U.S. Corporate’s Liquidity Impacted By Basel III
CONTEXT & CHALLENGE:
As the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) under Basel III discounts the value of non-operational deposits, some large U.S. banks have been discouraging the ‘surplus liquidity’ of corporate clients. This particular US Corporate Client was particularly keen to understand these impacts and be ahead of the game in seizing opportunities to reduce costs, improve values and have better quality data.
DESIRED OUTCOMES: The Client urgently needed the following:
The Treasurer wanted a much greater insight and understanding of the organisations deployment and utilization of intra-day liquidity particularly in the light of emerging Basel III constraints so that the business could:
- Engage in more evidence based dialogues with their Bankers on the management of this liquidity
- Demand more specific reporting and data to track utilization
- Raise expectations of new and additional liquidity and working capital services to be provided by their banks
- Save and/or release significant locked up liquidity value to improve the organisation’s financial supply chain issues
WHAT WE DID:
Intraday analyzed the multi-bank USD account reports of the Corporate including:
- Acquiring time stamps from the banks’ workstations
- Using our Intraday Insights Liquidity Simulator to model Operational versus Non- Operational Deposits using a significant sample of high value transactions
- Providing visuals and data summaries of surplus liquidity for sharing with the Corporate Treasury and other key business stakeholders
- Analysing this data to identify intraday & multiday trends and poorly utilised liquidity
- Reviewing & agreeing consequences and actions in terms of on-going reporting, new requirements for the organisations banks process and frequency of on-going tracking
- Helping to develop the business case for persuading the organisations executive team of vital future actions and investment to realise on-going value
RESULTS:
The Treasurer was offered a range of options, insights and analysis including:
- High value receipts were ‘hidden’ in ACH files
- Control over large payments had been ‘off-shored’ outside of his control and oversight
- Intraday risk with banks was five times the level of overnight risk
- Surplus liquidity could attract Supplier discounts
Allocating a proportion of the available cash surplus to finance the Corporation’s supply chain achieved new revenues of over $7m per annum.
The providers of core banking services also gained revenues by offering SCF tools instead of driving away liquidity.
“The Intraday Liquidity Simulator provided an excellent stand alone method of analysing and visualising some of the major liquidity challenges that we were simply failing to address using conventional means. This enabled us to rapidly identify significant areas of poor liquidity deployment and consequent substantial potential savings. It also provided us with a better basis for a more proactive and informed dialogue with our lead Banks on how they could help us better manage our ongoing liquidity challenges. “