Taking treasury leadership to new heights

Samantha Ng’s recent move to head up the Asia Pacific treasury department at Endeavor is testament not only to her talent and hard work, but also her unrelenting belief in herself. Indeed, one of Samantha’s main mottos in life is: if you want it, then go and get it. Throughout her career Samantha has lived up to this, be it coming out of her comfort zone to work on challenging projects; or the bold actions she has taken to ensure that she has a well-defined work/life balance. Now, as a treasury leader, Samantha is keen to lead by example and bring through the next generation of treasury professionals.

After obtaining a degree in finance, Samantha began her professional life in a non-treasury function, with an industry-specific role at Singapore Airlines, focused on revenue recognition. When the opportunity came to move into a treasury role, she leapt at the chance, moving on to cash management and FX hedging in a position with Singapore Airlines, where she honed her craft in the bread and butter of treasury.

The role at Singapore Airlines lasted for five years and was followed by stints in Sony, Infineon and DKSH. Always within the treasury space, these stints gave her insider perspectives into treasury best practices at different companies and industries, invaluable for a treasurer’s career development, and this is a consistent facet of Samantha’s impressive career journey.

Samantha felt particularly challenged at her stint at DKSH, a leading Market Expansion Services Group listed on SIX Swiss Exchange. Although its headquarters is in Zurich, DKSH is deeply rooted throughout Asia Pacific, with its global finance centre located in Singapore. When Samantha joined the group treasury team, the treasury function was new and she was deeply involved in setting up a global treasury centre for the company. Working with an inspiring and entrepreneurial group of business leaders at DKSH, Samantha was deeply involved in centralising FX dealing and intercompany funding. She also developed a tool to analyse and manage liquidity, FX and counterparty risks.

She led various projects at DKSH, from streamlining cash management structures to implementing a global corporate card programme and a bank agnostic communication gateway. Samantha played a leading role in standardising and simplifying how payment instructions, notifications and bank statements are sent to and from banks through the bank agnostic gateway. Through such a gateway, it has become quicker and less costly for DKSH to change banking partners.

Seven years later, Samantha is now with Endeavor. Endeavor is a sports, entertainment and fashion giant founded in 1898 in New York City, and has WME, IMG and UFC in its network of companies. The entertainment giant is growing rapidly in Asia and Samantha hopes to bring her expertise to this ambitious group.

Relentless advancement

Since beginning her career at Singapore Airlines, where despite being inexperienced and entirely new to the treasury function, Samantha relentlessly pushed forward and advanced. Samantha has demonstrated a real drive which has consistently encouraged her superiors to push her forward and encourage her on her career path in treasury.

Samantha places a strong emphasis on teamwork and working across functions to get the job done rather than sitting in a silo focusing purely on treasury activities. The steepest learning curve of Samantha’s career has come during her last seven years at previous employer, DKSH, during which she joined the team facilitating the company’s IPO, a rigorous journey and one that, true to form, Samantha relished.

Empowering ourselves

As a modern professional, striking a balance is an ongoing focus for Samantha, who understands that professionals today have many different and often conflicting family and professional obligations. Working nowadays involves an inevitable struggle to try to balance the two. With typical frankness, Samantha understands that the reality is that work doesn’t stop at 6pm, and family responsibilities don’t stop at nine in the morning.

Samantha believes that more women need to empower themselves to believe that at different times, it is acceptable to either spend a lot of time at work or at home. She tries to encourage the next generation of female professionals to be confident and honest, and not feel guilty about spending time at work to meet deadlines or saying no at work to meet family commitments.

Being adaptable and versatile

Samantha is of the view that the decisions she takes, whatever they are, are based on the best information that she has. “Whatever happens afterwards, well, it is just life and you just have to look at those new circumstances and adjust and make them work,” she says. “We have to learn and to be adaptable and try to look at things differently when the time requires us to do that. Life changes, so circumstances change.”

Outside of the workplace, Samantha gets involved with running workshops at her children’s school, such as a workshop around how to plan and manage your pocket money. Samantha enjoys the adventure of not knowing where her career may take her, and is happy enjoying the ride, it has certainly been a great one so far.