This is a YouTube video titled "Mastering the Language of Treasury: Insights From a Finance Polyglot Kai Bremer" containing a monologue or talk by Kai Bremer recorded in May 2023. Kai discusses his experience in financial risk management, hedge accounting, and building a centralized treasury function at Aldi South Group, emphasizing the importance of treasury governance and automation in ethics management across multiple European currencies.
I joined Ernst and Young at that time, joined their team for financial risk management and we were, we were providing to our clients advice on how to say for example structure your. Your FX risk management but also how to deal with hedge accounting. We also did some very interesting hedge accounting consultancies with our customers and there was a part was never exposed to before to whole accounting topic that is completely different from the cash view you usually have as the corporate treasurer. And again that, that helped me to make my profile more complete because I'm now able to speak to a lawyer, to a consultant, but also to a banker or to a corporate treasurer with confidence. I believe treasury is a very important interface function and it always helps if you are able to understand your counterpart. I was lucky to have that situation at an early stage of my career. The decentralized departments were quite organized but there was no central treasury so no department or no head of treasury that had a look, a holistic look on the situation for Ali South Group as a whole. And that was clearly something we had to build up because when you have a lot of funding in different parts of the world but also cash investments or ethics management, that is absolutely something that needs to be centrally managed. And we were in the lucky situation that we had the mandate to build up that treasury function. And like you said, we did everything. Ethics management, investments, but also treasury governance. I think still today there are some policies and processes live within Aldi that I've written down and that is something that yeah, I feel proud about. We sell our products to 27 European countries and 11 of those countries they don't use the euro so we have large exposure. British pounds and Swedish krona in Danish krona as we don't have a cost base in the countries. Every euro or every GBP that is generated in sales enlarges our ethics position. My idea is to automate ethics management as much as possible because I think when you are able to design a process that can be handled by people, it can also be handled by a system or by software and there is no need to interfere in that process or to have people do manual steps in that process if it's possible to do it completely in the software. And that is our idea that we want to achieve.
