The Future Treasury & Finance Leaders Forum gathers Adam Smith Award winners and industry practitioners together to foster peer connection, explore best practice and share career journeys. This year, the gatherings take place in five locations across the globe, and last month it was the turn of our acclaimed treasury and finance community in Hong Kong to come together, including event sponsor HSBC.
The day was shaped around two inspiring panel discussions as well as group discussions and the opportunity for skills development. The first panel, on best practice and key topics in finance, included FX management, the trend in stablecoins and the role of finance teams integrating sustainability. The afternoon session focused on personal and career development and was hosted by Sophie Jackson, CEO at Treasury Today.
With infectious energy, Honnus Cheung, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Office at On-us Group kicked off the day by sharing her own inspiring career journey. Recounting how she started out in professional life at PwC, followed by long stints in finance and treasury at Yahoo and then Travelzoo after which she went on to found her own business and also being an Independent Non-Executive Director and Audit Committee for listed companies in Hong Kong, Honnus set the tone for one of the day’s resounding themes: the importance of a growth mindset that embraces challenges, constructive feedback and skills development.
Next Honnus was joined by Hobson Chan, Treasurer, CNOOC Shell Petrochemicals Co Ltd, Vivian Peng, Vice President and Asia Treasurer at Flex Ltd and Violet Yung, Director, CIB Sales, Hong Kong, Global Payments Solutions at HSBC.
Violet, who was born and raised in Australia but moved to Hong Kong to launch her career, also started out at PwC. She joined Tesco as Regional Treasurer, Asia, before taking up a role at HSBC back in 2010. Over the years she has partnered with many Adam Smith Award Asia winners, and she observed that all the bank’s winning clients are united by a preparedness to make changes within their treasury and finance operations. Change requires patience and is always a product of the wider corporate team working together, she said.
“Winning is an endorsement of all those changes,” she said.
Vivian was certainly a change agent. She joined electronic manufacturing group Flex in 2005 and won Top treasury team/Top treasurer and Woman of the Year Asia back in 2015 in recognition, amongst other things, she was also instrumental in setting up one of the most sophisticated in-house banking plus cross border sweeping structures in China at that time. Through the years, she kept implementing innovation solutions in cash, FX and working capital to make the change and won a series awards through the years. She observed how technology is driving treasury transformation in Asia and shared how in the latest evolution of corporate treasury at Flex.
“We are trying new things,” she said, in a nod to the award-winner mentality Violet described.
Hobson took up the conversation next, detailing his team’s management of a standalone treasury function at the joint venture between Shell and CNOOC, based in Huizhou, China. The venture recently won the Best Funding Solution award in 2024 for a landmark financing deal. Hobson discussed how the capital-intensive company successfully raised funds for a US$5.5bn long-term loan facility, despite facing a deteriorating credit rating due to consecutive losses in an industry downturn that began in 2022. This situation heightened lender concerns regarding the joint venture’s ability to maintain competitiveness and profitability in an oversupplied market.
Following this expansion, the joint venture will become one of the largest petrochemical plants in China. Hobson emphasised that a key investment rationale lies in the joint venture’s ability to harness the strengths of its parent companies – Shell’s openness to exploring optimal solutions and CNOOC’s execution discipline. He shared that the venture’s proximity to the market, along with its best-in-class safety and reliability record, has significantly enhanced foreign shareholder confidence in further capacity expansion. The funding strategy also required a careful balance between shareholder and lender demands. “Securing a mega-sized financing is challenging, but the outcome has been fantastic,” he remarked, crediting much of the success to a robust financing strategy, support from parent company treasury experts, and the dedication of the joint venture treasury team.
Successful execution, reflected Violet, requires an open mind and an acceptance that not every decision will come to fruition. Collaboration and communication are also essential facets of best practice. “As a treasurer, there are many parties you need to work with and best practice involves open communication and collaborative decision making. Being a treasurer involves acting as a bridge to get others to buy into your solution and as a bank, we help equip treasurers with that ability to communicate.”
The importance of execution was also picked up by Vivian. She said that good ideas and strategies flounder without execution. But it requires leadership to achieve alignment, and this in turn requires trust and persuasion to get people to lean-in to the idea of change. “The culture of the company is critical,” she reflected. “You also need a team that is willing to pursue success.” She urged attendees seeking change to ensure they plan every step of the process. “You need to know in your mind what implementation looks like – dig into every detail.”
Later, the conversation reflected on the role of technology supporting best practice. At CSPC this has manifest in integrating automatic supply chain financing software that allows suppliers to access early payment with the click of a few buttons. “We don’t want to earn interest from our suppliers because our cost of funding is very low, we just want to help them, but a lot of companies in China charge an expensive rate to their suppliers,” said Hobson.
Similarly, Violet noted that the adoption of APIs has transformed the banking industry, resulting in less touch points, simplifying transactions and taking the noise out of processes as well as encouraging accuracy. Next, panellists discussed how stablecoins will soon create even smoother payments with less touchpoints, making life easier for treasurers, reflecting how stablecoins could provide treasurers with the ability to settle and clear transactions in real time, reduce the requirement to hedge assets and could also change trade flows in Latin America and Africa because the digital currency would reduce the need to hold US dollars.
Still, amidst the prevalence of so much new technology, Vivian said it was important for treasurers to remain focused on what function they need most. No matter how fancy the tech, treasurers always need to be able to apply it to their business, remembering all the time treasury’s function as a strategic business partner focused on minimising risk and managing the liquidity structure.
Treasury trends ahead
Panellists reflected on how the economic environment is influencing key trends in finance and treasury. For example, Hobson noted how the Chinese government is actively encouraging foreign investment. Attendees also discussed the spike in IPOs in Hong Kong, particularly from Chinese companies, remarking how the flow of capital into financial markets and jobs in the city is beginning. Although challenges in Hong Kong’s economy remain, particularly in real estate, the city is developing tech expertise.
Vivian shared how FX management at Flex has evolved at the company which conducts business in 33 different countries and strategy has evolved to push nature hedge to minimise the FX exposure. Flex has built its in-house FX management system integrated with electronics trading platforms that connects to different banking partners, which enables efficient trading to choose the best rate. The system covers automation from exposure capture to dealing with proposal confirmation and reconciliation, and furthermore analysing variances and hedging results.
When the conversation moved to table discussions, attendees discussed emerging trends around centralisation in the region as more corporates seek to locate their treasury function in one location. In another table discussion, one attendee shared how her department had improved cross border settlement with an RMB pooling strategy.
Professional development
Later the conversation turned to professional development in a second panel session chaired by Sophie. Highly Commended Woman of the Year 2024, Marie Hong, Head of Treasury, Asia, at Manulife, where she oversees 12 APAC markets across 55 entities and manages a multi-billion portfolio of cash and short-term investments, was joined by fellow award winner Chris Tang, Group Treasurer, Haier Group, Highly Commended Winner Corporate Treasurer of the Year 2024, to kick off the conversation.
Chris began by sharing his career journey that started in banking, first at HSBC and then Deutsche Bank, before he moved into corporate treasury. “Working for a Chinese MNC is much more complex on the inside than from a bank’s view,” he reflected. For example, the company, with local presences in more than 60 countries including APAC, Europe, USA and MENA, faced new challenges in the era of many uncertainties after the pandemic. He said that leading treasury at the group required “thinking like a CEO” to understand the technology and what it means for business operations.
He emphasised the importance of banking partners supporting how companies integrate technology and explained how his role involves stepping outside his role to lead cross functional conversations with other parts of the business.
Marie reflected how her career journey has included embracing different cultures. She moved from her native Korea to New York where she landed her first role in corporate treasury, instantly loving it. In 2011 she moved to Hong Kong. “Treasury is not like traditional accounting or finance because it has an operational aspect, and international treasury also involves working across different cultures,” she said.
She also reflected on the importance of taking career risks because it helps foster resilience and flexibility. Like when she moved from New York to Hong Kong without a job offer, arriving with two suitcases and the contact of a head-hunter, ready to take her chances. It wasn’t long before she secured a role at Cigna International, after which she joined Standard Chartered for two years, followed by three years at MetLife, before taking a job at Manulife.
“Working in the sell side really helped me understand various banking solutions and apply right solutions to the corporate clients,” she said. She also reflected how working in a bank has helped her in managing banking relationship effectively when she returned to the buy side.
At Haier, Chris has played a key role integrating sustainability, overseeing the first Hybrid Sustainable Finance Framework in Asia Pacific home appliances industry, and closing the first Sustainability-Linked Financing in Asia Pacific in July 2024. Although he noted that sustainability is not closely associated with treasury, he urged attendees to get involved in ESG. The lower cost of financing is not the most important incentive, as Haier is already able to tap very competitive pricing, he argued making ESG a treasury and finance issue had won important recognition from the industry, including with rating agencies, customers, suppliers and investors.
Leadership in action
Next the conversation turned to leadership, begun by Marie who shared revealing insights into her journey to becoming a leader at Manulife.
“Ownership is very important because people have a share in something and begin to think about what they can do better to make a better team.”
Other strategies include customised feedback (good and bad) to individuals in whose work she is always interested. She currently oversees a team of 20 but reflected that one of the challenges in the future will be keeping the personal touch if her team grows.
For now her focus is on continued evolving and ensuring treasury continues to actively adopt new technology and connect with bankers and fintechs in the region.
In a highly personal story, Chris shared how missing his first-choice university inspired him to gain academic qualifications from Tsinghua University and INSEAD, winning a scholarship to study a Dual Degree, Executive MBA. His achievement is all the more impressive because he combined studying with a frantically busy time in at Haier, handling six cross border acquisitions requests within a short period while overseeing multiple complicated regional cash management and trade finance RFPs at the same time, with very limited resources at hand.
