Treasurers still wary of financial system

Business confidence is a hard nut to crack, one day it's there and the next it's gone. Since confidence in the global financial system went out the window a year ago, banks have been slowly trying to rebuild their reputation with clients -- both of the consumer and corporate variety.

One man in charge of maintaining and retaining many of those corporate relationships is Eric Kamback, chief executive of treasury services at Bank of New York Mellon. After undoubtedly hundreds of conversations with corporate treasurers, he is sure of two things -- that BNY Mellon has benefitted from the economic malaise over the past year and that the tough times are not over.

At Sibos, the annual transaction banking conference organised by The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift), which is being held in Hong Kong this week, Kamback shared a few of his thoughts on the forces still reshaping the financial and transaction banking industries as well as on BNY Mellon's future in Asia.

What are the emerging trends in treasury services?
Like the past 12 or 15 months, the coming year poses a lot of challenges and a tremendous amount of opportunities. Banks and customers are still reacting to the lingering effects of last year's [crisis] and are very much concerned about the short-term future. Any stability that can be brought to this equation is of tremendous value. Many customers and banks are still trying to determine the future of the banking industry and who they want to do business with. This is going to continue to create both turmoil and opportunities.

Do the flows you see tell you anything about today's economic situation?
The economy will remain very fluid for the next six to 12 months. From region to region and customer to customer, people are concerned about markets, about the interest rate environment and the equity markets. There is still a lack of confidence out there.

As financial institutions re-evaluated their treasury businesses, what trends emerged?
The biggest trend we saw was in the regional bank segment. Many players decided they couldn't properly play in the transaction banking space but wanted to maintain their customer bases by continuing to offer both innovative and global solutions. When these institutions took a step back and realised they couldn't do this themselves, especially in the environment we're in, they decided to take a different direction and look at outsourcing from a provider who already had a system with a full scope of global solutions. We've seen a lot more interest in this space than we ever have before.