Eva Åkesson, a treasurer, discusses liquidity forecasting, hedging, cash pooling, and group insurance management. The conversation covers team structure and how treasury operations handle payment security within banking.
I decided I want to do something else. And there was actually an advert that swedbank were looking for a lot of different product managers. And I saw cash pooling, I saw international payments and I felt I really wanted to do something different at that point. So I applied and on the paper I got a job for the group Common International Payments. But when I started, in reality I also got the product manager job as cash pooling because I was called into all those meetings and the first year I did both and then my manager asked me after a year which I preferred and then I prefer the cash pooling because that project was much more challenging and it was still very, very different from working in a Treasury department because here, you know, you have to go out, you procure a system which could be the same as the Treasury Department but then you have a different way of looking at security in a bank have a much more formal procedure. Things take a bit longer in the bank due to this. And here I did marketing material, I did the contracts and a lot of other things. Even configuring the system when my system responsible was on holiday because we needed to do something. So it was very, very broad.
And you was treasurer there? Do you have a team or how was this structure and what was it like?
No, it was me. I was the full treasurer there. It was a lot about liquidity forecasting, trying to find out where the liquidity was. Hedging was not such a big thing because in most cases he was selling and and paying the salaries in the same currency. Apart from the Philippines where we had exposure. Philippines pesos against the US dollar. And so we started to hedge during my time at Transcom there because we saw that the fluctuation were getting bigger and bigger. And we also were setting up cash pools including the Philippines which was possible after some investigation was where someone thought it wasn't possible. But then we checked and it was possible so to get hold of the cash there. And in Transcom I also had the insurances was my responsibility, the group insurances. So which is of course quite complex when you have a lot of different countries. And of course we had support from insurance broker helped us who had the expertise in this. I think you have to like look at all the steps on the way. If we come to the like the payment side, you don't only have the payments itself, you have actually the data telling you that this supplier have this bank data. And today sometimes the suppliers are hacked. So I've been in the case there was a supplier that was hacked actually and we got the wrong bank data. In our case, it had affected a payment that was, I think, €50 or something. So it wasn't really the end of the world. But this is. You have to have security checks. Can you solve it from the IT side? If you can't solve it from the IT side, how do you have a process around it? How do you check the data? It's also requested by the insurance companies. If it's above certain amounts, that you have certain checks. And then you have the file. Is it safe? Is there someone within the company who can change the file if we send it from our ERP system directly? So you have really to look through your processes and where your possible weaknesses are and how you, how you handle that.
You, you know, do you have a team or how was this sort of structure and, you know, what was it like?
No, it was me. I was the full treasurer there. It was a lot about liquidity forecasting, trying to find out where the liquidity was. Hedging was not such a big thing because in most cases you were selling and paying the salaries in the same currency. Apart from the Philippines, where we had exposure. Philippines pesos against the US dollar. And so we started to hedge during my time at Transcom there.
