Treasury Management continues to be one of the last major growth areas for banks, yet I still find it to be an afterthought in most institutions. In an effort to shine the light on this opportunity, here are some additional thoughts. Pick and choose those that make the most sense for you and your organization, yet be careful of incrementalizing this list or marginalizing this product line and its impact on both your clients and shareholders.

Door openers

•Client education. Most popular topic is fraud prevention. Organize your thoughts around a fraud prevention checklist. It’s a good tool to overcome objections from both internal and external prospects. A detailed checklist also supports your compliance efforts.

•Use fraud prevention client education to cross sell positive pay.

Fraud prevention

•Give your clients pens whose ink can’t be lifted.

•Insist on call–backs for clients without dual controls.

Marketing and sales

•Raffles and contests for usage, cross sells and activation are great sales tools. The # 1 coveted prize this year – an iPad.

•Tighten up your sales process. Provide at least weekly feedback to each sales associate with specific ideas on personal improvement and greater success.

•Conduct detailed relationship reviews at least annually for all clients with $ 5 million in sales or more. Remember it is 4X more expensive to acquire a new client than to retain an existing one. Plus, 70 % of all new sales typically come from existing clients.

•Use this statistic for internal sales: customers with TM services are 10X more profitable than those without the product suite, and are 33 % less likely to leave the bank.

•Bring large customers to tour the bank, especially showing them your lockbox operation. It enhances credibility.

Expect more and pay more

•Expect to start paying incentives only after the sales person has sold at least 150 % of their salary in fee income. Some banks go as high as 300 %. Then pay generously and set high goals. People have the potential to achieve aspirational goals; they just don’t believe they can get there. With your help they will.

•Set hard TM goals for commercial bankers and vice versa. The whole really should be greater than the sum of the parts.

•Don’t set incentives that create zero sum games among your lines of business. Win–wins work much better, even if you double–count the credit, for all constituents including the shareholders.

Service quality

•Conduct customer surveys directly post implementation. Effective product deployment is the very first step to customer loyalty and relationship expansion.

•Consider beefing up your customer service staff. In banks where customer retention is the best in the industry, the ratio of sales folks to back office support people is almost 1 : 1. Create a position whose job is to support existing clients operationally and otherwise as well as identify additional sales opportunities (a – la the portfolio manager in the wealth management business).

•Include Operations in TM sales meetings to enhance their sensitivity to service quality and understanding of their impact on customer profitability, retention and satisfaction. Include Operations folks in client relationship reviews and give them scorecards reflecting their service levels to keep them engaged.

•Get the administrative assistants of the commercial bankers involved in customer service and knowledgeable about your product line. They are the main relationship maintenance arm on the commercial side of most banks.

Pricing

•Charge for serviced rendered. For example, charge for dual signature requirements. They cost you money to deliver. In general, charge for any item that can be self serviced.

•Conduct annual reviews of all exception pricing together with your commercial bankers to reassess appropriateness.

•Report on fee waivers and include percent collected thresholds in your incentive compensation goals.

•Price and build products appropriately suited to your various client bases, e.g. small business vs. larger companies; health care segment; etc.

•Avoid set – up fee waivers. Instead consider billing the first invoice 90 days after installation.