Awards for Excellence 2019
|
|
Bank of America Merrill Lynch is a longstanding winner of the award for North America’s best bank for small and mediumsized enterprises, and the last 12 months have seen it deservedly retain the crown.
The period has been characterized by a push into mobile for its treasury platforms that is arguably more useful at the SME level than for any other client segment. At the same time, it continues to attract devotion from clients – both long-standing and newly acquired.
John Wiborg founded Stellar Industrial Supply in 1988. He has branches in six states and does business in many more. It is a business that is working-capital intensive.
 |
| JP Jolly |
It also occasionally likes to buy others in the sector, and so needs what Wiborg calls a “capital partner” for acquisitions larger than what the firm can fund by itself.
“We were with a regional bank before and they did a nice job, but they had nowhere near the full set of products that we needed,” Wiborg tells Euromoney.
BAML started financing the company in mid 2018. Since then it is the depth of the conversation that has impressed Wiborg.
“It’s more consultative than simply issuing a loan and getting an interest rate – it’s flexible,” he says. “They will say: ‘If you like this element and this element, then we can put something together for you.’” Stellar now has an asset-based credit facility instead of the revolver it had before.
But BAML’s much-admired treasury products – centred around the CashPro platform – are a key part of the attraction for Stellar, for everything from running the firm’s travel and expenses account to credit cards for its employees. Online and mobile portals allow easy analysis of drawdowns on its credit facility.
JP Jolly is head of financing and channels in BAML’s global transaction services unit.
He says that among the biggest developments in BAML’s offering over the last 12 months have been the investment made in mobile for CashPro and the addition of features such as document exchange and e-signature capabilities.
The bank’s CashPro Mobile channel can now use the biometric verification abilities of a client’s smartphone – and it also integrates a token feature, meaning that users no longer have to switch between apps or carry a physical token.
“For SME clients – often lacking the scale of treasury resources seen at larger corporates – systems like CashPro Online and its mobile app are all the more important,” he notes.
Stellar was already sizeable when BAML began to help it to the next level, but the bank has also guided others from earlier stages. Jeff Dolven, chief executive of Washington State-based contract services non-profit corporation Skookum, says his firm’s relationship with Bank of America goes back to just before the financial crisis of 2008.
When it signed up with BAML, Skookum had revenues of about $30 million and about 350 staff. It now has revenues of about $160 million and some 1,300 staff.
“Their relationship manager would pop in to see us – he was obviously interested in our business and very proactive. I liked their approach of trying to understand what we were trying to do.” That included understanding Skookum’s mission to find work opportunities for people with disabilities, including many military veterans.
It was a good time to be popping in, as Dolven was in the market for a new bank for Skookum. And one of the aspects of BAML’s pitch that appealed to Dolven was the notion that Skookum wouldn’t outgrow the bank.
The variety of what BAML can offer also helps. Skookum had a credit line with its old bank, but BAML can help the firm with swaps or with an equipment lease line that allows for work in multiple states, the kind of arrangement that can be tricky for smaller regional banks.
For Dolven the appeal goes beyond product.
“As much as anything it came down to the fact that the relationship manager had put in the legwork to get to know us,” he says.
It’s a message that all banks busy building artificial intelligence-based systems need to remember: there’s no substitute for the human factor, and never more so than when catering for smaller clients.
