Cash management poll 2002: Missing the point

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The largest cash management banks seem surprisingly unconcerned by new competitors encroaching on their territory and by trends that threaten the revenues of one of their most important businesses. Even the fact that they are all pursuing the same strategy does not seem to worry them. Ask any of the global cash management banks to describe their strategy and they will give the same answer. They are all targeting the wallets of the top-tier multinationals.

The theory is that these multinationals are most likely to require complementary services such as foreign exchange and investment banking that banks hope to be able to cross-sell and also send and receive the most cross-border payments.

With sophisticated corporate treasuries now able to do so much more to manage their cash by themselves, what do banks do to add value? John Hazelwood, EMEA head of product management at JPMorgan, concedes: "Revenues from traditional cash management services are under threat." But he says the banks can bundle services. "The ability to bundle services, particularly liquidity management such as cross-border sweeping, is a key differentiator," he says. "Our revenue base has historically been fairly evenly split between payments and liquidity products."