Heather McKenzie’s blog entry on April 10 underlines the need of corporates for adequate banking relationships. It reminded me of a column published at the end of 2007 by the French association of corporate treasurers,  AFTE, which poked fun at the apparent chaos the arrival of MiFID had caused in their banks’ customer relationship departments.

Indeed, French corporates were rather surprised when they started receiving somewhat inconsistent letters from their investment services providers about the MiFID client category in which they had been put, toward the end of last year.  For instance, some companies were put in  several different categories by their various banks, with the same firm seen as a professional client by one institution, and as an eligible counterparty by another.Some corporates were even assigned client categories that do not exist under MiFID, such as “qualified client, informed client, or retail client.”  

What is more, treasurers received letters not addressed to their name, but to their function, “as if banks didn’t know the names of their clients.”

Asked about the letters, the corporates’ account managers often had no idea what their client was talking about.  The treasurers’ association expressed its astonishment at the improvised  manner in which banks seemed to have approached their MiFID  paperwork obligations, despite ample forewarning. 

So, beyond transactional innovation, maybe what corporate banking really needs is indeed better customer relationship management technology. CRM was one of the buzzwords of the beginning of this decade in the retail banking world. Perhaps is it time for it to try crossing over to the corporate side.  

Filed under: Corporate Banking, MiFID, Technology, regulation