Okay, so we've looked at the foundations of our house of cash management. We've been in each of the four rooms, whether those be the ground floors of bank accounts and payables and receivables or up the stairs to liquidity finance and technical infrastructure. We're now in the last zone, the roof of the house of cash management. What we're look at here in the roof, what you might call our sister products or our fellow flow products within transactional banking. We're not gonna go into detail about each of them. What we're just going to talk about is how both the products and cash management influence each other. Well, for those that don't know what trade is necessarily, if you ever hear of things like letters of credit, documentary collections, guarantees, DSOs, DPOs, DIOs, which by the way are days sales outstanding, days payables outstanding, days inventory outstanding, or in the area of supply chain finance, which is things like invoice financing and factoring and reverse factoring. All of these have the same impact on cash management. You're all going to have transactions being processed. There's going to be transactions processed over a bank account, and as the transactions are processed over the bank account there's also going to be some surplus cash sitting on these accounts. Customers tend to use the trade services when they're not necessarily 100% comfortable with the other counterparty that they're dealing with, or if they're trying to get beneficial finance from being owed money by maybe a larger organization than themselves. What this means is that when a customer feels confident or is large enough to deal on their own, they will dispense with trade services and do things or what we call open account. Now, open account is just doing transactions without the bank having to guarantee them or putting finance up the line. What we've just discussed here is that trade needs bank accounts, trade results in balances, sitting on bank accounts, all of which are cash management activities, and once a customer has dispensed with needing trade services, they just become a vanilla cash management client. We also have foreign exchange and options. So how does foreign exchange relate with cash management? Well, throughout the house of cash management, we keep on mentioning bank accounts and we keep on mentioning balances and we keep on mentioning things like cross currency pooling. Clearly what we're alluding to here is that a lot of our customers based themselves in one currency, but receive transactions in another currency or in another geography. If they're receiving funds, say in US dollars, and all they have is a GBP bank account, then those receipts are useless to them until they get converted to Great British Pounds. Upon selling the dollars and buying Great British Pounds and having the bank account credited, that is an FX transaction completely driven by the fact that the customer has opened up a a Great British Bank account with ourselves. On the other flip side of it is, if I need to make a one-off payment and I need to make it in US dollars and I've got a Euro account, I'll need to sell Euros and pay US dollars. Again, that transaction is driven by the fact that the client has got their cash management with this bank. What I've just described there is purely operational fx. Of course, there are other options in fx, which again are driven by the fact that the client has their banking with us. This revolves around their known FX transactions, and what a treasurer might want to do is to just hedge their options. So by hedging their options, what a client is doing is they're saying they know that they're going to have 100,000 US dollars and it's gonna arrive in 100 days. The bank guarantees them a rate of $1.50. The customer then has the option in a hundred days, whether they want to take that $1.50. If, if the rate's better than $1.50, after 100 days, the customer will take the better rate. If it's worse than $1.50, well then the customer has paid for that hedge, they've paid for that option, and they will take the $1.50, and they've been able to do their budgeting in between knowing that they were going to get no worse than $1.50. In short, it's leaving the upside open and it's closing down the downside. It's hedging, it's covering what their worst position's going to be. We now look at how asset management and cash management work together right at the start. In the foundations we mentioned about counterparty risk. Our larger multinational corporates and finance institutions, we'll look at having a maximum cap of the amount of cash they will hold with a bank. So when they exceed this limit, we don't necessarily want them to move their cash balances off to another bank. We might want them to take them off our balance sheet and allow us to actually run those on their behalf. Now, whether that's because they allow us to manage a fund on their behalf, or whether they just ask us to sweep excess balances off into a liquidity fund on their behalf, or maybe they ask us to place it, keep it as cash and place it with other banks on their behalf. All these are solutions in the space of asset management. Lastly, we look at the security services. Now, most of most of the custodian operations happen in the finance institution, non-bank finance institution space. However, they are also in pension funds, so they do get involved with corporates, et cetera, across all the fields of custody, whether it be in the global and direct custodian operation, the fund administration, the global distribution transfer agency side, the issuer services side, or the broker outsourcing side, they all need bank accounts. They all have a cash element that is linked to them. In between equities or gilts being bought or sold, as soon as you're not in them, there is cash. There's cash sitting on those accounts. Those accounts are part of a cash management solution. Of course, a lot of the institutions making use of custodial services, will also be doing transactions or bank equities, guilts in different currencies, and for that, they need the FX element as well. There is a lot of commonality between security services and the cash management space. In fact, it's fair to say that across trade, foreign exchange, asset management and security services, having a best in class cash management solution is a core requirement for all of these system products to also be considered as best in class.
