Mark Fortkamp walks through his career in treasury management, covering liquidity, foreign exchange risk, and leading teams across global regions. He discusses how treasury operations work and what international cash management actually involves.
I started as a, as a Treasury analyst completely focused on liquidity management. So out of the Chicago Regional treasury center, we were managing cash for north and South American legal entities and countries. You know, developed a really good understanding of the treasury system we were using at the time. Started to broaden my experience to include some foreign exchange experience and then was given an opportunity to move up a level to a specialist level role within the liquidity management team to just take a little bit more responsibility, have some different experiences focused on our in house bank intercompany loans and bills and managing the FX impacts of those two types of transactions. And then with that experience I was able to move over to the risk management team which was primarily focused on managing our foreign exchange risk. A lot of experience on a balance sheet hedging program, a cash flow hedging program. So really learned a lot both on the liquidity management side and the FX management side. And then, you know, as things happen and organizations change, you know, lucky enough to find myself in position to move into a manager level role and take over the management of and responsibility of managing the treasury analysts on the team that that was managing liquidity for north and South America and a few countries in Asia Pacific. By the time that, by the time I the reason I would say I was successful in the role is that as manager is because I had done the day to day, I had been the treasury analyst on that team. So I fundamentally understood everything that they were doing on a day to day basis. So it was extremely helpful that I had done the role. I could answer their questions, I could help them, I could give them ideas on how they may approach a problem because it was likely that I had seen as a very similar problem to that when I was a Treasury analyst. So having that in house experience is what ultimately was able to make me successful managing a diverse team. Fundamentally I just enjoy managing cash. I enjoy coming in every day and seeing how the business is impacting our cash position. I cash forecasting monthly reviews of actuals versus my forecast, developing better ways to forecast, getting better information every month to improve my forecast is what I'm looking to do. I certainly love the international aspect. I love working with teams in different countries to learn more about treasury structures in their particular countries. Just having that global view is extremely interesting to me. I think lots of different roles, you get exposure to one country or one business unit, whereas I do have that global viewpoint.
