Bank Fee Analysis: The Blind Spot Costing Treasury Real Money

Bank fees are a silent drain on liquidity. They don’t trigger alarms, and they rarely show up as a strategic discussion point, until you realize how much they’ve compounded. And while individually, bank fees can seem relatively modest, they can add up to huge sums, particularly for businesses operating dozens of accounts across multiple countries.

Some level of bank fees are simply the cost of doing business, but it’s surprising to many treasurers just how much these fees can be reduced by. How much? One Trovata TMS customer has saved over $700,000 in annual fees through bank fee analysis and benchmarking. 

That’s real money that doesn’t just help short term cash flow, but funds growth initiatives, extends cash runway, and can be redeployed into higher-yield investments. For treasurers tasked with doing more with less, it’s one of the most immediate opportunities to deliver tangible value.

Why Bank Fees Slip Under the Radar

Treasurers know the impact bank fees can have on profits, but few have the bandwidth or the tools to track them in a meaningful way. The challenge isn’t awareness, but execution. There are a number of contributing factors to this difficulty.

Fragmented Reporting

Every bank presents fees differently. Some provide itemized detail, others bury charges in broad categories. Formats range from PDFs to CSVs to proprietary bank statement standards. For multinational organizations, consolidating this information is a full-time job in itself.

No Common Language

Without a universal benchmark for services like wires, lockbox, or FX, it’s difficult to compare costs across banks. What one institution labels ‘cash management services,’ another may split into four subcategories with different pricing structures. This makes apples-to-apples comparisons nearly impossible without manual reclassification.

Manual Consolidation is Unsustainable

To benchmark fees, treasury teams must manually download statements, normalize them into spreadsheets, and reconcile charges against activity volumes. Doing this once is painful. Doing it quarterly or monthly is unfeasible for lean teams that already struggle to cover core forecasting and reporting tasks.

Low Visibility Means Low Urgency

Because of these hurdles, fee reviews often get deprioritized. Treasurers default to assuming charges are ‘just the cost of doing business,’ until someone finally digs in and discovers thousands in avoidable costs.

The Bank Fee Blind Spot

Most companies simply don’t have the resources to continuously benchmark fees, so they don’t. And banks, understandably, have little incentive to make it easier.

Why Take a Closer Look at Bank Fees? 

That blind spot is costly. Bank fees can run into the millions annually for large corporates, and yet they rarely get the same scrutiny as other expense categories. Consider why this deserves more attention:

Uncover Direct Savings

Every dollar reclaimed from unnecessary or inflated fees flows straight to the bottom line. Unlike revenue growth, which requires new customers or expanded sales cycles, fee reduction delivers immediate, tangible returns.

Fees Scale Quickly 

A ‘small’ monthly increase in charges can balloon into six- or seven-figure annual costs once multiplied across services, entities, and geographies. What looks negligible in isolation is anything but at scale.

Increase Your Negotiation Power

Banks expect to be challenged on pricing, but only when clients have data. Treasurers who can walk into relationship reviews with hard numbers and benchmarks consistently secure better terms. Without analysis, you’re negotiating blind.

Align Strategically With Your Best Banks

Fee analysis isn’t just about cost-cutting. It’s also about ensuring you’re paying for services that fit your treasury strategy. Many companies overpay for services they no longer use, or fail to optimize wallet share by aligning activity with their strongest banking partners.

Increase Control Over Liquidity

As more treasury teams adopt automation and analytics, those who continue to overlook bank fees will appear less efficient by comparison. Fee transparency isn’t just about saving money, it’s about demonstrating a level of control and sophistication that boards, auditors, and investors increasingly expect.

In short, bank fee analysis has shifted from a ‘nice to have’ hygiene task into a high-value lever. For lean treasury teams, it’s one of the rare opportunities to unlock immediate returns without expanding headcount or budgets.

The ‘How’ of Bank Fee Analysis

On paper, the process of reviewing and benchmarking bank fees is straightforward. There’s a clear set of steps every treasury team should take to stay in control:

1. Collect and normalize data. Gather fee statements across all banks and entities.
2. Map services against volumes. Match charges to actual transaction activity.
3. Benchmark costs. Compare charges across banks and against industry averages.
4. Review historical trends. Track how fees evolve month by month and year by year.
5. Run ‘what-if’ scenarios. Model the impact of reallocating services, switching payment methods, or negotiating rate reductions.
6. Detect anomalies. Flag unexpected charges, sudden increases, or fees that don’t align with contracts.
7. Negotiate with data. Bring precise benchmarks and modeled alternatives into bank relationship reviews.

Taken at face value, these steps sound simple enough. But there’s a big difference between knowing what you need to do and the reality of how you actually do it.

For most treasury teams, ‘how’ means hours of manual downloads, reformatting, reconciliations, and spreadsheet gymnastics. That’s why even though the checklist is familiar, it rarely gets executed consistently. The effort required is disproportionate to the resources most teams have.

This is where technology makes the difference.

Unlocking Advanced Bank Fee Analysis

Using technology to automate this process doesn’t just make it faster and simpler, it also creates the foundation for advanced analysis that simply isn’t feasible when done manually. As mentioned above, the right technology allows for detailed analysis of historical trends within the data, as well as forecast modelling based on different fee scenarios.

These are powerful tools that give treasurers more insight as to what the future might look like, and more influence and control over the outcomes. 

Understanding Historical Fee Analysis

Bank fees don’t just hit you once, they accumulate. Tracking patterns over time can uncover creeping costs that become significant drains.

Key questions to ask when reviewing historical data:

• Have maintenance fees increased incrementally year after year?
• Are volume-based discounts being honored as transaction activity scales?
• Do fees spike during certain quarters or geographies?
• How do costs align with your broader liquidity trends?

By graphing and reviewing fees historically, month by month, bank by bank, treasurers can pinpoint systemic inefficiencies. A $1,500 monthly increase in wire fees may not raise eyebrows in isolation, but across 12 months, that’s nearly $20,000 lost. Multiply by multiple services and accounts, and the picture sharpens quickly.

This kind of analysis arms treasurers with the evidence to challenge banks directly. Instead of vague concerns, you can show a precise pattern. “Over the past 18 months, our lockbox fees rose 12% with no change in service levels. Explain this discrepancy.”

The Power of ‘What-If’ Bank Fee Scenario Modeling

While historical analysis tells you where you’ve been, what-if modeling shows you where you could go.

This is where tech-enabled bank fee analysis becomes especially powerful. Instead of just tallying past charges, you can model the impact of alternative decisions:

• Switching banks. What would your total annual fees look like if you shifted 30% of payments to a different bank?
• Adjusting payment methods. How much could you save by moving from wires to lower-cost ACH for certain transactions?
• Rebalancing services. If one bank is charging higher FX fees but offering lower account maintenance costs, what’s the net impact of consolidating activity?
• Renegotiation leverage. What savings are achievable if you secure a 10% reduction across select service categories?

These scenarios highlight potential savings and inform strategic bank relationship management.Treasurers can walk into negotiations with a data-driven basis for change.

In other words, what-if analysis turns treasury from reactive to proactive and predictive.

The Bank Fee Analysis Final Word

Bank fee analysis may not sound glamorous, but it’s one of the fastest ways to deliver measurable impact in treasury. The fees are already there, quietly eroding liquidity. The question is whether you have the tools to expose them.

By combining historical trend analysis with what-if modeling, treasurers can not only reclaim hidden costs but also reshape how they engage with banks. Instead of being reactive recipients of fee schedules, they become proactive negotiators armed with data.

If you think it’s time to put bank fee analysis on the strategic agenda, book a demo with Trovata today.