“Treasury is one of those professions where there’s quite a broad remit,” observes Kelvin Chia, Director of Treasury and Corporate Finance at NetLink NBN Trust. “Depending on your previous experiences and expertise, you get to bring something different to the role, the company that you work for, and the teams that you build along the way.”
What Chia brings to the role is a wealth of experience in the banking sector, as well as corporate experience spanning different industries. After graduating from the University of Sydney with a degree in accounting and finance, he initially joined Macquarie Group in Singapore, advising energy and mining companies on M&A, joint venture, IPO and financing transactions.
While the role provided an excellent opportunity to gain knowledge and experience, Chia already knew that he did not want to confine his career to investment banking. He took his first step into the corporate world by joining Senoko Energy, a client of Macquarie and one of Singapore’s leading power generation companies. “This was my initial brush with treasury, because I went to help them with their post-acquisition refinancing and restructuring,” he explains.
After a couple of years, Chia returned to investment banking with a move to Scotia Waterous, a global leader in oil and gas M&A advisory, where he helped energy companies optimise their overseas investment portfolios. He also had a stint working for public transport operator Tower Transit Group, where he was involved with business development and commercial.
In 2018 he joined his current employer, NetLink NBN Trust, which designs, builds, owns and operates the fibre network infrastructure of Singapore’s nationwide broadband network. As Chia explains, the company manages the network for all the various telcos in the industry, “it’s largely a B2B and infrastructure business model where what is good for Singapore is also good for business.”
Building the treasury function
As Director, Treasury and Corporate Finance, Chia is responsible for leading the company’s financing, corporate development and financial planning activities. When Chia first joined the organisation, the treasury function hadn’t yet been built up – so for his first couple of years on the job, Chia’s main focus was on developing the function from a basic level, putting in place technology platforms for financial planning, and optimising work streams to improve efficiency.
“This enabled the different teams to reduce their manual processes by quite a bit, while automating the consolidation of budgets and forecasts so that we could develop our financing strategies and capital optimisation plans,” he recalls. “Being able to build that together with the team was very satisfying.”
Today, Chia’s role includes leading a lean team of managers who work closely with other departments across the organisation. “I have one manager focused on business partnering and corporate development, and another that helps look after the management of daily treasury activities, such as managing the bank mandates and the business as usual (BAU) scope of treasury,” he says.
“We also have a manager that looks after all the various finance and treasury technology platforms that we utilise, as well as helping the finance team digitalise and optimise business processes.”
Seeing through the impact
Looking back at his career so far, Chia reflects that his experiences so far have broadly fallen into two distinct phases: “The first ten years I wanted to spend mostly in investment banking to gain broad experience, and from there, I wanted to spend more time in corporate type roles where I could have more agency.”
He reflects that corporate roles provide an opportunity to “delve deeper into the business model, as well as having more of an impact. You’re able to see through the consequence of the decisions you make.”
Nevertheless, Chia’s approach continues to be informed by his previous roles. “For example, we also look after the corporate development side of the business – so that leverages some of my past M&A experience, as well as capital raising experiences,” he explains.
And while infrastructure has been a common theme throughout his career, Chia highlights the value of working across different verticals. “I started with energy, and then transport, before moving to telecommunications in my current role,” he says. “So I’ve been able to gain a depth of experience in each of these areas – there are some similarities, but there are also a lot of intricacies to each of these sectors.”
Looking forward
Turning to the year ahead, Chia says one particular focus will be on looking at how ESG principles can affect financing decisions. “We’ve already moved into sustainability-linked loans, but we haven’t quite yet got into green bonds,” he says. “So it’s an area that we’re still looking into.”
This includes looking at which targets align with corporate goals as well as with the ESG environment, Chia notes. “A lot of these requirements are still moving around at this stage, so we’re keeping an eye on it, but I’m not sure where we’ll end up at the moment.”
Beyond ESG, other key areas of focus include AI and other emerging technologies. With that in mind, Chia says his team is keeping abreast of developments in areas such as data frameworks as well as analytics, “and seeing how we can apply these into our day-to-day activities, as well as it being the confluence of where all that data goes into and how it’s used across the organisation.”
In closing, Chia observes that treasury is a highly influential function within the organisation. “It cuts through many different functions, as well as including managing the cash flow of the organisation, which is key to thinking about budgeting decisions as well as the future direction of the company.
“I would say it’s an exciting area for people to explore when they are thinking about their careers – and it can lead to many different paths beyond treasury as well.”
