Cash management: Analyzing the voting patterns

Citigroup wins this year's Euromoney international cash management poll with big-money votes – within the highest ever 1,154 respondents to this year's poll, 60% of corporations with annual gross sales figures of more than $25 billion use the bank. And when it comes to the really big clients – those with more than $100 billion in annual sales – that jumps to 90% of respondents who use Citigroup. The only scoring boost in the poll bigger than the one Citigroup gets from those big clients is the one HSBC gets from its small ones. It is a leading ICM provider for an astonishing 61% of clients with sales figures of less than $1 billion. That number accounts for HSBC's run to near the top of the poll this year. If HSBC manages to keep up its small-client dominance and grab just a few of the big accounts in 2005, next year's poll might even see it overtake Citigroup to leave all the other banks behind.