Cristian Iosio argues that treasury needs to move beyond back-office operations and integrate deeper into business strategy. He says treasury professionals must use digital tools and take on broader responsibilities to support long-term growth and strategic decisions, not just manage cash and risk.
As a Treasury, we need to support the business in the long term and provide the business with the ingredients to be able to grow and eventually accelerate the growth. So these were the fundamental, if you like the title in the slide of the treasury on the treasury manual, what does it mean in practice? In practice we need to create, and I'm starting from the origin, so we need to create a Treasury group that is lean, very efficient, at the same time is very competent. We need to be able to get the support of all the new tools, digital tools that we can get our hands on to be able to manage a group that today is fairly wide in terms of presence around the world. We manage about 40 subsidiaries around the world, so we need to be able to understand the situation. So health check of each subsidiary. We need to understand also the cash dynamics. I do see treasury as a natural extension of a financial professional skill. So within treasury, yes, you deal with cash, yes, you deal with cash infrastructure, yes, you deal with systems, with market operations, or you deal with trades. So very technical aspects of the business. But you still deal with corporate finance, you still with corporate valuation, you still with average cost of capital, average. You deal with capital budgeting. And this gets very intimately involved with all the reasoning around business strategy. When you define your course of action, you need to also include the resources you need to have to be able to walk that path. And finance and let's say strategy, but also the vision of corporate growth go hand in hand. And I do see treasury an intimate part of that process and thought process. So the technical knowledge, don't get me wrong, is absolutely fundamental. But the treasury is part of the integrated vision of corporations. And an integrated vision of corporations will become, in my view, more and more relevant going forward. Corporates are not a summary of silos. Corporate and corporate strategies should be all embracing. And therefore treasury is very much part of that line of thought. To think about a finance manager and the cfo, which represents the top of that position, should actually have quite a wide set of skills to be able to manage the finance area of the future. I do see the development of the business in a direction that is away from what you would define and describe as commodity services. Certain areas of finance tend to be commoditized. Robotics is taking over certain activities. I would say that with the technology infrastructure that we have today, we more and more activities, even in treasury, will become commodities. So the way I see treasury is very much a reflection of what I'm doing today. As you said at the beginning, I'm responsible for treasury and I'm responsible for M and A. These are very different activities, but they complement each other. Going forward, I would expect treasury to be progressively more integrated, head of treasury to have even more responsibility, but also cover different areas. Corporate finance is one of those. And corporate finance should be intimately related to strategic planning, strategic development, support of senior management and the board in taking strategic decisions that can be funded and within a reasonable amount of risk for the corporation.
