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To be or not to be a treasurer
|10-2-2017 | Jan de Kroon |
Recent berichtten de (social) media over een Treasury initiatief van enkele hogescholen onder regie van de Hogeschool Utrecht. Het initiatief behelst een praktische minor Treasury Management waarin de masterstudenten aan de hand van praktische casuïstiek en tooling worden voorbereid op een mogelijk treasury carrière. Het interview met de initiatiefnemers maakte melding van de moeite die sommige studenten hadden met het inleven in de problematiek.
Gastlezing over treasury management
Het doet me denken aan een gastlezing over treasury management die ik zomer vorig jaar gaf aan trainees van een detacheerder die vooral actief is in de zorg. Ter voorbereiding had men zijn best gedaan om zoveel mogelijk kennis en inzicht te vergaren. Tot praktijkcases uit de klantenkring aan toe. Groot was de verbazing toen men ontdekte dat het daar die middag eigenlijk nauwelijks over ging. Althans, niet in eerste instantie.
Een initiatief om in het hoger onderwijs een goede basis te leggen voor het treasury management dat men later in de carrière tegen gaat komen juich ik zonder meer toe.
Wat daarbij echter van groot belang is, en niet altijd voldoende aandacht krijgt, is beleidsmatige en organisatorische ordening die vooraf gaat aan ieder vorm van treasury en überhaupt ieder onderdeel van de financiële functie. Daar vinden we immers de kaders waarbinnen informatie en financiële techniek tot resultaten moeten leiden.
De treasury functie
De treasury functie zorgt voor toekomstige financierbaarheid, voor bescherming van vermogen en resultaat tegen financiële risico’s en regelt de financiële logistiek. Maar dat kan alleen in functie van wat het kernbedrijf van de organisatie in kwestie van plan is. Op de korte maar ook op de langere termijn levert de treasuryfunctie, net als de controlfunctie, randvoorwaarden die aantoonbare toegevoegde waarde bieden. Mits goed ingevuld heeft de financiële functie een positieve invloed op de concurrentiekracht. Net zoals een goed geëquipeerde HR functie dat overigens heeft.
Net als de controller zal ook de toekomstige treasurer zich met het kernbedrijf moeten kunnen verbinden om zich te profileren als de leveranciers van toegevoegde waarde. Inleven in wat de business doet, financiële risico’s zien nog voor ze zich voordoen en net als de moderne controller in zekere zin navigator zijn. Dat vraagt van betrokkenen het vermogen om schijnbaar complexe financiële vraagstukken terug te brengen tot de essentie.
Het vraagt ook om ‘buy in’ en een zeker financieel-economisch bewustzijn van lijnmanagement. Ook van de treasurer-to-be vraagt dat om een meer generalistische kijk op de bedrijfsvoering en wat daarbinnen gebeurt alvorens hij als specialist de kanonnen in stelling kan brengen. Je kunt immers briljant zijn in je visie op financiële markten en meester in financiële techniek; als je geen grip hebt op de onderliggende posities ben je toch gedoemd te falen. En laat daar nou juist de grootste uitdaging zitten!
Jan de Kroon
Owner & Managing partner of Improfin Groep
How about these Fintechs?!
| 9-2-2017 | Pieter de Kiewit | treasuryXL
In the late ’70s Sony introduced the Walkman. My marketing professor told me that, without market surveys, Sony hit the jackpot. Everybody wanted to have one. Snapchat, my niece, who is 17, understands what they offer, started in May 2012, the company was recently valued at $22 billion. This is beyond what my headhunter brain can digest.
Yahoo was bought by Google for a fraction of what the company was valued at a few years ago. In august 2016 Randstad Holding bought Monster (Monsterboard in The Netherlands) for €400 million. A decade ago Monster, then a multi billion $ company, told everybody they would dominate the recruitment industry forever and they tried to buy every available recruitment company.
How about these Fintechs? The market potential is huge, new solutions will pop up that will change our everyday life. In my opinion it is an extremely diverse group of companies. This market is extremely fragmented and in my perception many Fintechs have, in my perception, a hard time reaching their potential clients. What I notice is that the language of the Fintechs is not the language of the clients they want to sell their business to. The language they do speak is the capital raising language. When this capital staff is hired, product offerings are developed as well as marketing material. The banking industry observes, invests, initiates and wonders what to do. Companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and others join in this Fintech jungle. Who will dominate in a few years, I can not predict.
Perhaps I am cynical, but I do not see any Snapchats or Yahoos. I hope this will change, because I think, next to banks, there is room for more innovative financial services companies. There are many good ideas out there. I wait for a finance Monster to step up and change market dynamics. Later on we will see if a Randstad will step in and if they will have a sustainable future. Time will tell…
Pieter de Kiewit
Owner Treasurer Search
Do you want to read more articles about FinTech on treasuryXL?
B2B Fintech: Payments, Supply chain finance & E-invoicing guide 2016
Uitgelicht: Fintech – investeringen in financiële innovatie fors toegenomen.
Will the European banks strike back?
The Five Cash Management Initiatives Treasurers Should Consider
|8-2-2017 | Jan Meulendijks | iTreasurer |
In October 2014 iTreasurer published an article ‘The Five Cash Management Initiatives Treasurers Should Consider‘ about how treasurers keep focus on ways to keep cash management in their organisation efficient and cost effective. As this is always an important issue and also relevant in 2017, we asked our expert Jan Meulendijks to comment on the article.
Five initiatives
iTreasurer stated in their article that treasurers should spend their time on five initiatives and that they should be part of a treasurers’ overall budget and resource planning process.
Going beyond SEPA
iTreasurer stated: ‘Initially rolled out as an approach for risk mitigation for commercial payment transactions in Euro, SEPA adopters have found that SEPA, or the Single Euro Payments Area, provides a more efficient way to transfer and collect funds across borders without managing all the different legal payment frameworks of each country. But despite the many bright spots of SEPA, “reconciliation in 2014/2015 was still a challenge,”
According to Jan Meulendijks the development of reconciliation tools has now become an issue for ERP/General ledger software developers and that the banks do not need to focus on it any more. Processing digital account information/account statements are a well established feature of financial software programs and also include the processing of open accounts receivables.
Global Account Rationalization
‘The SEPA initiative has acted as the catalyst for other global projects, with high priority placed on account rationalization. By reducing accounts across Europe, many large US multinational corporations are realizing significant savings in both hard- and soft-dollar costs. “In the SEPA environment, all corporates needed was one account for payments and one account for receivables across the SEPA landscape,’ said Mr. Brieske, Regional Head of Trade Finance and Cash Management Corporates Global Solutions Americas, Global Transaction Banking, Deutsche Bank in the article. At that time keeping every bank happy was a tough job, if not impossible. Being able to spread the wallet across fewer banks was one of the positive by-products of a bank consolidation.
In-House Bank Structures
Treasurers had continued to find ways to alleviate the growing cash balances that had become strategically more important to their organizations. Structures like in-house banks (IHBs) were becoming more commonplace as organizations took the next step to further enhance their global liquidity models. The practical considerations for the evolution of the IHB could be directly attributed to global expansion and increased revenue mix overseas in addition to complexities related to time zones, language, growth of regional shared services and decision execution.
RMB Internationalization
As a result of the ongoing RMB regulatory changes, there had been a significant improvement in the ease of making cross-border RMB payments via China. The RMB was a fairly new currency on the international scene then. The RMB internationalization project had begun to pick up steam over the second half of 2014, with many global MNCs looking to launch new cash management strategies in Asia. New structures were thought to be able to unlock China’s previously “trapped cash” challenge, and optimize their cash held in this part of the world where many opportunities lie for them.
Jan sees a tendency today that the more the deregulation of the RMB progresses the more one can treat it as any other currency. However, this is not achieved yet and Asia will continue to be an region where ‘trapped cash’ occurs on a regular basis.
Maximizing Excess Cash