Photo of Sonam Donkar and Matthew Graves, Rohit Group.
Sonam Donkar
CFO
Canada
Founded by the Gupta family in 1986, Rohit Group is a privately held, diversified real estate organisation with over CA$1bn in assets. The company’s headquarters are in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Rohit Group’s real estate subsidiaries include Rohit Communities, Rohit Homes, Rohit Rental Living, Rohit Commercial and Rohit Health. In 2025, the company reported annual revenue of CA$539m.
Demonstrating that small treasury teams can achieve great things, Canadian real estate company Rohit Group was a Highly Commended Winner in this year’s hotly contested Top Treasury Team category.
Rohit Group’s 18-month transformation journey has seen its finance and treasury team building a digital treasury infrastructure that rivals organisations ten times its size. Furthermore, the diverse and forward-looking team – which brings together not just financial acumen, but also expertise in areas such as marketing and astrophysics – has a clear focus not just on Rohit Group itself, but on its broader responsibilities to Canada’s communities.
Inflection point
At the beginning of its treasury transformation journey, Rohit Group was facing a critical inflection point for its finance and treasury team. The company had undergone significant growth between 2022 and 2025, with total assets rising from CA$741m to CA$1.3bn. At the same time, annual revenue had climbed from CA$205m to CA$539m.
But despite this rapid expansion, the company’s treasury operations remained manual and decentralised, with a heavy reliance on spreadsheet-based tracking across around 80 loan facilities. Debt was managed on a loan-by-loan basis, while hedging was ad-hoc. Reporting to lenders and internal stakeholders was labour-intensive and reactive.
The team was also facing significant external pressures. For one thing, the retirement of the Canadian Dollar Offered Rate (CDOR) benchmark in 2024 meant the company’s hedging programme needed to be significantly overhauled. Further challenges were presented by unpredictable policy changes being made by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) to MLI Select – a multi-unit mortgage loan insurance product – and to its Apartment Construction Loan Programme (ACLP).
To support the company’s ambitions – including new provinces, a rental housing division, healthcare infrastructure and a January 2025 corporate restructuring – it was clear that treasury needed to evolve into a strategic growth enabler.
Multi-pillar transformation
Led by Sonam Donkar and execution managed by Senior Manager, Treasury, Matthew Graves, the team designed and executed a multi-pillar transformation.
From the outset, the team was clear that off-the-shelf solutions would not be able to accommodate the complexity and diversity of the group’s financing structures. As a result, the transformation was built upon bespoke in‑house solutions.
One such solution was the company’s Digital Debt & Liquidity Platform, an in-house solution that automated reporting across all 80 of the company’s loan facilities. Following the retirement of CDOR, the company also implemented a hedging programme based on its successor, the Canadian Overnight Repo Rate Average (CORRA) – an initiative that delivered savings of CA$2m in the first year alone.
An innovative portfolio hedging approach adopted by the company for short-term construction loans involved tying a single long-term interest rate swap to a portfolio of variable debt, rather than to individual loans. In addition, the team’s surety programme involved systematically replacing letters of credit with bonds, freeing up CA$42m in liquidity that had been encumbered since 2022.
Other elements of the transformation included a model automating project finance reporting for quantity surveyors (QS), which eliminated CA$30m in stagnant liquidity caused by delayed loan advances.
Notably, all of these initiatives were executed concurrently at a time when the business was scaling rapidly, meaning that rigorous prioritisation was paramount. During this transformation, the treasury was also thoroughly modernised and now operates on a single, mobile‑accessible, AI‑enhanced digital platform.
Teamwork and community
Rohit Group’s achievements are impressive in their own right, and all the more so given the small treasury and finance team assembled by CFO Sonam Donkar – herself a former Adam Smith Awards Asia Woman of the Year award winner.
For Donkar, an important principle is that diverse perspectives result in better financial solutions. As such, the team is both lean and highly diverse, including professionals from Canada, India, Pakistan, Colombia, Nigeria and China. Their backgrounds, likewise, illustrate a forward-looking understanding of the demands of modern treasury.
Rohit Group’s team is also one that takes its community responsibility seriously, with team members taking part in CMHA push-up challenges for mental health awareness, as well as volunteering at neighbourhood launches.
Meanwhile, the impact of the company’s transformation extends well beyond the balance sheet. For example, the team’s GSA-based construction financing enables Rohit Group to finance and deliver more than 1,000 housing units per year, with minimal administrative overhead. Given the country’s acute housing shortage, this operational efficiency translates directly into homes for families.
What the judges said:
“A multi-pillar transformation by a smaller treasury team with a strong focus on innovation, clear quantifiable benefits and a great human story.”
The Adam Smith Awards are the industry benchmark for best practice and innovation in corporate treasury. The 2026 awards attracted 635 nominations. To find out more please visit treasurytoday.com/adam-smith-awards
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