Strategies for Cash and Trade Finance: Transaction Banking for Regional Banks in OECD and Non-OECD Countries

Transaction banking requires significant investment in IT infrastructure, but what are the options for regional banks? The growth of open accounts is creating an opportunity for local banks.

Corporations are concentrating trade finance and cash management into a single interface, mainly due to large companies using open accounts and medium and small companies having a single interface. To understand the drivers for convergence, Celent conducted a survey among medium-size companies in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and non-OECD countries to capture as much as possible about these companies’ experience with the corporate-bank relationship.

In this report, Strategies for Cash and Trade Finance, Celent assesses the current expectations of Asian and European SMEs, suggesting actionable items to regional and global banks on how to best serve their needs.

“Cash and trade are indeed converging because the lack of credit requires more attention to the dynamics of cash,” says Enrico Camerinelli, Senior Analyst with Celent’s Banking Group and author of the report.

This report provides useful guidelines for banks, which must now decide how they can best respond to this desire for convergence. The report analyzes the results from a survey study, answering banks’ questions regarding what level of support to provide; how they are organized; what companies they prefer to work with; how important the global reach of the bank is; and what role the local banks can play. These are but some of the questions for which this report provides an overview and recommendations for action.