Dan Ferguson discusses how treasury functions create value for insurance company CFOs. The conversation covers strategic treasury management in regulated industries and how treasury teams can demonstrate their importance across the organization.
To the outside looking in, insurance isn't necessarily the most interesting industry. Certainly compared to, you know, a company that runs a fleet of airplanes and sells holidays, the attraction was really, it was a bigger company, it was a regulated entity. So you sort of learned more around that side of things. There was a greater scope in the role and a bigger team. And I think one of the key differences, I guess, coming to an insurance company is you've got a big asset portfolio to look at and look after and sort of understand the interactions with the asset portfolio as well. So there were, you know, there were a number of reasons for wanting to make that switch.
I think I've seen a lot of articles written over the course of the last sort of three or four months about, you know, is now the time that the treasurer is a sort of more strategic player, more in tune with the cfo, more relied upon by the cfo. And let's be honest, we've been hearing those kind of lines since the financial crisis and even before that.
Oh, yeah, 20 years.
Yeah. I don't. Personally, I don't think anything's changed. Treasury is such an important function, but some of it is down to the treasurer and the treasury team are putting their best foot forward and making sure they can show value that's appropriate and relevant to the CFO and to the company. So, you know, I must admit I.
Get a little bit annoyed at all.
Of these column inches that somehow it's only now that treasury is a strategic function. I think treasury has always been a strateg function, but there's a responsibility on the treasury team to show that value and I think that that will always remain.
You've got to get involved in as wide a breadth of experience as you can, I think, and I appreciate that difficult when you're during your first one or two roles, but it is still possible to sort of volunteer or to get involved in some of the broader projects.
Really.
I think the breadth of experience in treasury is hugely important because of the huge range of issues that you come up again on a daily basis. If I was going to say anything, I think it's that. And the important thing is translating that breadth of experience into, okay, so how did you make something better? What did you achieve? What did that save in money? What did that earning money? You know, sort of translating something from just, well, I'd sat in on a meeting a few times to actually some practical implementation that made things better.
