Innovations in Banking: Cash Management

"Innovations in banking: cash management."

In 1999, when Euro appeared, several new payment systems had been implemented in Europe. The most significant of them was TARGET. It allowed to transfer large sums of money within EU at a very high speed. Before TARGET it normally took one or two days to process a payment from one EU country to another. TARGET permitted to do such transfers quasi-real-time. Lots of large companies, holding accounts practically in all European counties decided to use this opportunity to realize a novelty called "cash-management".

This service is provided by a large bank, holding accounts in all European countries; (it is preferably that all branches of one company in all European countries keep all their accounts in one bank). Normally, large companies have overdraft credit lines for their accounts. It means that their accounts are allowed to be negative, but the bank charges its rates for that. When the company uses "cash management" option, all balances (both positive and negative) of all its accounts in all EU countries come to one central account, leaving zero balances on all other accounts. This operation is done every evening. As a result, company's chances of "going into debit" (having a negative balance and paying interest rate for that) are reduced significantly. Thanks to TARGET banks also do not have problems of balancing their inter-country liquidity and thus keeping this service profitable.