What are your typical everyday tasks?
Not surprisingly, my routine everyday tasks include staying on top of my emails (very important given the global role, from San Jose to Sydney) and following the main news potentially impacting our business or funding. As a change management advocate, I participate in frequent calls with stakeholders in our treasury transformation, explaining the why, the what and the how to obtain their advice and support. I find it important to have a few minutes of learning every day; it can be an article, an e-learning or a more structured training. Finally, I also always keep some time available to answer any request from my team, whether technical or more personal.
What is your approach to fostering the best bank relationships?
My approach to bank relationships is to build a partnership based on a transparent dialogue. This means that on one hand we clearly express our ambitions, expectations, and requirements in terms of funding, technology capabilities, support level and advisory capabilities. On the other hand, we also make sure that we build a sustainable long-term relationship fruitful for both parties.
Internally, I always seek to bring as much business to my relationship banks as possible (to the detriment of other banks or service providers), under the imperative condition that they provide us with the best terms on the market. A relationship bank gets a fair chance to bid, and as our treasury transformation is going on and we climb up the maturity ladder, we get a fair assessment of each bank strengths, weaknesses and compatibility with our technology and governance ecosystem. Knowing this, we adapt our funding requests, at a global level to reach a fair balance.
This approach obviously requires good analysis skills, listening skills, communication skills and agility. Further we need to understand the banks constraints and manoeuvring room as well as the regulatory environment they evolve in, across the various countries. Being both pragmatic and fair typically yields the best results.
How much autonomy and trust does treasury have within an organisation? To what extent can treasurers shape their role?
This is a topic that can differ a lot from company to company, and one of the utmost importance when considering taking on a new position. I personally have always designed my role. From my early days in treasury, I was assigned a specific role and tasks, but I quickly worked on redesigning processes, systems, developing partnerships and negotiating contracts. My career evolution has been one of identifying “unattended business opportunities”, designing solutions and getting the freedom to implement them. The driver often was to increase the productivity and interest of my team’s job, or to drastically reduce risk in the organisation. Treasury, as opposed to different areas in finance, is a place where one can really use his/her creativity as we need to constantly adapt to the business evolution (eg M&A), our partners capabilities, technology opportunities or changes in the regulatory environment.
There isn’t really an end to what you can develop or improve; it is a matter of doing it in a way that will be cost-efficient, can be bearable by the organisation, and optimising the resource of your team. I always build great attention to scalability, sustainability, cyber security, segregation of duties, auditability and user friendliness.
Are you a change agent?
My nature is to constantly challenge the status quo, revisit what we do and be open to new opportunities to improve processes and deliver value. Some ideas won’t mature because they do not fit to our organisation or don’t bring sufficient benefits to warrant the effort and costs.
But once I am convinced of the additional value, the feasibility and the affordability, I won’t count my efforts to embark every single stakeholder in my vision. I can demonstrate a lot of stamina and won’t leave any objection or concern unaddressed as this is the way we build a more robust solution.
How has the role of treasury evolved over the course of your career?
The world is ever more complex, with political risk now also materially affecting developed markets. We need to have our eyes everywhere and cannot take anything for granted. Our risk assessment frameworks are getting ever more comprehensive and agile.
Western countries are no more the centre of the world and economic value creation is much more spread across the globe, resulting in a need to focus more on those new large economies and markets.
Technology has developed tremendously bringing many opportunities for process optimisation and data mining but also bringing some specific risks along, which we need to be very aware of. Fraud prevention is more important than ever as fraud has become an industry and no company is immune. Cyber security should be everyone’s concern but the treasurer as the ultimate guardian of the cash obviously has a pivotal role to play in that respect.
The digitisation trend is here to stay and marketplaces, mobile applications and instant payment schemes have changed the way companies do business. The treasurer needs to understand how to build, implement and leverage solutions in a safe, cost-efficient and transparent way.
ESG topics, whether decarbonisation of the economy or DEI topics have changed the way our companies operate. There may be a slowdown in parts of the world, but the long-term trends remain. Some investors are leading the march and showing the way on how to transform our society, and we need to take their expectations into account to get sustainable financing.
