Frank Waechter discusses building a mid office treasury function from the ground up, covering the challenges of scaling operations, hiring the right team, and improving processes. He shares lessons learned while establishing treasury infrastructure and operational systems.
In consultancy, on the one side you think you have seen everything but on the other side when it comes to the day to day operation you think hey, you have, you are a greenhorn. And with that the mid office function gave me first of all it has to be established newly and then with the. With a quickly started system implementation which was then the new backbone of the whole treasury function that gave me a perfect introduction into that what we are doing. Mid office things give you a great introduction into that without being bothered with day to day payments, day to day cash management and where you have a lot of operational stuff. But mid office is that and you're quite often a in particular when it comes to new projects, new initiatives, you're quite often a sparing partner of the group treasurer for new things you want to implement either because you want to service your companies and subsidiaries better and need a system or you want to control your risk better and need a report and an approach. So quite often these guys in, these mid office guys or let's say sparing partners for their group treasurers and that's why what made it so interesting and it gave me a very, very quick learning experience after a relatively short time I was very deep into the topics in that regard. Over time we developed a team of people who were with the company even for five, six years and who were progressing very nicely. So I don't want to. And everybody was somehow passionate about hey that's a cool project, I want to be part of that. And I was afraid of then hiring a couple of consultants and let's say take this interesting project away from these guys and what we have done then and what we have developed then said hey, let's do the following. Let's find someone who is doing our daily job cash management, daily hedging routine and and so on and so forth. Let's find people who are doing this for us and we guide them through the daily jobs but then have much more resources to concentrate on this exciting project. We have implemented that by looking around in the organization and hiring people from the Puma organization who are not necessarily treasurers in their local subsidiaries but who have a common with whom we have dealt already on a daily basis, on an operational basis. But we have identified a couple of people and said hey, do you want to do a job swap? Do you want to come to Herzl and help us on our daily business? So it is a bit more treasury related. It's not only cash management but you have to do a bit more in cash treasury but you see how headquarters are working. You see what our daily business is. You may be part of an interesting journey.
