Asha Kumari, Deputy Treasurer at Save the Children International, is Treasury Today’s 2024 Woman of the Year EMEA Highly Commended Winner. This is a testament to the impact that she is having in elevating treasury and being committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Her role at Save the Children International is an important and challenging one; the organisation needs to respond swiftly to crises and ensure donations get to where they are needed – sometimes to countries that have challenges with the financial infrastructure. Also, multiple currencies need to be managed and treasury needs to stay on top of the latest sanctions and know-your-customer requirements.

As Roland Pearce, Relationship Director, Public Sector at Barclays – who has worked with Kumari as a banking partner – comments: “Save the Children operates in some of the most challenging places in the world to serve children in desperate need. For a treasurer, this requires deep knowledge of local operating environments, bank norms, currencies and complexity in managing counterparty, credit, liquidity and currency risk. It also requires a detailed understanding of financial crime and sanctions legislation and the need to manage a significant number of stakeholders.”

Committed to DEI

There is much to manage in Asha’s day job, and she has managed to bring many improvements to the treasury operations. This includes implementing process improvements across payments, foreign exchange trading and reporting, and digitising and automating treasury operational activity. Whilst managing this, Asha has also had a keen focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. This extends to women’s empowerment and ensuring that those around her continue to develop and have opportunities in their careers.

Asha has many women on her team, and she encourages them to continuously learn. This is done by expanding their network and attending professional events which also enhance their knowledge around diversity and inclusion. Asha is attuned to the needs of those around her, and many who have worked with her highlight how she is an active listener with high levels of emotional intelligence who can quickly grasp what her team members need.

Turning to the non-profit sector

Asha has developed her skills over a career that comprises ten years in the banking sector and five years in the corporate sector. She always wanted to work in financial services and when she was growing up in the Middle East, she jumped at the opportunity to manage the money for voluntary organisations. Her first professional role came when she joined Goldman Sachs as a treasury business analyst. She soon got a taste for making improvements to treasury and became part of an innovative project to improve straight through processing on reconciliations. This was just one of many projects she was involved in, and she was soon promoted and given treasury risk oversight of the treasury operations in Zurich and Moscow.

During this time working at a financial institution, she was also keen to have a social impact and volunteered her time to help those less fortunate than herself. After a career break, she joined Save the Children International in 2018, a shift in her career that took her into the non-profit sector where she is having a positive impact on the lives of vulnerable children.

Elevating treasury services

As well as ensuring that money flows to where it needs to, to help those in need, Asha has also worked hard to elevate the treasury function. She has achieved many things during her time at Save the Children International, including the treasury’s implementation of straight through processing from deal to payment. She has also implemented auto trading on the organisation’s multi-bank dealing platform and linked this platform to the treasury management system (TMS). She has led her team to increase visibility of the organisation’s bank accounts – even in the most challenging of countries under her remit – and also implemented a bank statement transformation tool. Not one to rest on her laurels, Asha has implemented an innovative global centralised payments system for 33 country offices, as well as implementing payment screening for payments going through the TMS, as well as digitalising know your customer (KYC) processes.

It requires strong treasury technical skills to pull this off. Asha’s colleagues rate her high levels of intelligence and technical skills and also how she can combine this with empathy. Those who have worked with her say she has the ability to understand her colleagues across all backgrounds and work with very diverse and geographically distant team members. She always advocates for treasury improvement, risk and control. Asha has consistently delivered best in class treasury operations, ensuring funding reaches the extraordinarily challenging locations that her organisation’s treasury operates in.

As someone who has worked closely with Kumari, and seen her hard and soft skills in action, Roland at Barclays comments: “I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Asha over the years and have always been impressed with her knowledge, understanding and tenaciousness to find a solution balancing multiple objectives and stakeholders in challenging operating environments. I highly value my relationship with Asha as one of my go-to contacts for insight, knowledge and practical solutions who is always willing to help others.”