Basel III represents the most significant “game changer” faced by corporate treasurers in the long-term, although a handful of other issues, including the Volcker Rule and similar rules outside the US as well as central bank monetary policies, are likely to stir the pot, according to a recent panel of experts in a recent Treasury Strategies webinar.
In a survey of its banking clients, the consultancy found that their treasury and finance departments are taking the lead in Basel III preparedness and to a much lesser degree their business units. In addition, about half the surveyed banks’ business units were involved in preparations for Basel III, just behind the IT department and well behind the treasury, finance and especially risk departments.
The greatest percentage of banks, 56 percent, said capital requirements were the element of Basel III that represented the greatest challenges to their deposit economics, followed by the liquidity coverage ratio, net stable funding ratio and the leverage ratio. Sixty-five percent of banks said they planned to introduce new deposit products in response to Basel III, while 62 percent planned to introduce new credit products and 58 percent new transaction banking products.
“It looks like half to two thirds of the banks will be changing every product line with which they deal with corporate customers, and the parameters for product development under Basel III are being laid out by the risk-management side of the bank,” said Treasury Strategies Partner Tony Carfang, who moderated the panel, which sought to explore what he referred to as game-changing issues impacting corporate treasuries. “So it’s entirely possible that these newer products may not be as attractive from a corporate treasurer perspective as products from pre-Basel III.”
Martin O’Donovan, deputy policy and technical director at the Association of Corporate Treasurers, said the Volcker Rule and the UK’s equivalent are significant game changers especially for banks and “may change some overheads and bureaucracies.” However, Basel III “will really drive what they’re able to offer customers and what’s they’ll charge for those offerings.”
For example, Mr. O’Donovan said, corporate deposits will remain valuable and useful to banks, “but the trouble is they’ll prefer longer maturities to periods of less than a month.” So ACT anticipates new evergreen-type products arriving that have a mechanism enabling banks to end the funding at 90 days, but if they don’t “it sort of rolls on … so treasurers who might want to keep their depository levels relatively short term will suddenly find that the banks … want things that are a touch longer to help on their liquidity and funding levels,” Mr. O’Donovan said.
On the monetary front, Mr. O’Donovan noted that in the UK banks flush with liquidity from low rates were reluctant to take corporate deposits toward year-end and in a few instances offered negative rates, a trend that may become more prevalent in 2013.
Deborah Cunningham, chief investment officer at Federated Investors, agreed that banks were “disincentivized.” She added that what made it manageable in the US was a reverse repurchase program tested by the Federal Reserve that enabled it to put some of its bond purchases back to nontraditional counterparts, including money markets.
“So that helped ease the crunch in the US … and kept rates fairly steadily positive,” Ms. Cunningham said. “But I can see Martin’s point for the greater potential of negative rates in the European segment.”
The Federal Reserve’s reverse repo facility is a good example of new tools the central bank is experimenting with to control rates as they roll back the quantitative easing program, said Roger Merritt, a managing director at Fitch Ratings. He added that many funds have taken steps to be able to account for negative rates and still maintain a stable net asset value, and that the “market phenomenon … wouldn’t have any impact on the ratings of the funds.”
One area that appears to be coming to terms with the more burdensome landscape, Ms. Cunningham said, is asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP), a significant finance tool for corporates. “We’re getting feedback from at least a handful of large banks that they would continue to look at this, and that it might be less profitable for them but it’s unlikely they would stop [offering] those types of programs,” she said, adding, “They look at it as [part of] a full package of operations to offer to their corporate cash customers.”