Answer
Usually fewer than you have — but there is no universal number. Size the footprint by purpose and jurisdiction, not by entity count. Keep accounts that regulators, payroll, tax, escrow, or live cash pooling / payment factory designs require; retire collection-only and idle accounts once virtual accounts, ROBO, or POBO actually replace their job. Full discipline: bank account management (BAM).
Why
- Purpose beats headcount — one entity may need operating + payroll + tax + pool participant accounts; another may need only a factory-funded operating account. Counting “one account per subsidiary” either overbuilds or underbuilds.
- Must-keeps are local — licence, tax, and social-charge rules often force entity-level accounts even when group policy prefers centralization. Markets such as China illustrate why a global target count fails without a country overlay.
- Substitutes must be proven — VAs and ROBO can retire collection-only accounts; they do not erase payment or regulatory accounts (do virtual accounts replace subsidiary bank accounts?). POBO can shrink outbound accounts only where corridors and documentation allow.
- Idle is expensive and risky — dormant balances, stale signatories, and portal-only wallets inflate fees and fraud surface under weak BAM.
- Structure sets a floor — live ZBA/notional participants, factory funding accounts, and in-house bank external legs are structure-critical; cutting them to hit a KPI breaks liquidity management.
Practical approach: classify every account (must-keep / structure-critical / collection-only / idle), prove a substitute before each close, and track a rationalization backlog rather than a single global target.
Next
Discipline: bank account management. Collection substitutes: virtual accounts, ROBO. Outbound design: POBO, payment factory. Concentration floor: cash pooling. Umbrella: liquidity management.