Success Story Library

Food Lion Negotiates Better Bank Fee Rates and Optimizes Banking Services with Trintech’s Bank Fee Analysis Software

Overview

Founded in 1957, Food Lion is one of the largest supermarket chains in the U.S. with more than 1,220 stores in 11 states, and 73,000 employees. A member of Delhaize America, the U.S. division of Brussels-based Delhaize Group, Food Lion serves more than 10 million customers a week, and sells more than 28,000 high-quality brand products and 2,900 Food Lion brand products.

Food Lion has been a customer of Trintech since 1996. The supermarket chain automates the verification and reconciliation of its bank deposits with ReconNET, and uses the DataFlow Transaction Network to collect, format and deliver its daily banking data for select stores.

Challenges

Food Lion spends millions of dollars in bank fees because it processes high volumes of credit/debit cards, checks and cash deposits daily. The company wanted a solution that would allow them to automate bank fee reporting, reduce fees, negotiate better rates, and optimize their use of banking services.

Food Lion had been using a competing bank fee analysis solution that was not intuitive and did not provide the automated reporting the company required. The competing solution provided a few standard reports; however, most reports were created by pulling information from the bank fee solution into Excel spreadsheets. Those spreadsheets were then compared to reports generated by the reconciliation application, ReconNET. This manual reporting process was both time-consuming and inefficient.

Objectives

Food Lion’s mission was to find a user-friendly solution that would improve efficiency and add critical capabilities, such as:

Automated fee error reporting and resolution processes for prompt recovery of overcharges
Side-by-side comparison of fees at each bank to help them negotiate consistent rates across all accounts and banks
Reporting for budgeting, forecasting and benchmarking
Integration with ReconNET to provide a complete, seamless bank fee analysis solution

Capabilities Provided

Since the implementation of Bank Fee Analysis, Food Lion can:

Quickly detect all price errors. If a bank charges more than the contracted rate, Food Lion knows about it immediately
Identify and take advantage of lower-priced services.
Determine which bank provides the best rates through bank-to-bank comparison
Quickly detect all quantity errors. Food Lion no longer has to create reports manually or perform additional analysis in Excel to confirm that quantities listed on the bank statement match the quantities processed through ReconNET

Testimonial

“We had been using another bank fee management solution that was difficult to use and required a lot of work to do basic comparisons. We replaced it with Trintech’s Bank Fee Analysis system, and now we have the right tool in place to perform analysis. It’s easy to use and we get results in a fraction of the time we spent before.” - Patti Fletcher, Corporate Cash Manager

Other Information

For more information on how you too can optimize banking relationships for increased productivity and savings with Bank Fee Analysis, contact Trintech today.