Prelim’s 5 Steps to Better Treasury Services

Think of this less like one of those WikiHow articles you pilfer through when you don’t know how to dance at a wedding or fix a flat tire (although these skills are very, very important) and more like an Atul Gawande checklist to building a modern Treasury Services department at a bank.

1. Do you use a CRM?

By this, I don’t mean that a CRM is in theory in use by the bank for mere cosmetic exercise. I mean that bankers are knee-deep in the software keeping track of every contact and every opportunity diligently inside of a CRM, and this CRM is actually integrated into the core—or at the very least, has workflows built out that alert other teams when a customer has applied and been approved for a service.

2. Do you track metrics on a central dashboard (and are these metrics aligned with your OKRs)?

Is there a central dashboard from which the head of treasury services can easily see 1) how long each treasury service takes to originate, 2) active client usage of treasury services, and 3) customer satisfaction? It’s possible to run a good treasury services team without a central dashboard that updates in real-time to account for these metrics. But when the C-suite asks whether to anticipate future growth or slowdowns, you’ll be flying blind.

3. Do your customers know what services you offer?

This question may seem obtuse and your first instinct may be to respond, “Of course they know what services I offer!” But do they know all the services you offer, and if not, can they find this information on your website? You might be losing customers you’ve never even talked to. It takes a minimal amount of effort to publish on the bank’s website the full list of treasury services offered. Or, send your list of services straight to their inbox with periodic email campaigns. Ideally, the website and campaigns also explain any unique offerings that are part of the bank’s suite of services as well as a way to apply online, which leads us to the next item.

4. Are your customers able to self sign up for treasury services (or at the very least be invited via digital onboarding)?

The best customers are often incredibly busy, and prefer to work on their own time. Especially when working with startups, or fast growing companies, customers would rather have a frictionless and entirely digital onboarding process. This serves to be advantageous to your team too; removing the painstaking manual process empowers the treasury service team to focus their time and resources on building additional client relationships. 

5. Do you have a product focused team (with product focused roles)?

Most Treasury Services teams err on the side of lots of strong generalists. What we’ve seen work really well however is having roles dedicated to specializing in particular products, such as having a single person dedicated to payments. This means no more struggling to communicate or understand business needs around these products, but also having a single person or couple of folks dedicated to a product increases sales and retention across the entire customer base.

To learn more about how banking can be made easy for everyone, banks included, check out prelim.com for further details.