I have to say that this post is a no brainer. It is not a brilliant idea or something that would require a process improvement consultant. However, it is something that a lot of us miss somewhere along the way. Even if we realize it; we may consider it not very significant and/or our technology solution may not be sophisticated enough to handle it.
Let us look at a simple, yet very common scenario. Jill, A user at a subsidiary of yours needs information on a certain transaction. How does she get it? She goes to the respective bank website and downloads a report that contains the details of that transaction. She has the information she needs and you don't even know about it. Yes, if you were to look at monthly bank costs, you would see a small insignificant payment for the information that was downloaded. One among the many other such small insignificant payments that you make to the bank.
Now, consider this. You have already downloaded the information Jill wanted earlier. The details of that transaction was available to you via the prior day and current day files that you had received from the bank earlier. Would it not be better had you shared this information with Jill? If so, you would have saved on the small cost you paid for that transaction. And many other similar transactions. The solution as I mentioned upfront is simple. Have one consolidated data warehouse of all transactions from all the banks that you have relationships with and enable your users access to this database via a web-based interface.
This scenario played out almost exactly as I described above for one of our customers. They had adopted our enterprise reporting module is saving anywhere between 10-15k USD a month, by just having our reporting module be the one front end for all its reporting users, all over the world. Again, no one could predict that the saving will be this high as there were so many different reports being generated from multiple banks at multiple locations. Once the solution was implemented, the cost benefit was clear.
Have you looked at your bank reporting costs lately? Are you paying the bank multiple times over for the same information? There may be room for improvement, just by consolidation of data and having all your users access it from your new enterprise data warehouse.