A treasury professional discusses how their role transformed after a merger, covering automation, team expansion, and leverage management. They reflect on varied experience across different company types and the shifting demands of modern treasury work.
When I joined, it was fairly basic, fairly manual, spreadsheet oriented, I think it'd be fair to say, and fairly decentralized. So that was quite different to what we've now created, which is a much more centralized treasury function, which involves a high degree of automation. With the implementation of a Treasury management system, we're taking control of over some of the cash responsibilities of the group. We've transformed the funding structure, we've grown the team size, we've improved the capability of the treasury function, which has really enabled us to deliver a lot of high value add opportunities over the last couple of years and make it a much more resilient treasury function than the one I inherited. I think we've had a number of different challenges. I think bringing Shanks and Van Ganzwinkel together, major corporate transaction companies of approximately the same size, so sort of a merger of equals in the context of that perspective is quite difficult to bring different organizational cultures together across different countries in Europe as well. So that that's always represented some challenges and we're still very much in that post merger integration phase at the moment of trying to create the single way of working, the one unified way of being renewing. So that's. That' the ongoing challenge for us that we've been working on quite extensively over the last few years. I think also there's been a number of other challenges along the way, particularly as a result of the acquisition. The leverage is also at a relatively high point at the moment. So we have to manage that carefully and communicate that carefully with our investor base and look to bring that down over time. It's following a trajectory that would be expected given the merger, but it also makes it a more sensitive period from a Treasury perspective. So we need to carry on managing that carefully over time. I've been very lucky to have a lot of varied experience over my time, both in terms of the organizations that have worked in, from large US companies to privately owned companies to publicly owned companies to highly leverage to low leverage companies. And it's all that adds that richness to your background and experience. So if you can achieve that, I think that's very helpful.
