“The thing that I love most about treasury is that no two days are the same and I get to work with people around the world,” says Sarah Symes, APAC Senior Treasury Director at Fluence. “One day I might be liaising with someone in India on a capital injection and the next day I may be helping someone in the UK to come up with an FX hedge structure for a new deal. I’ve also worked in industries that are completely different to each other.”
But while treasury has been an important part of Symes’ life for over a decade, it wasn’t even on her radar at the beginning of her career. Graduating from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in accounting and finance, Symes initially took up a position with PwC, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 2008.
“As a tax consultant at PwC, I was advising clients in the retail and consumer product sector,” she says. “After I obtained my chartered accounting qualification, I decided – like many good Aussies before me – to move to London, maybe for a year or two.”
Looking to do something different while she was living in London, Symes took up a position at Goldman Sachs in the operations risk and control team. However, three months after starting with the firm, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, heralding the start of the global economic and financial crisis.
The part of the business that Symes was involved in – client asset protection – was suddenly highly relevant. With their assets effectively out of reach, clients of the investment bank were clamouring to gain access to all available funds.
“I had joined the client assets team,” she recalls, “the purpose of which was to ensure that all the cash and securities that the bank held on behalf of clients were appropriately segregated and protected. It was all heavily regulated – and with huge volumes of trading activity every day, just identifying what went into the client pool was very complicated.”
New horizons
It was during her time at Goldman Sachs that Symes began to develop an interest in corporate treasury. “I had been working alongside our treasury operations teams, because client cash had to be held in different bank accounts separate to the firm’s assets,” she says. “It was through my interactions with them that my interest in the world of treasury was sparked.”
After six years with Goldman Sachs, Symes moved to Hong Kong where she joined the Asia Treasury Team at General Electric (GE). “That’s when I actually started my treasury journey,” she says. “My role was to advise and support GE Capital’s businesses in Asia which included commercial distribution and structured finance, private equity, aviation and fleet financing and consumer credit cards.”
In her role at GE, Symes was responsible for managing the treasury functions for the Asia structured finance and commercial distribution businesses, and subsequently leading treasury workstreams for multiple divestments when GE decided to exit all financing businesses. “The treasury division at GE was a well-oiled machine, with cash management specialists, hedging specialists and funding specialists and a sophisticated treasury infrastructure,” she recalls. “As my first treasury role, it was a fantastic opportunity to learn how complex treasury organisations are run.”
Starting treasury from scratch
After a couple of years at GE, Symes took up the position of Group Treasurer at Speedcast, a remote communications provider operating in 40 countries to provide satellite communication systems and IT services to clients operating in remote locations in the maritime, energy, mining and cruise industries, as well as governments and NGOs.
Symes found that the new position presented both challenges and opportunities. In contrast to GE, Speedcast had “a group treasury team comprising two people – one of which was me. It meant that I had the opportunity to start the treasury function from scratch, setting up regional teams and building out the treasury infrastructure.”
At the time, the company was pursuing high growth through mergers and acquisitions. When the time came to refinance its debt facility, the company decided to pivot to the US debt market. “We ran the process to evaluate whether we should go down the path of doing term loans or bond issuances. Once we decided we were going to issue a Term Loan B, we ran the RFP process to choose which banks would help to anchor us in that.”
With the existing CFO having left the company, and the new one yet to start, Symes found herself working with the CEO and one other colleague to get the project off the ground. “I hadn’t done any debt financing before, so it was truly a baptism by fire,” says Symes. “It was such an amazing learning experience, and I’ve taken the knowledge I gained there to all my subsequent roles.”
When the company’s ownership changed, and the headquarters moved to the United States, Symes decided to remain in Asia. Moving from Hong Kong to Singapore, she took up the position of Group Treasurer at Vistra, a global corporate services company and fund administrator. In this role, her focus was to integrate the treasury functions for multiple businesses which had been acquired and centralise cash across more than 20 businesses by implementing a cash pooling structure. This enabled the group to undertake further mergers and acquisitions, which eventually led to its US$6.5bn merger with the Tricor Group in 2023.
Pastures green
Having helped to prepare Vistra for its eventual merger, Symes believed that the time was right to take on a new challenge. Armed with the knowledge and skills that she had acquired in three very different treasury functions, she decided to take on the responsibility of developing the APAC treasury of a young company operating in a relatively new industry and joined Fluence in January 2024.
Listed on the NASDAQ since 2021, Fluence is a global energy storage solutions provider that has been playing a large role in the transition to clean energy. Given that wind turbines and solar panels often produce electricity at times when demand for energy is low, the company has developed solutions for storing that electricity until such time as it is required.
Although still very young, the company has expanded significantly since its NASDAQ listing. “From a tactical point of view, it’s about navigating the capital and funding needs of a very high growth business,” says Symes. As well as the challenges, she observes that working for such a new company comes with some exciting opportunities: “It’s like starting with a clean slate. If this was a more established organisation, change would be much harder to navigate.”
The treasury division at GE was a well-oiled machine, with cash management specialists, hedging specialists and funding specialists and a sophisticated treasury infrastructure.
Symes believes that a key part of this change lies in harnessing opportunities to transform treasury, and as such she is looking forward to the prospect of automating manual processes wherever possible. As well as providing efficiency gains, she notes that digitisation can also be harnessed to access data in a coherent and structured way.
Alongside adopting a new ERP, the company has plans to implement a new treasury management system (TMS). “Treasury has to be data driven, and in order to do that we have to automate as much as possible,” Symes notes. “There is so much technology available, and yet when I speak to other treasury professionals, many of them still do their cash flow forecasting with spreadsheets.”
In addition to the efficiencies that can be gained through treasury transformation, she is looking closely at liquidity structures and how the company can better centralise cash through the new TMS. “Virtually every treasurer will say that market volatility is front and centre of mind,” she says. “The question is, how do we manage that in an increasingly challenging world, and put in place practices that can help us prepare for events that may be just around the corner?”
Managing risk
Naturally, risk management is an important area of focus. As Symes points out, “One of the key roles of a treasurer is to manage risk for the company – and that involves having clear and robust policies in place.” One major concern is the question of cybersecurity. Like many treasurers, Symes has previously encountered extremely sophisticated attempts to get treasury teams to make fraudulent payments.
Staying on top of new and emerging threats is an ongoing exercise. “Historically, you’d use callback as the mechanism to confirm a new vendor’s bank account details, or before making a large everyday payment,” Symes says. “To make sure that the payment is going to the right bank account, you would get an independent person to do the call back. But if those calls can be intercepted, we need then to think about how we can protect ourselves.”
The role of artificial intelligence in treasury has become a major talking point in the last couple of years. And where fraud risk is concerned, Symes argues that AI has much to offer in helping alert businesses to unusual payments.
“Some treasury management systems are already using AI to identify suspicious payments by analysing what has been done in the past,” she says. “They can highlight things that are unnoticed and small, but that cumulatively add up, to protect the company and help with risk management strategies.”
Business partners
In the past, treasury has often been seen as a siloed part of the company. But in recent years, Symes believes treasury departments have become steadily more integrated with other functions across the business. “I think a lot more CEOs and CFOs understand how important it is for treasury to have a seat at the table, and I see them increasingly partnering very closely with their treasurers,” she notes.
For Fluence, this includes playing a key role during contract negotiations with clients – a role in which treasury advises not only on financing, but also on topics such as FX rates and locking in contract values in US dollars. “When it comes to negotiating contracts, there are nuances,” Symes adds. “Clients may be asking for things that we have not seen in other markets.”
Symes also has a part to play in the company’s budget discussions, where topics that might otherwise be seen purely as treasury concerns are considered in light of the overall business strategy. “As much as we’re talking about revenue and margins, we are asking, ‘what does this mean for cash? How do we make sure that we’ve got the right liquidity? Have we got the right banking lines in place?’” Symes explains. “It’s a very holistic approach to the business. At the end of the day, most companies don’t fail because they run out of revenue. They fail because they run out of cash.”
Cash matters
As such, Symes argues that the focus on effective cash management has likewise intensified in recent years. “Cash management has tended to be something that just happens in the background,” she explains. “I think that’s really changing. More and more organisations are realising the importance of not only protecting the cash, but also making it work for them.”
With the interest rate environment of the last year making it easier for businesses to get relatively good returns on their cash, she believes that a shift to lower rates would prompt a re-examination of priorities. “As rates start to get cut globally, treasurers are going to be on the hunt for the best return. And although they might get a two- or three-year fixed deposit at a pretty healthy rate, that would be a relatively long tenor. The question is, would a company want to tie up its cash for that length of time?”
In her view, another important part of the treasurer’s role is to educate the various stakeholders of the business. “Just because something has been hedged doesn’t mean that there is no downside – it means that that downside has been limited and that the company might not be benefitting from any possible upsides.”
Symes believes that as treasury continues to evolve, it is increasingly being seen not just a cost centre, but rather as a department that can add value to the business. “Although it’s not our key function, treasury can definitely improve the profit and loss situation of a company,” she states. “With the right investment strategies in place, and with the best pricing from the banks, treasury can make money as well as save it.”
Last word
Having two young children means that most of Symes’ free time is taken up with her family. However, she enjoys learning new skills whenever she gets the chance and has recently learned how to play Mahjong, the Chinese tile-based game. And although she has yet to develop a real love for running, she is proud of the fact that she recently completed her first half marathon.
Reflecting on her career to date, she says that working in treasury creates an “incredibly transferable” skillset, which can apply to any business. “I’ve worked in four different cities, and four different industries,” she concludes. “Treasury is such a dynamic and varied function, and it gives you an opportunity to really understand and partner with the business.”
