive systems to demonstrate their compliance. But there’s one area in which many organisations, particularly multinationals, still fail the transparency test: banking relationships.
The difficulty of effective banking management
It is inherently difficult for a multinational organisation to track and manage their bank account portfolio, for a number of reasons:
Globalisation has meant that a multinational can conduct financial activities in dozens of countries around the world, and deal with multiple institutions within each.
Regulatory requirements change from country to country. In dealing with each individual bank, a company is faced with different processes to open, maintain and close their accounts. Some of these will be due to government regulations, others will be due to the bank’s own internal compliance requirements.
Granting the necessary access to the correct personnel is made difficult through the use of manual, local systems that don’t scale. Add in employee turnover, and the act of ensuring everyone has access to everything they need – but nothing more – becomes an incredibly complex task.
The cost of ineffective banking management
Add these complexities together, and it’s entirely understandable that organisations can struggle to get a real-time understanding of their banking relationships. And the consequences of such a limited or inaccurate view can be serious: compliance can be all but impossible, security breaches are hard to detect, and opportunities to lower costs and leverage banking relationships are missed. What’s more, in such a highly regulated environment executives can potentially face jail for failing compliance.
All in all, the need to have a deep and current understanding of your positions cannot be understated.
But what if a multinational organisation could take control of its banking, gaining a real-time and perfectly transparent view of their situation at any moment? Enter bank relationship management.
The opportunity of bank relationship management
Bank relationship management (BRM) is a philosophy aimed at mitigating risk and capitalising on opportunity through the use of smart processes and technology. BRM helps organisations track and manage their banking relationships by:
Offering up a single, simple view of all global bank accounts, insurances, lines of credit and forex activities.
Offering instant, customisable and easily manageable authorisation rights to each individual needing to access accounts.
Offering a complete view of fees and charges, paid and unpaid.
Highlighting or halting activities that are contrary to company compliance guidelines, or outside of an individual’s access rights.
Offering comprehensive summary reports to auditors.
Put simply, bank relationship management is the future of multinational finance. It guarantees transparency and compliance, reveals opportunity, and ensures executives don’t face severe consequences for non-compliance that, due to bad banking management, they may not have even been aware of.
Ready to change the way you manage your banking relationships? So are we. Contact Certomo today.