Why is corporate banking so important for a bank? There are many factors that make the corporate banking division of a large bank crucial to the bank's overall success, some of which we'll investigate here.
Corporate banking is an income stream that repeats year after year, sometimes referred to as annuity or click income.
Every time a payment occurs, every time a transaction is performed, every time an FX trade is undertaken, every time a balance is left on a bank account, the corporate banker is making money.
Investment banking, on the other hand, may earn larger fees for each deal, but a mandate first needs to be won for every new transaction.
The typical minimum term that a corporate selects a bank for is three years, but banking relationships often span many decades in one form or another.
Once the corporate banking relationship has been established, it'll typically continue until either the bank decides it does not wish to continue doing the banking of that corporate.
This is rare, but does happen if the bank strategy changes or until the bank's level of service drops enough that the corporate decides to discuss their operational banking needs.
With new banks, this is relatively unusual and tends to revolve around funding terms and conditions as the relationship between the bank and corporate tends to last many years, the deposits made by clients of the corporate banking division are a relatively cheap source of stable liquidity for banks.
The product range offered within corporate banking is very wide, ranging from simple with checking or current accounts all the way through to very complex arrangements, which may be hundreds of accounts and many different currencies using cash concentration and multicurrency pooling to minimize the cost of debt or to increase yield on surplus cash balances, as well as improving the efficiency of the corporate's working capital balances.
In doing so, a corporate banker will be discussing many areas of banking, cross-selling many of the bank's products to deliver a service that meets a wide range of the corporate's financing needs.
