Corporate America Is Still Stuck on Banker’s Hours, Jiko Survey Finds

The economically relevant shift here is not “more cash yield” in the abstract; it is a slow migration of operating balances away from balance-sheet deposits and toward Treasury-based cash products with better liquidity/controls. That is structurally favorable for fee-heavy cash franchises like BLK, because they can intermediate the migration without owning the duration or credit risk, while deposit-dependent regional lenders like NBHC face a gradual squeeze on low-cost funding and relationship stickiness.

Near term, this is more a sentiment and procurement-cycle story than a revenue catalyst. Treasury teams acknowledge the problem, but the real bottleneck is integration into ERP/TMS stacks and approval processes, which means actual asset movement is likely measured in quarters, not weeks. For banks, the first-order risk is NII pressure from noninterest-bearing deposit runoff; the second-order risk is weaker cross-sell, since once operating cash leaves the bank it is harder to reclaim.

The contrarian point is that surveys overstate conversion: treasurers often say they want 24/7 liquidity and principal protection, but governance, audit, and implementation friction keep adoption slow. So the market may already be pricing the “modern treasury” narrative too aggressively in fintech/asset managers while underpricing the endurance of legacy deposits. What would falsify the bearish bank thesis is stable deposit mix and deposit betas that do not rise on the next earnings cycle; for BLK, the key check is whether cash-management inflows actually accelerate rather than just marketing visibility.