Corporate & Business · NPO & Social Impact · Financial Operations & Risk
An account estate is a control structure, not just a set of charges
Sixty-eight accounts at one primary bank, separate merchant acquiring, and surplus cash sweeping into an account paying nothing. The pricing could be renegotiated; the structure had to be redesigned, because duplicate administration and scattered signatory rights are a recurring cost that never appears on a tariff schedule.
- 14.9%
- documented annual charge reduction
- 68 → 13
- future-state account model
- 80.7%
- modelled maintenance-fee reduction
- 0% → 6%
- negotiated treasury yield
Proof context: A multi-entity organisation banking across four institutions
The situation
Eighty-six accounts, four banking relationships, no single view
The organisation banked across four institutions, with 68 accounts concentrated at one primary bank, separate merchant-acquiring arrangements, and a mix of cash, electronic-payment and treasury functions that had grown up alongside each other rather than been designed together.
KuTh reconstructed the estate from statements, tariff schedules, transaction records and supplier proposals. The first analytical decision was to separate pricing problems from structural and control problems, because they have different remedies: a rate can be renegotiated, but an account structure that produces duplicate administration, scattered signatories and weak segregation of duties has to be redesigned.
What KuTh did
Four workstreams, kept deliberately apart
- Repriced account by account. Each phase reconstructed actual historical activity, applied the relevant product and transaction tariffs, then recalculated the same activity at the negotiated rates. The result is not one global discount applied to a total.
- Modelled a purpose-based account structure. Low-use account closure and consolidation, cash-deposit pricing and treasury sweeping, designed around what each account is for rather than around how the estate happened to accumulate.
- Treated cash handling as a pricing problem. Deposits were counted by value band rather than assumed at a blanket percentage, because the benefit depends entirely on the actual deposit distribution across tiers.
- Isolated merchant acquiring. Terminal rental, minimum monthly commission and variable acquiring charges were analysed as three separate costs. Ordinary transaction commission was never folded into the fixed-fee saving.
- Reviewed access and segregation of duties. Internet-banking fees, user access and the capture-authorise-pay split were examined together, because a dispersed account estate disperses control with it.
Results
What was attained, and what is still a model
Scroll table sideways →
| Workstream | Status | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Primary-bank transaction repricing | Negotiated and documented | Seven completed phases across 31 accounts — approximately 14.9% annual reduction against the modelled pre-negotiation charge base. |
| Account rationalisation | Future-state model | 68 accounts modelled down to approximately 13 purpose-based accounts: 80.9% fewer accounts, subject to implementation. |
| Monthly account fees | Future-state model | The 13-account structure reduces modelled monthly maintenance-fee exposure by approximately 80.7%. |
| Cash-deposit pricing | Negotiated | Standardised to a 1.02% variable rate in the tested structure. The lower and mid tiers reduced materially; the higher tier barely moved. |
| Treasury sweep | Negotiated structure | Surplus cash was being swept into a non-interest-bearing account. An interest-bearing destination was negotiated for the engagement period. |
| Merchant acquiring | Modelled alternative | 17 locations reviewed: 43.2% annual terminal-rental saving, plus removal of a recurring minimum-commission layer — 55.4% across the targeted fixed-cost components. |
How to read these figures
The 14.9% is the cleanest attained metric, because seven completed account-level phases support it using actual historical activity. It describes the completed account population, not the entire banking estate.
The account-count and maintenance-fee percentages describe the economics of a proposed structure. They stay labelled as modelled until closure and migration evidence exists.
The 6% treasury rate is historical evidence of what was negotiated during the engagement. It is not a current market rate and should not be read as one.
Beyond the charges
An account estate is also a control structure
Sixty-eight accounts do not only cost more in maintenance fees. They multiply signatory administration, FICA onboarding, reconciliation effort and audit scope, and they make a clean segregation of view, capture, authorise and payment rights harder to hold.
The redesigned structure centralises the user profile with differentiated rights and gives each account a defined purpose. That was treated as part of the commercial case rather than a governance footnote, because the administrative burden is a real recurring cost even where it never appears on a tariff schedule.
Supporting documents