Treasury teams can come in many shapes and sizes, each of which has its own set of challenges and opportunities. Julia Donegan is a treasury professional who has experienced both ends of the treasury maturity spectrum, moving from a highly efficient treasury environment to embrace the challenge of building a treasury function almost from scratch.

Donegan initially started her career in accountancy. “When I was training to be an accountant, I did a lot of contract roles,” she explains. “I ended up at Post Bank, which was a short-lived bank in Ireland. While I was there, I worked in every part of the finance team, including treasury.”

While she describes her work in this role as “very basic”, recruitment agents subsequently advised her to pursue the treasury route instead of accountancy, which led to a contract role at pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s treasury team in Dublin – “and I actually loved it. I realised I would much prefer this to being an accountant on a permanent basis.”

Donegan went on to spend ten years at Pfizer. Initially focusing on day-to-day liquidity management and reporting, she worked her way up through a series of roles which culminated in her appointment as Treasury Team Lead. In this role, she managed a team of seven while leading key strategic projects and managing day-to-day liquidity management activities.

“Throughout my time at Pfizer, I learned the ins and outs of treasury, and in the later years I pushed myself forward to do a lot of projects within the team,” she recalls. “My responsibilities included migrating activity from centres across Eastern Europe and the Middle East and Africa into the Dublin treasury function.”

But when she was approaching her ten-year anniversary of joining Pfizer, Donegan felt that the time had come to apply herself to a new challenge. “Pfizer was a really well-established treasury function that did everything really efficiently, but I wanted to try something a bit different.”

This desire for change took her to Newell Brands, a manufacturer, marketer and distributor of consumer products ranging from baby buggies to kitchen utensils. With the company in the process of establishing a new treasury team in Europe, Donegan was the first treasury colleague to be hired in Dublin.

“It was essentially a startup treasury function,” she explains. “We had some treasury activities based in a service centre in the Netherlands, but it wasn’t really a corporate treasury function. The idea was to start afresh with a treasury function for EMEA.”

Gaining industry recognition

Donegan’s initial remit in her role was to set up a treasury function in Dublin that would take on the activities that had previously been carried out in the Netherlands. She also embarked on a request for proposal (RFP) process in order to restructure the company’s banking arrangements – an initiative that was recognised in the 2024 Adam Smith Awards programme, with Newell Brands named Overall Winner in the Best Transaction Management Solution category.

This award-winning project involved transforming the company’s banking structure which previously included 14 cash pools across six banks, 179 intercompany loan relationships and 27 bank relationships.

Without a centralised approach, pool balances had to be monitored manually, with physical wire transfers between accounts. Meanwhile, many of the company’s bank accounts sat outside the liquidity structure. Other challenges included insufficient transparency throughout the company’s EMEA structure, which was managed locally, as well as a lack of real-time reporting on bank accounts.

To address these issues, Newell Brands worked with Citi to put in place a fully centralised structure which included a multi-entity, multi-currency pool based in London, with automated end-of-day sweeping. During the project, the company also consolidated its netting process. As a result of these efforts, Newell Brands has achieved 90% cash concentration – up from 40% before the project began – while gaining more visibility and control over cash.

“This was a huge project, because we were trying to balance setting up an operation, running the day-to-day activities, and also running this huge project with a very small team that essentially consisted of a treasury systems manager and a contractor,” says Donegan. “It was very different from what I had been doing at Pfizer, and there were days when I was asking, ‘What have I done?!’ But I also really enjoyed building something from scratch, and being able to say, ‘This is how it should look.’”

As part of this exercise, Donegan decided early on that existing processes wouldn’t simply be transferred from the centre in the Netherlands to the new treasury. “It was important to look at each of those processes critically and say, ‘No, this doesn’t make any sense. Let’s start again – what should treasury look like?’”

Following the success of these initiatives, the company’s APAC treasury operations were moved into Dublin and the treasury team was expanded. “That was another big project – it involved going to our former colleagues in Hong Kong and seeing what they had done, and then migrating it into Dublin,” says Donegan. “Again, there were a lot of cases where we looked at the existing process and took the time to standardise them.”

“At the same time, we were working to get a lot of our forecasting to work through our new treasury management system (TMS), which is SAP S/4HANA.”

Creating a blueprint for treasury

While working on these initiatives, Donegan says her approach was greatly informed by her previous experience at Pfizer. “I knew what treasury should look like, what it should do, and what I wanted to build towards. Without that, I think you would be a bit directionless. Even though I didn’t have the same systems and the same resources, I knew what we could achieve using some great workarounds.”

In one such workaround, the treasury was able to start using one of its main banks like a TMS. “We got all the banks to feed their balances and statements into that bank, and we would pull reports directly. We could see all our balances and payments in and out. We used workarounds for a long time, but I knew where I wanted to get to.”

Then, in April 2024 Donegan was appointed to her current role as Global Treasury Director. Today, she is responsible for all of the company’s treasury operations around the world, overseeing a team of 11 people.

“I report to the SVP, Treasurer and Chief Tax Officer. Treasury is essentially divided into two functions – I’m responsible for treasury operations, and there is also a team that focuses on debt capital markets. My team is based across two locations – Dublin and the US – and between those locations we cover EMEA, APAC, Latin America, the US and Canada. We also have a small sub-compliance team that manages our compliance and control globally.”

Today, Donegan says she is largely focusing on standardising treasury processes around the world. “When I’ve taken over each region, I’ve tried to make sure the forecasts are similar. I’m also working on a banking restructuring project in Latin America, as well as working on various legal entity projects and rationalisation and tax projects. And we’re looking to further roll out our S/4HANA system and go live with our netting this year.

“But alongside all of this, I’m still involved in the day-to-day activities – I catch up every day with the team and talk through any problems they might be having.”

Driving improvements

With 47 countries and 600 bank accounts under her remit – all of which operate differently and provide information to the treasury in different ways – Donegan says that standardising the cash forecasting process is an ongoing challenge. “A lot of the difficulties that arise can be linked back to how we receive data, and the quality of that data. Likewise, challenges can arise if we’re not receiving forecasts from the right people.”

With so many touch points across the organisation, Donegan points out that anyone who spends money or interacts with bank accounts can have an impact on treasury operations. “Our businesses are very varied, and a lot of them can be quite seasonal, such as our camping businesses and Yankee Candles.”

Nevertheless, the organisation’s ‘One Newell’ initiative has included a drive towards greater standardisation to increase uniformity across the different business units. “That’s an organisation-wide project, rather than a treasury project, but we’re hoping it will make our lives easier, with fewer touch points,” says Donegan.

In the meantime, one approach which has helped to address the challenges presented by the company’s myriad brands is the use of notional pooling. As Donegan explains, “What that means is that if an entity tends to pick up in December, but has a slow February or March, we no longer have to fund it individually using inter-company loans – we can just balance it through the notional pool. So that has provided a lot more stability.”

And while the team is still fairly small, Donegan says that harnessing automation through automatic sweeping and straight-through processing of FX transactions has done a lot to ease the daily pressures on treasury.

“That means we can be more on top of any emergencies that happen and also improve our processes so we can see those emergencies coming sooner,” she notes. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to get a phone call tonight saying that a big tax payment needs to be done by tomorrow! It’s always important to build in time to react to any unforeseen situations that might arise.”

Looking further ahead, Donegan is interested in the potential benefits that could be achieved with AI-powered forecasting. “We want to work towards predictive forecasts, whereby you can use all the information you have collected over the years and use it to predict what is going to happen this year.

“But like many other treasury functions, we’re not just on a single ERP system, so getting all of this information together is the really hard part. I think that continuing to work on having all our data in one place will be really beneficial.”

Likewise, she highlights the importance of gaining more control and visibility over the company’s existing data, “because the more information you have, the better these new technologies can predict what’s going to happen. If you’re only feeding in data from one ERP system, it can only tell you what’s going to happen in a very limited way.”

Taking stock

During her career, Donegan has experienced two very different types of treasury function. But what her roles have in common is the opportunity that treasury presents to get involved in so many activities across the organisation. “There are very few things within the organisation that don’t hit treasury – everything revolves around cash, and if cash isn’t working then everyone feels the impact,” she reflects. “You’re working with so many different teams and projects.”

At the same time, she says treasury is characterised by a blend of two very different elements. “On the one hand, you know what you need to do on a day-to-day basis, so that aspect is quite controlled and steady. But at the same time, you can be involved in a lot of strategic projects and be pulled in when things go wrong for different teams. I really enjoy that combination of controlled activities and constant change.”

Given the diverse challenges that can arise, Donegan observes that the treasurer’s role is one that requires flexibility, as well as an openness to learning new systems. “And personally, I feel that my accounting base gives me a good grounding in how everything flows,” she says. “It’s something that I’ve never struggled with, even when dealing with legal, tax, accounting or audit. I think that can be more of a challenge if you don’t have an accounting background.”

Alongside the demands of her role, Donegan spends her time outside the office looking after her three children. “I’d like to say I have some great hobbies or go on ten-hour hikes, but mainly I’m a chauffeur!” she laughs. “My role is very busy, so when I’m off I am really focused on spending as much time as possible with the kids and keeping everything in life running smoothly.”

Looking back over her career so far, Donegan says she’s glad she took the risk of leaving an organisation she loved to jump into something new. “I think to develop your career, sometimes you’ve got to make those decisions about what you really want. And it was a worthwhile risk – I’ve been with Newell five years, and I’ve progressed from manager to senior manager to director, and then global director. It’s been a lot of hard work, but it’s also been very rewarding.”