For many banks, corporate banking services account for a large chunk of their income. Enterprises are lucrative banking clients because they engage in high-value transactions and often bring hundreds of constituent accounts with them. The tradeoff is that banks tend to expend more time and effort to address the needs of their corporate clients, all so that the latter don’t take their business anywhere else. And because the financial sector has become even more competitive in recent years, banks may feel particularly challenged to satisfy the requirements of their corporate banking customers.
If you’re a decision-maker in your bank’s corporate banking program, what should you know about the expectations of modern corporate clients? To answer that question, here’s a briefer on the six best ways to keep your corporate customers happy—and, ultimately, to keep them loyal to your institution.
Provide an Extensive Menu of Online Corporate Banking Services
Your first priority should be to offer your modern-day corporate customers the opportunity to bank online, as many of them may already be inclined toward using digital channels for banking. You can meet this need by upgrading to a full-fledged corporate banking solution that will allow you to deliver a full menu of digital corporate banking services to your customers, including those that will allow them to perform virtual account management, pricing and revenue management, and real-time payments processing using enterprise-class payment processing solutions. This will not only prove to be convenient for them; it will demonstrate that your bank is an innovative and forward-thinking institution—i.e., the kind of banking partner that they’ll want on their side as they undergo their own modernization.
Optimize Corporate Lending Services and Corporate Credit Management
Optimizing your current corporate lending and corporate credit management facilities would also serve both your bank’s interests and your corporate customers’ needs. Both you and your corporate clients would benefit from an organized, efficient, and up-to-date system for keeping track of corporate loans, managing corporate credit, and flagging any potential corporate credit risks. Retooling your corporate lending system will allow you to lend your clients the money they need on a timely basis, while at the same time guaranteeing you dependable returns on their loan payments.
Become a Trustworthy Banking Partner for Trade Finance
If several of your corporate clients want to take their business overseas, it’s also a good idea to improve your system with online banking software for trade finance. You can promise your clients a large array of trade financing instruments and products, safe and reliable protocols for trade transactions, and an eagle-eyed approach to dealing with payment risk, country risk, or corporate risk from clients’ international partners. Any corporate client venturing into trade finance for the first time will feel daunted by the process, but if they can rely on you to smoothen out all the banking processes, they will make your bank their partner of choice for international trade and commerce activities.
Streamline Your Foreign Exchange Services for Corporate Clients
Foreign exchange is another corporate banking service that can increase your popularity among corporate clients, especially those that oversee a lot of foreign transactions. Rework your forex system to broaden your control approaches to risk, make your bank more responsive to new forex regulations, and simplify your corporate customers’ experience of doing forex-related transactions with you. If you can leverage an excellent system for foreign exchange, your corporate customers will choose your bank over other financial institutions that may offer the same service.
Provide Effective Treasury Management Solutions
Corporates also look for reliable banking partners that can help them sort out the complexities of treasury management, including collections, disbursements, corporate investment activities, and financial risk management. When a corporate client finds a bank that truly understands their organization’s needs and can be trusted with managing their treasury, the former will often entrust the latter with this duty for the long haul. Knowing this, take the opportunity to cultivate long-term relationships with your corporate clients by offering them the most effective treasury management solutions.
Help Corporates Become Smart with Their Liquidity Management
Lastly, corporates are on the lookout for banking partners that can help them oversee their daily liquidity situations. Liquidity management can be nerve-wracking for corporate customers, as any failure to track or understand the liquidity situation can steeply affect their ability to purchase goods or services, pay back debts, and fund short-term investments. Offering a helping hand to your corporate customers for their liquidity management via the use of sophisticated multi-branch and multi-currency liquidity management architecture will earn you their invaluable loyalty.
Providing Excellent Corporate Banking Services and Effective Relationship Management to Corporate Clients
There are significant rewards to addressing the needs of your corporate customers and actively pursuing long-term business relationships with them. Banks and corporate clients can achieve mutual growth together and navigate the tricky, complex, and demanding world of finance through a corporate banking program. Now that times are changing and the global business environment has become increasingly digitalized, it’s your choice to adapt to the current scenario and to implement your corporate banking services using a higher standard than before. Revamp your current system today, and become your corporate clients’ preferred partner for both their present and future corporate banking needs.