Bank account management processes are clearly a pain-point for treasury managers. That’s because standards and requirements to manage bank accounts and signatories as well as handle compliance, vary by country and sometimes by banks in each country. At a fall meeting of The NeuGroup’s Global Cash and Banking Group, one member described how his team handles bank accounts and signatories, which began a discussion about opportunities to leverage what peers are doing right to streamline processes.
In the pre-meeting survey, it was revealed that bank account challenges are on the rise. Most members (96%) reported an uptick in compliance-related activities concerning bank accounts. Keeping current with signatory changes, including discrepancies between corporate and bank records, as well as managing documentation for opening and closing accounts and know-your-customer (KYC) were among the top challenges.
During the meeting the presenting member described his approach as a top-down control over account openings. The company’s treasury team in the US must approve all account openings, and it negotiates most agreements with the banks. Agreements with smaller banks may be negotiated locally but treasury provides the final approval; this requires that documents to be translated into English, which slows down the process. But on the upside it may persuade the local office to instead use one of the three global banks preapproved by treasury. Most attendees said their companies approve bank account openings and do local documentation work centrally.
As for compliance, a number of countries’ banks are now asking for full KYCs of the directors, including personal information such as home address, marital status and even whether they have children. One member said pushing back on banks’ requests can prompt them to limit KYC to only the director who signed the board resolution. Another said his company only gives passport copies of the directors who have no transactional authority.
Regulators have also focused on account directors because companies do not always have sufficient insight into the backgrounds of those they hire. A spouse in a government position, for example, could exert problematic influence or pose an optics problem.
SWIFT and other market participants have promoted KYC standards, in order to reduce corporates’ compliance burdens in trying to conform to different requirements in different countries and from different banks. But do such standards simply find the greatest common denominator, leaving corporates to fill in the rest? And is maintaining bank relationships and their expertise still key? An HSBC banker participating in the session said that may be the case today, but standardizing KYC documentation ultimately should lead to greater automation and efficiency. Banks’ KYC documentation may ask for information in different ways, but 80% of that information is the same.
Pain points in the bank account management process aren’t going away and instead probably are increasing as regulators across the globe turn the screws. M&A increases complications, since now acquired companies’ accounts must be dealt with, increasing the challenges related to tracking signers and reconciling account information with banks.