Part One

The World of Corporate Treasury

THE TREASURY OF A CORPORATION is often called its lifeblood, and with good reason. Treasury is responsible for the money of the organisation and its flow, reaching funds where and when it is needed, in the right form.

The term treasury has been used for centuries, with the first noted use of the word from the term tresorie, which means “room for treasure.” Those treasures have since been replaced with money and assets that companies own and use to generate value for stakeholders—shareholders, customers, employees, and partners.

Money and assets exist in different forms, and move around, sometimes exceedingly quickly and sometimes very slowly. In an increasingly global and connected world, the Treasurer, who has direct responsibility for the Treasury, is faced with the numerous challenges of handling the funds, assets, liabilities, and cash flows of the firm across locations, each of which has different regulatory and market environments, optimising the use of these resources and ensuring availability to support the business.

Over time, with increasing complexity in business environments, the Treasurer’s role has increased, with chief financial officers (CFOs) also taking on additional responsibility for the function. With complexity, however, comes the need to simplify the support and financial structure to ensure that the firm’s functioning is smooth and the environment to encourage business growth is built.

This book aims to do precisely that: decipher the complexity of the treasury world and today’s environment, and simplify them for practitioners, so that they have a strong foundation of key treasury activities and functions.

Treasurers are the core of a company’s management, and on the way toward achieving business leadership, the firm needs to ensure that it has achieved treasury leadership, which will pave the way and set the stage for financial outperformance. The treasuries of all of the world’s leading organisations are cases in point—each one of them has built, achieved, and maintained treasury leadership.

Part One of this book answers some of the questions associated with treasury functions and responsibilities:

• What does a treasury look like—what do the employees in a treasury function do?
• What do a chief executive officer and a CFO expect of their Treasurer?
• What does a Treasurer consider his or her primary responsibility?
• What does a typical day in the treasury department of a global firm look like?
• What is treasury culture?
• What are the core attributes of a good treasury design?
• Why are operations, processes, and control so critical to a firm’s work?

We begin by looking at treasury in an organisational context.