November 17, 2014
Bank fee analytics provider Weiland enters first time partnership with Reval.
Financial technology provider Fiserv recently agreed to integrate its Weiland BRMedge bank-fee analysis software into Reval’s corporate treasury and risk management (TRM) platform, a first such partnership involving the Weiland service that reflects the impact of new bank regulations on corporate customers.Following the financial crisis in 2008, regulators such as the FDIC raised their fees on banks significantly. Banks have proceeded to pass on those increases to customers, especially corporate customers that don’t have the same protections as consumers under the Dodd-Frank Act.
“We’ve seen much more interest from corporates, which before could just pay [the fees] without paying too much attention,” said Dan Gill, vice president for Fiserv’s Weiland Corporate Solutions division. “Now treasuries are seeing this becoming a bigger budget line item, and they’re not willing to just pay it without reconciliation.”
In Reval’s announcement of the partnership, Mr. Gill reported that a large US-based insurance company recently cut its annual bank fee budget to $8 million from $15 million using the BRMedge software while continuing to expand its business.
As a result of the higher fees, corporates also began asking their treasury workstation providers such Reval, Sungard and Kyriba to include a solution in their offerings. Gill said some of those providers have built basic services but none matching Weiland’s sophisticated application, which scans statements for more than 30 categories of potential errors and automatically notifies banks when they arise. The software also allocates charges to business units and posts fees to the corporate’s general ledger, and it enables treasuries to analyze the entire cash flow cycle and budget for future bank fees.
An independent company and software provider until 2010, Weiland has dominated the space for bank-fee analysis software. It has agnostically worked alongside treasury management systems, capturing business from 40 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies, Mr Gill said. He added that the workstation providers’ efforts to build bank-fee analysis functionality changed the equation.
“Those solutions won’t provide corporates with the savings they would get using our software, but they’ll get more visibility into fees,” Mr. Gill said. “Once that started happening, it became a little easier for us to reconsider our agnostic approach.”
Mr. Gill said a partnership with Reval was especially attractive because of the company’s significant presence in Europe, where the Weiland unit is looking to expand, and Reval’s desire to penetrate further the US market, which is Weiland’s stronghold. Reval’s customers will ultimately save money using BRMedge as a part of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider’s TRM offering, and the partnership will streamline the onboarding process, allowing a corporate treasury to work with a single project manager.
“We’ll get them saving a lot of money much sooner, and they can go out and do more advanced analytical things, like budgeting fees, or billing fees back to cost centers, or any of the things we consider easy to do but are difficult without fully understanding the fees coming in,” Mr. Gill said.
Gill noted corporate transactional bank accounts are perhaps the most fluid offered by a bank, requiring significant capital to be held against them under new regulations.
“We think banks will be more selective with the customers they go after, and they’re going to do that with fees and the services they offer,” Mr. Gill said. “Our role as the cop in this situation is to help identify where that is happening.”