Treasury management services play a crucial role in day-to-day operations and long-term planning for financial institutions.
An effective treasury management solution can help banks drive deposits and attract a broader customer base through services like cash management and payment processing solutions for their business customers. It helps banks manage their liquidity risk and improve their liquidity profile while generating income. But while hand-in-glove support has always been part of a successful financial institutions’ offerings, today’s tech-savvy business customers expect more than superior client support. They expect convenience in transacting their business.
Commercial customers increasingly expect to be able to sign up for treasury services in a quick and easy interaction — even better if it’s done online. So, what can a financial institution do to support that? They can start by revisiting their treasury management disclosure document solution.
Managing treasury management services agreements manually is cumbersome, tedious and, ultimately, an ineffective use of time for bank staff. In order to draft compliant content, financial institutions either need to engage outside counsel or hire someone to manage their treasury content in-house. If leveraging outside counsel, banks are then tasked with the burden of maintenance, tracking any regulatory changes and reengaging counsel to make changes when necessary. Meanwhile, hiring in-house counsel is expensive and tasks the financial institution to create their content and ensure it is current. Both options are costly, and both expose financial institutions to a considerable amount of risk.
Instead, financial institutions should consider engaging with technology providers — much like they already do for in-branch and online deposit origination services. The ideal solution should allow financial institutions to build their own customized treasury management services documentation with compliance guardrails that ensure the solution fits and remains compliant. This allows banks to share and promote custom, bank-defined content that describes the treasury services it offers to commercial customers in a single master services agreement that can be shared in branch or online. Leveraging multiple delivery options for this content is a huge boost to financial institutions that want provide options for commercial customers.
Financial institutions should seek out technology that allows them to easily configure their treasury services agreements and is capable of maintaining those agreements over time — without having to start from scratch or engage counsel. Without a standard, well-defined process for updating treasury management disclosures, financial institutions run the risk of releasing inconsistent or inaccurate content to commercial customers. They should look for solutions that have well-thought-out change management processes. Solutions that offer an easy workflow, allow for customization while maintaining compliance and integrate into their existing technology stack is icing on the cake.
Investing in technology that streamlines treasury management documentation not only helps banks reduce their maintenance costs associated with compliance, it allows them to leverage a self-service model. When they add or modify services, they can handle the updates internally, rather than reengaging counsel or putting the content through a rigorous compliance review.
Opting for technology solution also allows financial institutions to be more agile with how content is presented. Instead of maintaining agreements for each treasury services they support, they can streamline their agreements into a single master services agreement, which reduces administrative tasks and reduces tasks like in-person signing that are often involved in commercial customer onboarding.
If banks are looking to strengthen their treasury management services, a great place to start is exploring technology partnerships to help create and maintain their content. It frees up skilled staff to focus on the things that build business relationships, rather than words on a page.
This article has been prepared for general information purposes only and is not legal advice. The information in this article is not intended to create, and receipt of it does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship.
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