Is your bank supporting your business?

• Author: Gregory, Tom
• Position: Treasury

Does your bank really understand your business? Does it offer the intellectual capital and resources to put new solutions into practice? Would your company switch its primary banking relationship to a financial institution that demonstrated heightened proficiency in the firm's industry?

These are some of the hard-hitting questions circulating around water coolers and conference rooms at businesses across the nation. As financial services become more commoditized, banks must seek new ways to differentiate themselves to acquire and retain business.

But is proving themselves experts in specific industries the best asset banks can offer as they scramble for business?

It might be. Two-thirds (67 percent) of respondents to a survey during a session presented by this author at the 2008 New York Cash Exchange said they don't think their bank fully understands their business.

Furthermore, 54 percent said their primary bank doesn't offer the intellectual capital and resources needed to help them identify and realize new solutions. And almost 80 percent said they would be willing to switch to another bank with proven expertise in their industry.

To warrant commercial business, banks know they must serve their customers' needs and more fully exhibit their expertise. If banks fail to gain, sustain and communicate such expertise, business customers will flock to a bank that does.

Banks should help businesses paddle their way through murky economic conditions as well as help them streamline inefficient processes by offering new technologies or process efficiencies.

In addition, bankers should be strategic partners, offering valuable advice and services to their corporate customers.

Corporate practitioners at the New York Cash Exchange identified the following five critical areas where they need strategic solutions and advice from their banking companies:

1. Converting to electronic payments. More than half (51 percent) of survey respondents still make more than half of their organization's business-to-business payments by paper check; while 70 percent said they were somewhat or very likely to convert most of their company's remaining paper B-to-B payments to some electronic format in the next two years.

   Banks should offer solutions that help businesses implement payment efficiencies, speed receivables and take advantage of electronic data capture/transmission. One way banks can do this is by assisting customers convert to electronic delivery of remittance...