Real and fake risk control – Treasurers and recruiters benefit and suffer

| 25-09-2018 | by  Pieter de Kiewit |

As owner of a small company I have been listening to people complaining about regulatory and compliance affairs for a long time. 2018 will be the year these affairs have a substantial impact on my business and now I can understand the complaints. Both treasurers, recruiters and, I expect, many others in our society, struggle finding the balance in correcting what goes wrong and the hassle of too many rules. Some simple examples: 

  • ING is punished hard for money laundering and I suspect just so. The rules are in place but not applied. My assumption is that target setting beats following the rules;
  • Some large corporates nowadays hire recruitment outsourcing parties that do the procurement of my services. One of them required me to inform them about the payrolling of my staff because: “in Bangladesh there is child labour and we want to prevent you make the same mistake”;
  • One of my clients is a subsidiary of an international conglomerate and decided to implement the services of a new cash management bank. The project has been on hold because the HQ of the conglomerate and the bank cannot agree upon the know your customer (KYC) regulations, much to frustration of all involved;
  • GDPR is implemented, also to control the power of large internet firms. Of course these regulations also apply to my business but did any of you read my new privacy statement or actually read cookie statements? Bureaucracy rules!

I think 99% of us know what is the right thing in 99% of the cases. This is what our parents taught us. That does not mean we will do the right thing. In the current situation, regulators want to solve issues by creating new rules. I am happy that applying the rules with consequences, as with ING, is being done increasingly. I think the structural solution does not lie in more rules.

Hopefully we can all start a dialogue about what is right and act upon it. Customers and clients, family members, colleagues, countries, teachers and students. Not blindly following the rules, but following them because we understand and agree. I am aware that this sounds might sound soft and is not possible in all situations. With many of our clients we cooperate successfully based upon a few bullet points in an email. That’s the way I like it.

Will you share your thoughts?

Pieter de Kiewit

 

 

Pieter de Kiewit
Owner Treasurer Search

 

 

 

What corporate treasury can learn from corporate insurance

15-06-2018 | Treasurer Search | TreasuryXL |

Last week Treasurer Search sent it’s monthly newsletter that included below article. Not all people in the market will think the same as the author, but we think it is definitely an interesting way of looking at our insurance colleagues.

 

One of the many benefits of being a recruiter is that every meeting is a lecture of an expert about his professional life and developments. An excellent way to learn and keep up-to-date. Every second week I try to transfer this knowledge to my colleagues in Team Treasurer Search and the risk topic often gets attention. I also want to share my observations about insurance and treasury with you.

First, perhaps a bit cynical, why is corporate insurance reporting to the group treasurer more often? The importance and professional level of insurance is increasing, this is also acknowledged by CFOs. To prevent their span of control becoming too big, they delegate the profession to legal, procurement and recently often to treasury. Many treasurers are not motivated by insurance tasks and ignore the overlap that exists. Traditionally the risk types “market risk” and “liquidity risk” create primary tasks for treasury departments that often motivate the candidates I meet. Recently counterparty or credit risk gets a bigger role, not only with financial services companies. My recent conversations with corporate insurance managers brought me new insights in how risk can be analysed and managed.

In previous blogs I wrote that “new school treasurers” distinguish themselves by better connecting with their business partners and provide understandable solutions that make sales, operations and finance happy. Insurance managers were already forced to talk with the business their whole life. If an insurance manager does not understand what his business partners do, he will not be able to make a proper assessment of the risk. And that does include all types of risk: staff getting sick, goods not being supplied, tornados, computer viruses, politicians starting embargos, etcetera. They are closer to enterprise risk managers than treasurers are. By now there are practical and scientific strategies to mitigate various risk types. Insurance managers know.

In my perception treasurers can learn from insurance how to connect to business partners and help them finding solutions for complex and diverse problems. Do you think me setting them on a pedestal is right or am I too positive?

If you want to find out more about Treasurer Search and their services visit their company profile on treasuryXL.