What corporate treasury can learn from corporate insurance
15-06-2018 | Treasurer Search | TreasuryXL |
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?
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