Felix Warmuth explains how to structure a global treasury team across regions like Vienna and Brazil. He covers banking relationships, cultural differences in negotiations, and why companies outsource transactional work to shared service centers while keeping strategic roles in-house.
Having the right banking relationships that could help you out, help you out everywhere in the world, which is actually one very important thing that we focused on during the last year. So after the merger of. Exactly setting that up, right? Because you will have constantly topics arising, financing or risk management topics all over the world. And you need to have your relationship set up in that way. The second thing is also the cultural differences. Not speaking here about the banking stuff, but actually speaking internally, right. It's different to talk to somebody or to negotiate somebody in the Germanic world, right? We're very straightforward in a Germanic discussion. You have no small talk. You start immediately, right? Just you do, you tackle, you tackle the issue and start to get it, start to get it done. It's very different for when you talk to somebody in India, for example, right? We're very big. That's just a different kind of negotiation, a different kind of discussions. It's culturally very interesting. What we have started already. And pretty much every central function, we try to focus on the real core corporate topics, right? So basically taking what you would call from execution to analytics, right? So basically saying, okay, what do you focus on? The corporate function, which is the thinking, what is the strategic thing? So basically the heavy lifting and everything that is transactional or that is purely executional, we are actually having internally outsourced into what we call global business services, which is some kind of regional shared service center where we are bundling all transactional activities. That's not only true for treasury, that's also true for example for accounting, where you put your accounts payable, your accounts, accounts receivables there also for tax or for every other area. That is something that we're focusing on very much on and I think is actually also the future where Treasury Department will go to or will lead to is purely doing corporate strategic, heavy lifting kind of thinking stuff. Right now we have pretty much two areas that we are focusing on on the treasury regionally. We have one team here in Vienna which is on the treasury side, a team of four. And we additionally have a team of two based in Brazil. We of course had a lot of banking stuff, a lot of financial instruments in Brazil in place. So that's why we have a local team in Brazil dealing with those kind of things. But basically everything is run out of either the team in Brazil or the team in Vienna.
