13-10-2022 | treasuryXL | Refinitiv | LinkedIn |
How can data and analytics help banks meet the FRTB Standardised Approach deadline? This blog by Refinitiv helps you understand everything you need on the Standardisded Approach.
12-10-2022 treasuryXL | Pieter de Kiewit | Treasurer Search LinkedIn
Throughout covid times the organizers of Eurofinance remained active and were able to create interesting web-based events. Still, general opinion in last weeks’ event in Vienna was that there is nothing like the live thing. The programme was packed with interesting content, the event floor with interesting companies and visitors.
By Pieter de Kiewit
Communication leading up to the event and the venue, the Wien Messe, radiated experience in events of this size. The numbers of representatives and visitors were impressive. Luckily, the venue is big enough to not nerve the visitors who have to get used to large crowds again.
The programme was spread out over the very large room for plenary meetings, five large rooms for parallel session with presentations & panel discussions and “open rooms” on the trade floor. Key note speakers like Guy Verhofstadt and Goran Carstedt were able to enthuse with stories beyond the scope of treasury, others covered topics about treasury technology, both practical & visionary and treasury organization, for example about my personal favourite, the treasury labour market.
For many, the trade floor was easily as interesting as the content. Visitors gained market information, for example preparing for a TMS selection and implementation. Also reuniting with old treasury friends and getting to know new ones, was relatively easy during well catered breaks. Some of the visitors created new legends during the Thursday night afterparty that is not covered by this looking-back-blog.
As treasuryXL ambassador I visited the various partners of the platform present and received positive feedback on the event. So Cobase, Kyriba, TIS, CashForce, Nomentia, Refinitiv and CashAnalytics, we hope to see you again in Barcelona again and welcome a number of new ones.
Hasta luego,
Thanks for reading!
12-10-2022 | treasuryXL | GTreasury | LinkedIn |
Helen Kane, the Risk and Exposure Fellow at Hedge Trackers (a GTreasury company) recently sat down with The Global Treasurer to discuss how treasury teams can approach yet more global uncertainty.
Kane, along with the global head of corporate cash management at Deutsche Bank, lends expertise to the current state of deglobalization, the supply chain, and more—as they relate to treasury operations.
“Treasury strategies and skill sets that drove success in the 1990s were different from those in the 2020s. My advice for all treasurers is to be open to change, be open to learning, and be ready to flex, all while maintaining those historical controls and implementing new ones to safeguard your assets,” says Kane.
11-10-2022 | treasuryXL | LinkedIn |
Speaking about a rockstar within recruitment for treasury you think about Haia. She started working for Treasurer Search as a Recruitment Consultant at the beginning of this year and celebrated many successes with the team since then.
Haia is a down-to-earth, spontaneous and proactive human being with a hilarious sense of humor! You will be very lucky to work with her as someone who is searching for a next treasury adventure or if your company is in need of a treasurer.
We wanted to know Haia a bit more and we asked her the following questions. Happy reading!
I’m a recruitment consultant at Treasurer Search, so I’m mainly responsible for assignments from our clients to hire treasury professionals (from A to Z), and here we’re talking about Juniors up to executive level assignments. About my background, I have a Bachelor in Sociology and a high Technical Diploma in Management. I started in recruitment since 2016 doing some internships, and officially started as a recruitment assistant at a medical centre, then a company in Dubai where I made my way to the upper level and I left as a Recruitment manager. I moved to the NL and started at Treasurer Search in Feb, 2022.
Well-connected / Transparent / Professional
They will be working with Recruiters who are experienced in both recruitment and treasury, so we know who a good cash manager or group treasurer is. At the same time, Treasurer Search provides a transparent recruitment process, no surprises or hidden info, alongside the smoothness in communication.
In today’s world, everyone can learn whatever they want in no time, the resources available are at a wide range. For me it was mainly reading, attending online courses, and of course, learning from the experts in this field.
Attending as much helpful webinars as possible. Also following the stars in both industries is very helpful because you need to stay up-to-date, don’t you?
Being a treasury recruiter widen your aspects of how the financial management works. You forget about traditional roles in business finance and you learn treasury is way more than the basics that the public knows.
When I started at Treasurer Search I was new to the country, and the treasury. This is where my colleagues played the big part and helped a lot through time. Now I’ve integrated well in the society as well as learned a lot about treasury. Mainly, I’m proud of my colleagues who played an essential part in this big movement for me.
Thanks for reading!
Kendra Keydeniers
Director Community & Partners, treasuryXL
06-10-2022 | IQPC Exchange | treasuryXL | LinkedIn |
At the 10th annual Group Treasurers’ Exchange, 60 Group Treasurers, Directors and Heads of Treasury will be coming to Berlin on November 15-16 to discuss how innovating the treasury function will mitigate risk and bolster profitability.
Designed for Group Treasurers, by Group Treasurers, the GT Exchange Europe 2022 offers a unique and exclusive format specifically tailored to unpack the issues that are most relevant. This invitation-only meeting is exclusively attended by a select group of pre-qualified senior treasurers responsible for creating an efficient and innovative treasury function. Attendees will benefit from an experience packed with networking with likeminded peers navigating the same industry challenges in a relaxed, consultative, and friendly environment.
The Exchange is attended by senior strategic leaders and decision-makers from major Treasury departments across Europe. Every attendee is personally invited and registered to ensure the right level of seniority and relevance to the event’s key themes.
Group Treasurers, Directors and Heads of Treasury can capitalise on a closed-door event with no press, full of one-to-one meetings, intimate breakout sessions, think tanks, roundtable discussions & more!
This innovative two-day event will cover key challenges facing an innovative treasury function, with expert speakers attending from a variety of top companies, including:
If you’re a qualifying attendee and want to attend the #GTEU Exchange, request an invitation here
03-10-2022 | treasuryXL | Kyriba | LinkedIn |
Companies of all sizes and industries with FX exposures are being impacted by global trade complexities. New dynamics are putting CFOs and treasurers’ FX strategies and their ability to explain results to the test. Automating an FX management program provides numerous advantages. Diminishing the need for manual involvement frees corporate risk, treasury, finance, and accounting teams from sourcing information manually from multiple systems, compiling and uploading it into spreadsheets and finally attempting to put all of this into a management report that is timely.
By Brian Blihovde
Senior Director, Product Marketing
Companies of all sizes and industries with foreign currency exposures are being impacted by a number of global trade complexities. For many, supply chain disruptions, interest rate, and price index increases are taking a toll on profitability. For many others, the impact from increased foreign currency headwinds is becoming the glaring reality unveiling weaknesses in FX risk management programs. CFOs are having a more challenging time predicting income statement impacts in both directions: favorable and adverse; neither direction is good, particularly for publicly traded enterprises. New dynamics are putting CFOs and treasurers’ FX strategies and the ability to explain results, to the test. Using leading practices supported by leading solutions helps CFOs and finance leaders overcome these challenges of reliance upon manual, spreadsheet-based workflows.
Whether your organization is starting, advancing, or reassessing your individual FX risk programs, there are levels of benefits, value and success metrics tied to how exposed and how uncertain your levels of fx risk management are. For instance, are you able to identify exposures, aggregate and categorize them? Are those balances generated from automated journal entries or is there a manual component? Across your systems, how well are market exchange rates used and applied across the ERP, GL, procurement, billing, or FP&A modules? How often? Finally, and probably one of the most overlooked attributes, how long does it take and the number of staff who participate in attempting to gain access to even a partial picture of your FX risk? How efficient is the draw of FX data? Ultimately much effort is put into converting that data into information and what do the lags in the timeliness of the information you, as CFO are using to make decisions? The answer lies in a company’s ability to invest in technology and process transformation that can stem from that investment.
Diminishing the need for manual involvement or onerous workarounds, frees corporate risk, treasury, finance and accounting teams from sourcing information manually from multiple systems, compiling and uploading into spreadsheets and finally attempting to put all of this into a management report that is timely. The giving them more time to analyze information, track exposure trends and proactively seek out other opportunities to eliminate risk. Ultimately, automation transforms how treasury professionals are perceived within an organization, allowing them to be seen as a key resource in strategic planning. The implementation of an FX management program provides numerous advantages, but the three high-level areas for the entire finance organization and business divisions exist:
The use of technology does not merely indicate that the application of technology will result in system integration and process automation. Yes, this is one of the starting blocks of taking good processes and creating time-saving opportunities to generate better decision-making with cost-savings optimization. One focus of FX Hedge Management optimization will involve operational cost savings, but another focus should be on taking more of a role in assessing overall strategic success of your hedging through currency pair correlated VaR analyses and scenario analyses. Having more analytical power from technology automation can speed access to better information on your overall cost of hedging foreign currency risk.
When evaluating your FX management programs, organizations should consider which of the following aspects of their FX workflow requires better efficiency and effectiveness:
Technology solutions should undergo assessment for various capabilities that are part of leading analytical aspects of the FX Risk program. For instance, portfolio VaR analyses can help companies create portfolio views or dive into targeted gross/net exposures while considering the cost of a hedge across specific currency pairs, portfolios. Automation for running simulations helps determine top hedging scenarios that your risk managers can analyze to determine what currency pairs to hedge and what the resulting net exposure and portfolio value at risk will be. Access to automated dashboards and FX business intelligence gives your treasury and finance leaders the ability to Identify strategies to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of your exposure management and hedging programs across specific parameters and filters. If you cannot choose various exposures, legal entity slices, or currency selections, you are not optimally running an automated or efficient FX program. Finally, FX trade desk workflow automation and confirmation capabilities for the back-office is often under-estimated as entering and executing FX trades is part of operational or physical workflows attributed to the program. However, the implications to generating entries, integration to trading or confirmation platforms makes this an integral part of FX Risk processes.
The goal is the create a plan and roadmap to optimize and transform the way your finance organization collects, analyzes, aggregates, and mitigates risk from foreign currency exposures. One suggested approach is to work with FX Advisors to help you understand where you are and how to get there. As always, having a plan, success measures tied back to value drivers helps programs succeed.
| FX Improvement Steps | Objectives, Guidance | |
1. |
Identify Systems, Sources of Exposures |
Often, there are a wide array and extensive network of foreign currency denominated transactions; and extremely unlikely to be creating offsets that could qualify as natural hedges. The inventory of systems in an extensive matrix is a very good starting point. |
2. |
Assess Integrity of your FX data, GL accounts, & source postings |
Once the system landscape is understood, how well are the controls on your ERPs, ancillary systems and manual transactions coming from sub-ledgers? Are your financial statements subject to shifts from erroneous transactional impacts? |
3. |
Select and deploy technology targeting automation |
Consolidating technology platforms into one risk management platform, allows finance organizations to save significant, material cost amounts and increase profitability from merely being accurate in their hedging activities. Fully automating your FX management program with technology, which entails modernizing data collection, exposure consolidation, calculation and analysis, and hedging recommendations, ensures an organization is operating in step with current FX best practices. |
4. |
Target a full, end to end solution |
Your technology solution should provide for:
|
5. |
Customizable, Flexible Business Intelligence |
Reporting and dashboards create relevant and valued analytics at your fingertips with real-time speed and automation. |
Kyriba’s FX Advisory Services professionals give you leading practice advice and guidance in identifying, assessing, measuring, and implementing positive FX Risk Management results across your people, processes and systems. Learn how to improve and transform your FX Risk Management profile into more predictable and effective hedging results
Learn more about Kyriba’s leading FX Risk Management solution and our FX Advisory Team today. Reach out to our team of FX Risk Management professionals at: [email protected]
29-09-2022 treasuryXL | Treasurer Search | LinkedIn
Are you thinking about how you can shape your treasury career and in need for inspiration? There are plenty of education opportunities, but in what education will you invest?
You are invited to join our next Live Session. Registration is Now Open for:
𝐌𝐲 𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 & 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐫 𝐄𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐝
There is no standard career path for treasurers but one can learn from the choices and developments of the successful ones.
In this webinar two graduated Register Treasurers will share their stories:
They will tell you about how they moved between various stations and will pay special attention to the added value of their post academic degree: The Treasury Management and Corporate Finance programme (RT Programme) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam).
Everyone is welcome to this webinar. This webinar is extra relevant for those who consider joining the RT programme.
🌟Moderator: Pieter de Kiewit of Treasurer Search
🌟Duration: 45 minutes
We can’t wait to welcome you next week!
Best regards,
Kendra Keydeniers
Director, Community & Partners
22-09-2022 | Harry Mills | treasuryXL | LinkedIn
Also known as pre-transaction risk, pricing risk occurs between a transaction being priced and agreed upon. It materialises when exchange rates change after a quote has been delivered, either impacting the sales margin or incurring a re-price. treasuryXL expert Harry Mills, founder & CEO of CEO Oku Markets, will explain to us what Pricing Risk is all about, and how to deal with it.
By Harry Mills
Businesses experience pricing risk to a greater or lesser extent depending on the nature of their business, their marketplace, and their sales and purchasing cycles. We find it helpful to consider the following initial points when assessing pricing risk:
A transaction is “FX-denominated” when it is in a currency other than the firm’s functional currency. An example is a UK business providing a quote to an Irish business for an export sale denominated in euros (instead of GBP).
You’ll likely have an intuitive idea of the level of influence that fluctuations in FX rates have on your transactions, but consider a UK company that designs and builds high-end bespoke summer houses (why not?):
“Businesses should understand the precise impact of currency fluctuations on their costs and/or revenues to determine their FX sensitivity, especially concerning pricing risk”
Harry Mills, Founder & CEO Oku Markets
Getting to grips with pricing risk can be fairly straightforward for FX-denominated transactions with a straight-through and linear FX impact on the price, but most businesses have a more complex setup.
Many businesses are converting from a just-in-time to a just-in-case stock strategy. which can bring complexity and may add to pricing risk. It’s our view, here at Oku Markets, that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for currency management, so here’s a few areas to think about:
Pricing risk can impact procurement and sales, although we mostly think about the pricing that we are delivering. What about the pricing we receive, as customers? It’s not uncommon for Chinese exporters to add a large buffer to their prices to factor in fluctuations and depreciation in the USDCNY exchange rate. Read more about China and the yuan.
So it’s worth considering and asking your suppliers and international partners about how they manage FX – is there an opportunity for increased transparency and better terms by tackling the problem together?
It might be helpful to visualise the lifecycle of a transaction to identify when currency risk occurs. Again, there is no one-size template for this – every business’ FX Risk Map will look a little different, but here’s a basic setup to get started with:
Three ways you can reduce pricing risk and deliver more consistent results are:
The most appropriate route or combination of mitigating actions is unique to each business. An online travel company delivering live holiday prices will require higher frequency updates to FX rates and a tighter quote expiry date and FX buffer when compared to a company providing quotes for custom-designed summer houses.
When it comes to an FX buffer, we suggest considering the volatility of the currency pair and adjusting for the relevant quote period.
Quantifying currency exposure requires thought and specialist skills and expertise. Most FX brokers lack the capabilities to do this properly, resorting instead to emotionally-charged deal-making which can result in poor outcomes for clients.
We’re proud to work transparently with our clients, and we work hard to break the asymmetry of knowledge and information in the FX market.
You can contact us for a review of your currency processes and for our guidance and suggestions at [email protected] or 0203 838 0250.
Thanks for reading 👋
Harry Mills
Founder at Oku Markets
Managing Business FX Risk
19-09-2022 treasuryXL | Pieter de Kiewit | Treasurer Search LinkedIn
As treasury recruiters, we should know enough about corporate treasury to do intakes and screen candidates. Also, we should know the latest about what’s happening in the field of recruitment and so we read the publications of Geert-Jan Waasdorp of The Intelligence Group. I would like to share his latest, very interesting article and build the treasury connection.
By Pieter de Kiewit
I left a link if you want to read the full article but this is roughly what he says. There is a huge growth in people working since before covid. In parallel, there is a huge decline in active applicants. This pressure in the labour market is not evenly distributed among all employers. The ones that can find new employees can do so because of a strong employer brand and increased investments in own or external recruitment. Also, they are willing to decide quick and offer a better package.
So what does this mean if we project these findings on the corporate treasury labour market? My personal observation is that treasury staff is, on average, less driven by the company brand and more by the job content than candidates from other job types. We learned this working for clients like Tesla and Nike. Employer branding specifically towards treasurers would also be hard, I cannot envision a corporate recruiter promoting his manufacturing company at Eurofinance.
The obvious low-hanging fruit is that the hiring manager, already at the start of the process, has to organise and choose a mindset in the following: being able to decide quickly, from fewer candidates than before, and offering more than the old standard. Even highly skilled recruiters sometimes underestimate these aspects over time.
The judgement if the internal recruitment team is equipped to tackle the search or whether an external one should do the job – we, Treasurer Search – I will not elaborate on here. What I do want to mention is another obvious source that can be opened. For some of us that are considered a paradigm shift: bringing treasury talent in from abroad, from within the EU or even sponsoring a work permit. I am aware that some of us consider this topic highly political. What I can tell, both from our own organisation, as well as from successful placements with our clients, that this can be a very successful solution. In the Dutch labour market already the majority of candidates placed by us is non-Dutch. This is not a plea to open the borders and not be critical. Regretfully we have examples where this solution did not lead to success as coming to The Netherlands can be hard for the new employee. But also locally found candidates can fail in their new job.
My conclusion is that indeed, the world is different, as is the labour market. And given current demographic developments I do not expect a shift back. Luckily there are solutions but we will have to accept the consequences and cannot lean back. Those that do will shrink and go extinct.
Good luck in your search,
Pieter
Thanks for reading!
14-09-2022 | treasuryXL | EuroFinance| LinkedIn
The EuroFinance will finally open their doors in exactly one week. After two years everyone can meet in person again at the largest and most senior gathering of corporate treasurers worldwide. 
For over 30 years, EuroFinance is where best-in-class treasury teams come together with the most innovative fintechs and renowned financial institutions to share experiences, discuss best practices and collaborate to solve the challenges of the day.
Benefit from the extensive expertise of 150 world-class speakers across 3 days of thought-provoking keynotes, lively debates, in-depth case studies and technical discovery labs providing practical insights and key skills to advance your treasury.
With such a great number of high quality sessions it’s wise to schedule your session program in advance.
Click here for the full agenda
Click here for the speakers overview
We are happy to announce that the partners that are highlighted below will host a booth at the expo. Together with them we build the treasuryXL community by delivering daily treasury news, blogs, events and vacancies.
They would love to welcome you at the expo and invite you for a quick chat. You can also book your appointment in advance to secure some extra time. Contact me directly and I will introduce you personally.
I wish you a great time at the EuroFinance. Safe travels and enjoy!
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