How Hilton Mitigated the Pain of Bank Fee Analysis

Hilton is a household name in hospitality around the world. The company makes available 1.2 million rooms across more than 7,600 hotels, under 23 brands, in 126 countries and territories. For vacationers, the options are unbeatable. For treasury, the geographic scope and business complexity create some challenges.

“We are so spread out, all over the world, that maintaining access to our global bank account information is a huge challenge,” says Dana Lee, Hilton’s senior director of regional treasury for the Americas. “We have been working on gaining better visibility and bringing together all kinds of data to provide a global view of treasury.”

The challenge is expanding along with Hilton’s business. “We have over 3,000 accounts across many, many banks,” says Jee Lee, senior director of global treasury management systems. “We are experiencing a lot of growth as a company, and when we add properties, that also means adding bank account activity. We have had a single treasury management system since 2012, but a couple of years ago, we still did not have an efficient system for managing bank account information.”

Dana’s team was responsible for opening, closing, and managing bank accounts for operations throughout the United States. Jee’s team oversaw a repository of information about global accounts, which individuals in Hilton’s foreign business units would submit via emails and spreadsheets. The company’s manual approach to bank account management was not only time-consuming, but it created a risk of errors and slowed down processes. For example, opening an account sometimes took up to six weeks.

“Our bank account manager maintained a ginormous spreadsheet, making updates to it almost every day,” Jee says. “When the Covid-19 pandemic forced us all to work from home, we became even more aware of how inefficient it was to tie up processes in spreadsheets. As business came back and we began growing again, manual activities made it really hard to scale.”

Plus, adds Dana, “outside the U.S. we struggled to keep up to date on questions like: Is this account still open? Do we still need this account? Who are the signers? Answering these questions was important, and we knew there had to be a better way to manage all this information.”

Dana and Jee embarked on an initiative to streamline bank account management. They wanted to develop workflows that would automate processes, and to create a comprehensive data repository that could act as a single source of truth for bank account data across the company.

The team decided to implement the ION Bank Account Management platform. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution promised to simplify opening and closing of accounts, as well as bank fee analysis. Jee and her team worked with ION Treasury to connect the solution to Hilton’s treasury management system and to three of its partner banks. The functionality available in the technology has greatly reduced the manual work for both teams involved in bank account management.

Information about accounts in the three connected banks flows into the system automatically. “For these three banks, no one has to transfer data anymore from fee-analysis PDFs into Excel files,” Jee says. And reports that the system generates can show bank fees across all accounts; Know Your Customer (KYC) information; Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance; and details on signatories, account limits, branch locations, and more.

Having all this data at her fingertips enables Dana to do much more frequent analyses than she could previously. “One of the first things we look at each month is whether the bank fees we were charged match what we expected to be charged,” she reports. “We get a nice variance report showing any differences between the pricing we’ve been quoted and what we actually paid.

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“In the past,” she continues, “we would get a thousand-page account-analysis statement from certain banks, which would arrive in CSV [comma-separated value] format. We struggled to slice and dice that much information, and if there was an issue, we might not notice it for several months. The new system enables us to dig into fee data on a monthly basis. Now I’m probably spending more time analyzing the data than I did before, just because I’m fascinated with what I can find.”

As an example of the benefits of this visibility, she describes a recent situation in which she noticed a pricing discrepancy. “We had opened a new account and negotiated dramatically reduced exception pricing,” Dana says. “This new reporting made clear that the exception pricing had rolled off and we were being charged the standard rate. I noticed the huge difference in cost two months after pricing changed and called it to the bank’s attention. They made the correction and refunded the fees to us. I might have eventually found that in our old, manual process, but I definitely noticed it more quickly with the new system.”

She is also using the bank account management system to negotiate better bank pricing up front. “I’m using some of these reports to pull out certain categories of service fees that I want our banking partners to look at,” she says. “It’s so much easier now for me to pull information from the system and share it with our bank, saying, ‘Our volume has increased dramatically in this category of fees, and I’d like you to sharpen your pencil and see what you can do to reduce our costs.’ We have always done those kinds of reviews, but they used to be much more painful.”

Once the bank account management system was fully launched, Jee and her team turned their attention to phase two of the project—document management. Their vision was for the new technology to serve as a repository for account-related documentation from across the Hilton ecosystem, including tax and signatory documents.

“Each of our relationship banks within the United States has a standard set of paperwork they require to open an account,” Jee explains. “Different banks may want different language, so the template is not the same for every institution. We’ve set up the bank account management system to hold the templates for the three participating banks, along with all the other requisite documents. When someone wants to open an account, the system knows exactly which version of each document to use, and which boxes to check. Then it generates the email to the bank to request the account. This makes the process of opening accounts much more scalable. It also makes our lives easier whenever we need to update one of the bank templates; we change it in one place, and it is updated for all new accounts with that bank.”

It also significantly reduces the time Hilton takes to produce an account-opening package. “How long it actually takes for our new account to open depends on how quickly the bank can turn the paperwork around, but on our side, the time is greatly reduced,” Dana points out. “And then, once an account is live, we have all our SOX compliance information right there. Compliance audits are much easier now as well.”

Next, Hilton is looking at adding more banks to the new system and its accompanying processes. “We saw from the beginning that the best way to maximize value from this project would be to know quickly: Are we being charged what we agreed upon? And is the bank competitive in what they’re charging us?” Jee concludes. “That is exactly what we gained through this project. We can compare fees and services between banks without downloading multiple fee statements and doing a lot of manual work.”