Anne Kew explains how treasury works in a social purpose organization focused on affordable housing. She discusses balancing commercial discipline with social impact, navigating government policy shifts, and why relationships matter in corporate treasury.
For Anne Kew, whilst we have eight shareholders who are the trustees of our board, we do not pay dividends. Any profits that we make, in effect, are recycled back into the business with the objective of building more affordable housing. Like many countries in the world, there's political pressure to develop and build more housing, more housing that is quality housing, that is energy efficient. The ESG agenda is a huge thing globally and that does apply to green cities, for example, green living. And our remit, therefore, is to try and play shape as well as just building units. It's about bringing communities together, it's about offering the infrastructure to those communities, whether that be through things such as community centres, whether it's other initiatives that we undertake within lnq. The headline, in effect, of how we work at LNQ is we have social purpose, but we work with commercial discipline and commercial drive. And that is no different to the PLCs that I've worked within, whereby the end means is shareholder wealth. For us, the end means is the provision of more affordable housing, given the important role that affordable housing has within the infrastructure of the uk. And I think that's a really, really powerful message in that it is no different to corporate entity. If we was to look at Allen Kew's treasury, how we are set up, how we are governed, the policies, procedures that we have in place, the accounting that we have to do, the systems in which we use, the communication in which we have to have, which is vitally important both internally and externally. That is no different to a corporate treasury in a FTSE 100, or no different to a corporate treasury in a small startup business. The principles are absolutely 100% the same. It's just that end piece around social purpose. People talk about having strong relationships. Do you have strong relationships, really? It's all hunky dory when it's going well, but when things don't start to go well, that is where the value of corporate Treasury Department certainly shines, in my opinion. And we've been through some of that, some stuff that's outside of our control, changes to government policies, risk regulations, Covid financial crisis, but the importance of the Treasury Department within our entity. I think this is something that has also fundamentally changed and it's probably changed across the corporate sector. The relationship between the board, the FD and the corporate Treasurer is more important than it ever has been before, in my opinion, and we've certainly seen that within nmq.
