As corporate executives make cash management an increasingly important part of their treasury function, so transaction banks are realigning their businesses. Now it is increasingly part of the overall corporate relationship. Laurence Neville looks at the models the leading banks are adopting.

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Emerging markets have become a driving force of economic growth and the development of international trade, putting pressure on cash management banks to improve their global coverage. Laurence Neville reports.

Citi’s leadership of Euromoney’s 2009 international cash management poll results was far from a given this year.

Press release

Cash management: Cash captains see their ship come in

For so long seen as a banking backwater, cash management’s time has come. Revenues are high-margin, stable and growing. Products such as liquidity management will only grow in importance. And, with the huge client bases involved for the biggest players, it’s a gateway into a lot of other business. Laurence Neville reports.

After the crash, here comes CASH

The gap between the top two and their closest rivals continues to increase, according to results from our recent survey on international cash management.

Citigroup and HSBC are neck and neck at the pinnacle of the cash management business, according to Euromoney's latest poll. Other firms trail far behind.

Full results

Results index

Euromoney's annual cash management poll shows surprising results. A familiar group of leading banks continues to slug it out for market share leadership but the names customers rate most highly in qualitative rankings are often not those that lead the quantitative league tables.

Barclays’ announcement last month that it had agreed to outsource cash management services for its larger UK corporate clients to Deutsche Bank is remarkable. Maintaining account services, domestic and international payments and collections, liquidity management and electronic banking are bread-and-butter banking activities. The provision of such unglamorous but vital services is an essential part of the cement that binds corporate customers to their relationship banks. So it can’t have been easy for Barclays to admit that its customers would be better off using Deutsche’s products and services than its own.

Barclays and Deutsche Bank have joined forces to launch a pan-European cash management service for large corporates called 'Barclays Euro Treasurer'.

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All the global cash management banks continue to concentrate on the small pool of top-tier multinationals where there are opportunities to cross-sell but where competition is most intense. These most demanding of cutomers are driving down margins. The global players might be overlooking other sources of revenue.

Monitoring thousands of accounts payable and receivable flowing daily through myriad bank accounts, while minimizing short-term borrowing costs and maximizing returns on investment of liquidity, is a huge challenge for corporate treasurers. They value highly banks that do this well. But Euromoney's poll shows few banks excel.