Photo of Luca Hammel, Dufry.

Luca Hammel, Global Treasury Front Office Head at Dufry has been described as a “go-getter in all areas of treasury and finance”. Although he is early on in his career, Hammel’s already exemplary CV readily confirms this assessment.

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Luca started his career as an intern at UBS in 2011 whilst studying for his degree in Business and Economics, before joining Dufry in 2012 on a part-time basis. During this stint with Dufry, Luca shone and was offered a full-time position as Corporate Treasury Analyst in 2015. In this role, he juggled a multitude of treasury responsibilities and was tasked with managing the implementation of the TIS payment solution and also intercompany financing and hedging in Latin America – an especially complex market.

The professionalism and commitment that Luca applied to these duties caught the eye of his boss, Yves Gerster, Global Treasury & Shared Services Director at Dufry. “Under Luca’s management, the TIS implementation has been a success and many milestones have been achieved ahead of the planned deadline,” says Gerster. “Also, he was able to expand the scope of certain areas of the project beyond their initial target. To achieve this, Luca has had to manage many different stakeholders in different departments, countries and organisations around the world.”

Luca’s work also enabled him to achieve a promotion to Global Treasury Front Office Head and he is now responsible for the group’s cash management strategy and intra-group liquidity management as well as continuing with the implementation of the new payments system. Luca has also earnt a place on the company’s internal fast-track career programme – which cherry-picks future leaders in the company.

As well as learning on the job, Luca has been keen to develop through education. As well as completing his undergraduate degree, he has also recently attained a Masters degree in Banking and Finance from the University of Zurich.

Key achievements

The scope of his role and his work managing various projects means that Luca has, in a very short time, already compiled an impressive list of career highlights. Here are a handful of these:

• Managing the implementation of the TIS payment solution.
• Managing and fulfilling regulatory requirements for the company in a fast-paced regulatory environment.
• Managing and ensuring the smooth running of treasury applications such as 360T, Bloomberg and Trinity.
• Bank negotiations.
• FX and interest rate risk management evaluation and process redesign.
• Analysis and renegotiation of credit and debit card conditions.

Testimonial

Neil Davis, International Corporate Sales Director at Elavon said: “I have known Luca for around two years. We first met when I approached Luca’s current company to offer my company’s products and services.

From the outset, it was clear that Luca had a very good understanding of our industry (card acquiring), which is unusual in that we generally find most treasurers have a broad knowledge of our industry’s products and devices, rather than the more detailed knowledge Luca displayed.”

Davis goes on to add that: “The nature of our business is extremely technical and therefore the lead time from first contact to implementation of the service is lengthy, and involves multiple internal stakeholders from both sides, together with a number of calls and meetings, the majority of which were facilitated by Luca. He ensured that all stakeholders were engaged from his company’s side and that all our requests for information were responded to extremely promptly and that agreed project deadlines were met. What’s even more impressive is that Luca managed to facilitate the project whilst in the background dealing with an extremely large acquisition of another company.”

Dufrys’ Gerster added: “I know Luca as an extremely reliable person with a very high sense of duty and an extraordinarily keen perception. Luca has shown excellent organisational skills and approaches his work and completes it in a very efficient manner.”

Key skills

• People and stakeholder management.
• Negotiation.
• Broad treasury and finance knowledge.
• Self-starter.
• Keen to learn.