This is why corporate treasury is great – The laymen introduction to corporate treasury
| 09-01-2018 | Pieter de Kiewit |
My father was a civil engineer and would have liked one of his kids to follow in his footsteps. Regretfully for him we all went in different directions, me landing an engineering degree of the wrong type. What I did like to learn from my first business management professor was about creating bridges between various functional areas. That is what I have been doing as a recruiter for almost 25 years, the last 8 solely in corporate treasury. Why treasury?
All organisations, even the small ones, can benefit from good treasury. Only the bigger ones hired permanent experts. The main three areas, perhaps oversimplified, they focus on are:
- Money logistics: opening and closing bank accounts, doing (bulk) payments, forecast money coming in and going out;
- Managing (treasury) risk: understand and manage the implications of interest or currency fluctuations. If your manufacturing costs are in Euro and you sell in Dollars and the price of the Dollar drops, what to do? What to do if you have excess cash on your current account;
- Funding: where do you get your money for new or current business? Bank loans, equity, mortgage, leasing?
This does not sound sexy, does it? But do understand that during the crisis treasurers found solutions for companies how to survive. They found funding to pay salaries, helped sales finding creative funding solutions to make complex transactions achievable, helped prevent companies going belly-up due to currency exposures, forced banks to offer better solutions at a more acceptable price.
Treasurers manage huge amounts of money and operate very close to the CFO. They are involved in mergers & acquisitions, reorganisations and international expansion. They act in small numbers but have huge impact if they would stop doing their work. And the job type evolves continuously. Creating new treasury bridges to traditional job types like accounting, tax, sales helps all doing a better job. The academic world is showing increasing interest. In the Netherlands the post graduate education at the Vrije Universiteit is becoming more prominent in the treasury community. Corporate treasury is very dynamic!
What I love doing is helping CFO’s, HR, internal recruitment and senior treasury managers with their staffing questions. What qualifications and personality type matches best with your current and future business situation. If you only hire one treasurer per year, what do you need to know to choose the best candidate? I hope now you can understand my passion for creating bridges in treasury and recruitment.
I look forward to your thoughts to the above and further contact,
Pieter de Kiewit
[email protected] / +31 6 1111 9783
Pieter de Kiewit
Owner Treasurer Search
Having spent my working life in international finance, I have patiently listened to all the news about the Bitcoin over the last few years. During 2017 whilst the Bitcoin was on a spectacular price rise, my interest was awakened in this new phenomenon – is this the future? I attended seminars, read articles, learnt the difference between the Bitcoin and the Blockchain, searched and investigated via the web, and tried to form an opinion. These are my findings:
Such a stellar performance should mean that the trade volume has increased dramatically.
The daily volume in September 2017 when the price was about $4,000 was the same as the start of February 2016 when the price was about $400. I had to create this chart as all the data I could find related to the $ value of turnover – which was phenomenal – and not the actual number of Bitcoins traded. Normally, when an asset sees a huge increase in price, this goes together with a corresponding increase in turnover. Clearly this has not happened with Bitcoin – why?
Money Market outlook
where N is the notional of the contract, R is the fixed rate, r is the published -IBOR fixing rate and d is the decimalized day count fraction over which the value start and end dates of the -IBOR rate extend.
where vn is the discount factor of the payment date upon which the cash for difference is physically settled, which, in modern pricing theory, will be dependent upon which discount curve to apply based on the credit support annex (CSA) of the derivative contract.
Onderstaand een kort verslag van ons Treasury year-end meetup-event van eind 2017. 
During our stay in South Africa I was reading an article in Die Burger (newspaper for Afrikaners) where a spokesman of Cape town-based PWC gave his ideas on the recent rise of Bitcoin and the future of Blokketting (Afrikaans for Blockchain). This inspired me to write this blog. Since I started writing about blockchain I categorically refused to use the term Bitcoin. But this time it is different. As Bitcoin nears the end of a record-breaking year, it seems an appropriate time to dive into this – by many traditional players said – over-hyped thing. Others describe this fascination for Bitcoins as a “speculative mania”. The broader public has discovered this phenomenon. I will not say it is (already) the end of the rise in Bitcoins or other crypto currencies. But let me be clear: Bitcoin is a lot not!
With the steady rise of Fintech within the finance industry some people are already calling for the demise of banks as the historical financial partner of choice for corporates. Certainly, Fintech is showing itself to be very dynamic, offering many new products and solutions, and being a lot swifter than the banks. Banks seem to have grown too big and complacent, are being weighed down by new rules and regulations, are less prominent in the field of funding for corporates, and possibly have lost their focus on what used to be core businesses. But let us examine the relationship between bank and client.
De 
