This is a YouTube video titled "Navigating the Deep Waters of Treasury: Lessons and Strategies for Success" containing a detailed monologue or talk from May 30, 2023, focused on the speaker's personal career journey and insights in treasury management, including shaping treasury functions, embedding treasury in product development and sales, and the broad scope of treasury roles in a global organization. The content is a single-speaker narrative without conversational elements.
I did apply for quite some jobs in treasury during that time. Was a bit of a difficult economic environment back then and the labor market was tight. But fortunately I got this head of treasury position at IWKA at the time. Now it's called Kuka. Actually it was a one man show. There was not much of a outlined function for that, but there was a treasurer as my predecessor and when I arrived my predecessor told me, well look, I will be there for another two days and then you are left on your own. You can imagine being only nine months out of university, I was really shocked about this statement, but it turned out to be really a great opportunity. So there was a bit of process description, there was a bit of, of rules for the treasury function, but it was really something scattered and more, let's say combined with accounting topics and everything. So I really had the chance to shape the treasury function, to describe and define processes, to describe and define interfaces to accounting, to the planning areas. I wrote, let's say my own treasury guideline based on the knowledge I had and of course a lot of, a lot of interactions with other treasurers got into contact in the first one or two years. At the end of the day was a great start because I was also forced to learn to swim very quickly, take my own decisions, build a team step by step, which also helped me as a young professional in that role to really push that up to a professional function, to recruit people step by step, to find the right place also for the strategic aspects of the function at Kuka. So that was a great start and once in a lifetime opportunity to, you know, to being able to shape the whole function. I think what is unique about SAP treasury is that we are very closely connected and even embedded in, in what I called innovate to sell cycle. So what does that mean? SAP sells its own treasury and cash management solutions and my organization is fully embedded in the development process. So we have a regular alignment with our analytics, our development colleagues, we come up with our own ideas on new products or functionality enhancement. We are of course the first pilot customer for those new applications. And then on the other side of the value chain, we also support our sales colleagues at conferences, in customer meetings and over time we established a real structure for that, an agile structure. Treasury is an excellent starting point or a wider and more comprehensive finance career or a career altogether because it gives you a variety of topics, not only treasury topics, but you have to deal with tax controlling, investor relations, you have to do planning exercises and at the same time you have already an external exposure to other stakeholders, like banks and rating agencies. For example, in a global organization.
