“One of the most exciting things about treasury is that you don’t have two days the same,” says Viktoria Hadarits, Assistant Treasurer at Lightsource bp. “Every day is different. There are days when you come in and you have a blank sheet of paper – you can design, you can achieve so much, add so much value. Then some days you come in and there is nothing and you go – ‘where do we start? How are we going to do this?’ It can be super exciting one day and really challenging the next. That’s what keeps the job really interesting.”
Like so many of her fellow professionals, treasury was not the first stop on Hadarits’ career journey. After graduating with a BSc in Economics from Budapest Business University, Hungary’s largest – and the world’s oldest – public business school, she went on to gain a Bachelor’s degree in international business from Avans University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.
Joining ING as a project manager in Hungary, Hadarits worked on the implementation of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID). In this position, her motivation and enthusiasm, combined with her close attention to detail, helped to ensure the successful implementation of the project.
Having met her husband while studying with Erasmus in Paris, they decided to move to Spain. “We moved to Madrid – my husband is Spanish – and although I didn’t speak Spanish at the time, being able to speak English and having studied finance and international business meant that I was able to become an FX option broker in the interbank market, working with UK clients,” she recalls.
When the opportunity came to work overseas, she and her husband relocated to London. Although her new role was similar to the role she had held in Madrid, in the London office she found she was the youngest person, the only woman and the only non-native English speaker. “I really enjoyed the adrenaline of the markets,” she recalls. “But I didn’t enjoy the environment. I felt I wanted to do something different.”
Other side of the table
It was while talking to a friend that she first learned of corporate treasury. “I suddenly realised that as well as having transferable skills, I had a deep knowledge of the products and services used by treasury. I was just sitting on the other side of the table.”
Possessing the right skills and having the product knowledge were instrumental, she believes, to securing her next role at Virgin. “I went from the banks being my clients to being a client of the banks,” she reflects. After joining Virgin in 2013 as a treasury assistant, within five years Hadarits was appointed Group Treasury Manager.
It was while she was at Virgin that her interest in sustainability began to grow. With companies increasingly beginning to question their roles, responsibilities and core purpose, she began to think about her own motivations and question the direction her career should take. At the same time, she had a great desire to deepen her knowledge of treasury.
“Virgin was a very entrepreneurial environment, very exciting, with new investments and divestments constantly happening. It was very fast paced,” she explains. “But I was interested in seeing other types of treasury departments. I felt that I needed to broaden my treasury horizons.”
By joining the well-established treasury department of FTSE-listed Johnson Matthey, a global leader in sustainable technologies, as cash and FX manager, Hadarits was able to broaden her knowledge of front office operations and sustainability. “They were much further ahead on the sustainability journey. I was able to get involved with a lot of sustainability products used in treasury.”
Stepping into renewable energy
In early 2022 Hadarits was offered the chance to be a part of the Lightsource bp treasury department that the company was building. Since the company was in the renewable energy space, she had no hesitation in accepting. “I felt that with my experience and my knowledge of treasury processes, and having worked with some very good treasury professionals, I would be able to bring a lot to the company.”
From its beginnings in 2010 as a small UK start-up with just six people, Lightsource bp has experienced extraordinarily rapid growth. This massive expansion – it now has a presence in 19 countries with more than 1,200 employees – was the impetus for the company’s decision to create a dedicated treasury.
Joining the company at this time of rapid expansion presented Hadarits with challenges as well as opportunities. “Two years ago, the company realised that it would make sense to have a centralised treasury,” explains Hadarits. “In April 2022 I joined the firm as their first treasury professional. Today, we have eight people working in the treasury team – a massive growth in just a year and a half.”
This speedy expansion was necessary because up until then, treasury activities at the company had been spread across a number of different departments, including structured finance, payments and accounting. “Now that we have built our team, some of the tasks have been taken over by us,” she explains. “Additionally, a lot of new areas of finance have been brought into the organisation by treasury.”
Some five years ago, the company became a 50:50 joint venture with BP. Although BP is involved in all strategic and investment decisions at board level, the treasury at Lightsource bp has a free hand in all day-to-day decisions. “Although the two treasury teams are fully separate,” explains Hadarits, “we have a very good relationship with the BP treasury team. It means that we have the advantage of being able to consult them and get their insights and opinions.”
Current responsibilities
On a day-to-day basis, the team is now responsible for all the usual treasury operations – cash management and cash flow forecasting, liquidity management and debt management, foreign exchange and investments management.
The new treasury has also inherited more than 15 banking portals and more than 800 bank accounts. “With the company growing so fast, and without treasury professionals to monitor, every time the company entered a new country, new bank accounts were set up across different banking providers,” Hadarits explains.
In order to consolidate the existing cash management banks, and to reduce the large number of existing accounts, the treasury has been running a series of RFPs. “Now that we have a treasury in place, we are reviewing the bank accounts and all of our global cash management relationships because it just doesn’t make sense to have these accounts scattered across so many banks,” she says. Taking a regional approach, the treasury has been running RFPs in the UK and EMEA and will be doing the same for the Americas and for APAC.
With such a new treasury department, there have inevitably been some challenges to overcome, chief of which is the lack of a dedicated treasury management system (TMS). Many of the legacy processes simply use Excel spreadsheets. “Although there were good reasons why things were set up the way they were, from a treasury perspective it doesn’t necessarily make sense,” Hadarits notes. The first priority for the company has been to implement SAP to cover the most pressing finance needs, with a TMS implementation potentially following in the future.
Future projects
Even given the enthusiasm Hadarits has for treasury, her list of current and future projects is impressive. Although the implementation of SAP is centred on the accounting system, rather than being treasury-focused, there is heavy treasury involvement in the project.
Meanwhile, the team’s efforts to rationalise bank relationships and accounts continue. “The cash management RFP has been done for the UK, and we are transitioning over all the bank accounts to our one UK cash management bank,” says Hadarits. “We’re starting now with the EMEA cash management RFP, which will probably take us from now until the first quarter of 2024.”
As well as running cash management RFPs to consolidate its cash management relationships, the group has also run an FX RFP. “We’re now starting to look at the trade, execution and strategy of hedging,” says Hadarits. “That is going to be a new area where treasury is going to play an important role.” An FX trading platform implementation is on the agenda for next year. Treasury has also recently started investing in money market funds – “so we now need a trading platform, rather than the traditional approach of calling up funds to subscribe,” Hadarits notes.
Last – but not least – is the need for a wide-reaching rationalisation. “Because of the complex organisational structure, there are a lot of intercompany relationships and positions that were created over the years. We are in the process of reviewing these, clearing balances and creating new funding routes.”
The way ahead
Digitalisation is high on the agenda. Having implemented a number of automated processes this year, Hadarits is keen to continue moving away from manual processes and finding further ways of embracing automation. It is in the day-to-day operations where she believes automation can be most helpful, creating efficient processes and speeding up processing time up so that treasury can concentrate on the bigger picture.
In addition, Hadarits is mindful of other departments in the company that are facing similar challenges in the wake of the company’s rapid expansion. “It’s important to recognise that other departments are going through the same evolution,” she notes. “We need to work together to make sure that we understand their digitalisation projects – there can be a lot of overlap, especially within finance.” As such, she says, “we need to see if we can collaborate with other departments and also make sure that we are not duplicating efforts or stepping on each other’s toes.”
While the quest for greater visibility is an ongoing challenge, she believes that technology will play an important role in addressing this. “Many treasuries struggle with visibility. We’re always trying to get better visibility on cash balances,” she says.
“With APIs (application programming interfaces) coming into the picture, you are going to get real time balances in your TMS – and then you can use artificial intelligence (AI) to automate what happens next.” For example, she predicts that treasurers will be able to stipulate the minimum balance needed on an account, and then teach AI where to invest the surplus balance.
“I think AI is going to be able to execute a lot of the operational tasks in treasury,” she adds, noting that treasurers will be able to continue adding value by providing more input into strategic decisions. “AI presents interesting possibilities, but we will need to make sure that AI is not driving our future – that we direct it to where we want it to be, so that it serves our purposes and not the other way around. It’s a tool to make our team more efficient, but not to replace it,” she says.
As treasury continues to evolve, Hadarits believes that continuous learning will be extremely important. While she doesn’t think it is necessary to be a technical expert in all things digital, she sees the value in learning as much as possible about systems and how they work. “My children are learning coding in school,” she says. “I have no knowledge of how to do that, but it might be a good idea to learn some of the basics. It doesn’t mean I will become a programmer, but at least I will be able to understand it better.”
Striking a balance
One aspect of her role that Hadarits particularly enjoys is the team building element. “Because I love treasury so much, I like to show the team the world of treasury and the variety of options that treasury offers,” she says. “Seeing them get enthusiastic about treasury is really exciting.”
She emphasises the importance of considering the mental health of team members and striking the right balance between work and personal life. “We are a new department. We have achieved a great deal in 2023, but we still have much more to do,” she says. “I like to have a plan in place so that I can show the team the things that we need to concentrate on and the things that we can realistically achieve.” As well as covering as much ground as possible, she says, it is also important to take stock of our achievements and celebrate our successes.
As such, Hadarits is a great believer in switching off outside of the office and winding down at the end of the day. Apart from enjoying the time spent with family, she loves running and taking her children to the skate park. She also enjoys crocheting in the evening while listening to podcasts or an audiobook. “I’ve done a lot of pencil cases,” she laughs. “Everyone in my family now has a crocheted pencil case!”
Nevertheless, where the Lightsource treasury team is concerned, Hadarits notes that everyone is fully committed to the company’s success. “We believe in the same purpose, which is to deliver sustainable and renewable energy,” she concludes. “I think that brings all of us together. That is an important part of why I am at this company.”
