[Foundation-l] Wikimedia financials - bank fees

[En Pine]

I notice that the financial report at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_February_2012 says something about “higher bank fees ($42K)”. Has anyone taken a hard look at these fees to see if WMF could organize its utilization of bank services in such a way that it can lower this expense, including the possibility of moving the WMF’s bank account(s) to one or more different financial institutions? $42k seems like a very large amount of money for a nonprofit such as WMF to spend on bank fees in a single month. I can speculate that the definition of bank fee might include things like currency conversion fees, but even so, $42k seems like a lot.

Pine