Anthony Buchanan shares what he learned building treasury systems at Asahi Group, from managing FX and commodity risks to working across procurement and marketing. He explains how treasury roles are expanding beyond traditional finance as automation changes the work.
There's two different angles there. There's the Asahi Group, which we are a part of, and there was obviously a slight concern about how much freedom. Having worked for a business where I had to go elsewhere to get agreement for everything, how much freedom would I be allowed to set up, like you said, start a new Treasury? We had nothing. No systems, no people, start from scratch, build everything. We had elements of the old SAB Miller cash pool structure, but that's the only thing we kept. We had no system to tie into and therefore how much freedom would I be able to recreate, put new policies in place, model it for the new business? There's no point using SAB Miller policies when we had a massive global exposure, when I'm now more focused on Central Europe and the FX risk and different commodities and so on. The Japanese team were very flexible to actually let us move ahead to what we. They had some restrictions around debt, which was fair enough. Having just raised 10 billion euros themselves for the two acquisitions, they were a bit nervous about us going off and doing our own thing. So that was controls around that and actually we were throwing off a lot of cash, so that wasn't the issue. And then from a group perspective with the new board, yeah, I think they like to see people demonstrate diverse skills, possibly. And I'm always interested to do more than just treasury because I think it helps with your cv. So you've got the areas of working with tax, procurement, looking at supply chain from a financial point of view. But yeah, I've had the opportunity to work on some quite large HR projects which. Looking at certain parts within HR which we're looking to implement this year and hopefully go live next year. So, yeah, it gives me opportunity to work with different teams. And in that particular project, they did draw in some people from marketing and other parts of the business, which gave me a great opportunity to meet people outside of my normal remit. I'm generally overlapping with other finance people, so having to chat to people about the business, about marketing, you get a totally different view. It's really interesting to have that insight into what they see in the business, what they're trying to achieve and need to achieve as far as the right product in front of the right people through the right channel, and the sort of struggles they have with that and the wins. We've been focusing for a while working with procurement and working capital, the commodity side of the world. In our market, obviously we're quite heavy on grains. We need various packaging from aluminium for the cans, then you've got diesel exposures for distribution. I think that's Treasuries, in general, I think, are becoming more focused on commodity risk and move beyond fx. I think then, once you're working more closely with procurement, you can look at the working capital opportunities. So how do you help your suppliers, which at the same time helps your suppliers so. And sort of helps ensure that these businesses, especially in tricky times like now, that our suppliers are staying afloat as well, and ensuring they're getting the cash they need. And so can we accelerate payment terms through those tools? I mean, I think longer term, in the future, I think certain areas will become more automated. We're looking more and more at bots. And how do we use those more in sort of back office? And could there be areas of treasury that could take over? So you can then think more strategic? Sam.
