Why treasury teams struggle to gain control of bank fees
As organizations grow, their banking activity expands with them – more accounts, more services, more transactions, and, inevitably, more fees. Yet visibility into those costs rarely keeps pace. What starts as a manageable process gradually becomes more complex, fragmented, and increasingly difficult to trust. Our goal is to help treasury teams evolve to an insight-driven management of bank fees and banking relationships.
This article is Part 1 of our three-part series on modernizing bank fee analysis:
- Part 1: The challenges holding your treasury teams back
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Bank Fee Analysis Series – Part 1: Why treasury teams struggle to gain control of bank fees
The challenges holding your treasury team back
Across our work with 100+ treasury teams, we consistently see the same challenges surface when managing banking services and fees. These may appear different from one organization or industry to another, but they almost always fall into one of four areas:
1. Data challenges: Incomplete, inconsistent, and fragmented
At first glance, bank fee data appears readily available. In practice, it is difficult to use.
Account analysis statements arrive in a wide range of formats, including PDFs, CSVs, EDI822s, TWIST BSBs, and CAMT.086s. They are delivered through a mix of portals, emails, and internal systems. Even after collection, inconsistency remains. Fee codes, naming conventions, industry classifications, and pricing structures vary widely across banks, and sometimes even across accounts within the same bank.
This creates an illusion of visibility. Organizations technically have the data but not in a form that supports reliable analysis or confident decision-making. Before insights can be generated, the data itself must first be made usable.
2. Process inefficiencies: Manual, unstable, and hard to scale
Because the data is difficult to work with, the process of making the data useable often becomes heavily manual.
Teams spend most of their time collecting, cleaning, and reconciling data instead of analyzing it. Spreadsheets often become the default tool. Workflows evolve organically over time, often without standardization or documentation. Inorganic growth via acquisition further exacerbates the issue. These processes require significant effort and are difficult to scale as complexity increases.
As a result, highly skilled treasury professionals spend hours on repetitive tasks rather than high-value analysis and decision support.
3. Control & risk gaps: Limited visibility and oversight
The greatest risk is often not the complexity itself but the lack of control.
Many organizations do not have a consistent way to validate bank fees against contracted pricing or expected activity. Without structured validation or monitoring, errors and overcharges often go unnoticed. Even small price discrepancies can accumulate when applied across aggregated relationship volume, particularly when considering the recurring nature of many services.
Without reviewing service invoices across the relationship, treasury teams cannot confirm if fraud services are consistently subscribed to across all appropriate companies and accounts. Without these reviews, treasury is often unaware of trends in individual fraud prevention service volumes that can indicate changing fraud tactics and operational gaps.
The lack of price and service controls quietly become a source of financial leakage.
4. Strategic limitations: reporting without insight
Even when organizations manage data and process challenges, many never move beyond retrospective reporting.
Without timely, structured insights, it is difficult to understand cost drivers, identify optimization opportunities, or benchmark against the market. Decisions can be uninformed and untimely as bank fees become another cost center observed by accounting rather than being actively managed by treasury.
This limits the ability to optimize banking relationships or negotiate effectively.
The big picture: the cycle that’s hard to break
For some treasury teams, these challenges feel too difficult to tackle. Others attempt to solve them in isolation – a new spreadsheet here, a manual reconciliation there – but without the bandwidth, technical expertise, or tools to address the broader issue.
The result is reinforcing the cycle:
- Fragmented data drives manual effort
- Manual effort introduces and limits scalability
- Limited controls reduce visibility
- Limited visibility prevents proactive decision-making
Over time, bank fee analysis becomes purely operational activity and something that is completed because it must be, not because it delivers value. The focus moves toward producing reports rather than generating insight. Many organizations accept this as an inherent limitation of the process rather than a solvable problem.
But the organizations that break this cycle take a different approach. They recognize the need for a structured foundation that flips the paradigm around bank fees, enabling treasury teams to understand, manage, and influence bank fees and their associated operations in a more strategic way.
What’s next in the series
In Part 2, we explore how leading organizations are solving these challenges, including the data, process, and control foundations required to modernize bank fee analysis.
Then, in Part 3, we bring it all together and outline what a best-in-class bank fee program looks like and how treasury can leverage bank fee data to drive operational insights and change.
If your team is navigating similar challenges, be the leader that breaks the cycle. Contact us today!