<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Teamwork makes the dream work – with benefits including improved efficiency, minimised risks and an enhanced sustainability profile</h2>



The treasury team’s performance in 2023 delivered exceptional results and key achievements for the wider business.



Starting as a team of only two employees after the successful IPO in 2021, an international team – now with six employees – has been created to support About You&#8217;s incredible success story combined with a corresponding growth narrative. The team is extremely diverse, with a broad cultural background. People who have fled persecution have found a new country, been accepted and given a chance to succeed. The team is composed of members from Germany, Poland, Romania, and Iran.



Through a significant team effort, About You’s treasury function has achieved wins such as:



1. Enhanced Financial Performance: Through our advanced cash flow forecasting and liquidity management strategies, the team has optimised the use of our cash and cash equivalents, which has led to a significant improvement in our financial performance and profitability.



2. Improved Efficiency: Automation and streamlined processes have not only reduced operational costs but also improved overall efficiency. This has freed up valuable resources and time, allowing the team to focus on strategic initiatives.



3. Risk Mitigation: Treasury’s sophisticated risk appetite framework has shielded us from adverse currency and interest rate movements, mitigating potential losses and ensuring financial stability during uncertain market conditions.



4. Stronger Supplier Relationships: By implementing a modern payment processing solution, supplier payments are made faster and more reliably. This has strengthened relationships with suppliers and could potentially lead to preferential terms and discounts. Especially in the current macro environment, treasury has been able to help our suppliers with our working capital management and the resulting early payment.



The team has also embraced innovation and technological advancement, integrating data analytics into its modus operandi, while also being better prepared to manage risk through use of Monte Carlo simulation. This holistic project also went beyond traditional treasury management by encompassing liquidity management, risk mitigation, and operational efficiency. And the treasury team’s ability to foster strategic partnerships with fintech firms and banks diversified its financing sources, reducing its reliance on traditional financing and exemplifying best practice in collaboration.

About You SE &#038; Co. KG (Germany)

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A rapid, large-scale treasury transformation achieved thanks to the relentless pursuit of excellence by a small but dedicated team</h2>



With a lean team of six people, WPP’s Asia Pacific treasury team embarked on an ambitious transformation project focused on rationalisation, centralisation, standardisation, and improving connectivity. The result was the establishment of an optimal, future-ready treasury structure catered to WPP’s multidivisional, multi-legal-entity communications business.



By deploying new-age solutions such as next generation virtual accounts, establishing market-specific cash pooling structures and inter-system connectivity solutions, and adopting investment enhancing tools, WPP has overhauled its fragmented treasury structure across 20 markets within just 18 months. This has resulted in a simplified banking structure, while ensuring a robust controls framework, and delivered other benefits, such as 95% visibility on cash in the region, significant cost savings and enhanced yields.



Treasury transformations are highly complex projects, especially one of WPP’s size and scale that included more than 1,500 bank accounts across at least 30 acquired agencies with legacy bank systems and processes in 20 markets throughout APAC.



But WPP’s six-strong team demonstrated commitment and rigour in navigating and testing boundaries of regulations. The team worked with HSBC to co-create tailored solutions and establish an optimal treasury focused on account rationalisation, centralisation, and connectivity. This will serve as a foundation to drive growth for years to come.



The success of this ambitious project further highlights WPP’s commitment to deliver creative transformation and reinforces the company as a leader in this space. And the positive outcome ultimately came down to the treasury team’s relentless pursuit for excellence.

WPP plc (Hong Kong &#038; Australia)

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A high-performing team delivers exceptional results in the face of uncertainty and a challenging ‘year of change’</h2>



Chalhoub Group is a leading partner for luxury across the Middle East&nbsp;for over 60 years with the vision to be a hybrid retailer that brings luxury experiences to the fingertips of customers.



Increased consumer market share was the group’s 2023 ambitious commercial strategy, so the treasury team aligned with the group’s aims to deliver:



<ul class='tw-list-disc tw-list-outside tw-pl-4 '>
<li>Growth in retail stores/e-commerce</li>



<li>Savings from operational efficiencies</li>



<li>Reinforced capital and cash management for Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)</li>



<li>Support M&amp;A activities with funding</li>



<li>New sustainability linked financing solutions</li>
</ul>



As such, the team embarked on a significant transformation project to enable this.



The treasury team in question consists of a healthy mix of experienced professionals and new energised team members around front office, middle office and digital payments. In 2023, this high-performing team captured $~2m in savings while demonstrating digital transformation, expanding capital, revenue growth and sharing learnings in industry seminars.



The wider Chalhoub group culture has been built on entrepreneurial spirit so various teams in the company have significant empowerment under a decentralised architecture to manage the very large number of global brands that the group partners with.



But the treasury transformation project required focus on processes and activities to be centralised and the team delivered this by bringing new ideas like integration of multiple digital payment providers, innovative solutions like centralised BNPL initiative, single source of truth like automated Power BI capturing data from TMS centralised MT940s, support to challenging markets like KSA with a diversified funding arrangement, and organising access to capital for M&amp;A’s and ground-breaking sustainability initiatives.



The path to success was not easy for the team as it had to balance multiple priorities of a TMS implementation and Omnichannel strategy together with the uncertainty around economy in 2023 and changing legal landscape in Saudi Arabia. The group also made a significant organisational change by bringing in new leadership including a new CFO &amp; COO. While navigating these changes the treasury team’s focused on professional expertise, execution and working with an agile approach to ensure all the deliverables were completed, leading to significant gains for treasury team and the Group as a whole.



The treasury team kept its focus on performance while transforming thus leading to producing innovative solutions that increased revenue and reduced costs during a year of momentous change in the company.

Chalhoub Group (UAE)

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A multidimensional transformation makes light work of a complex, unusual challenge to build a treasury function from scratch</h2>



In 2021, General Electric announced that it would separate its three major businesses into standalone enterprises. This meant that operationally, historically centralised activities, like corporate treasury, would need to be established on behalf of each standalone enterprise individually.



The mandate of this project represented a highly unusual situation to the GE HealthCare organisation: the opportunity to build a Treasury organisation from scratch as if it were a start-up but with a catch – it also needed to support the operations of a global mega-cap company at light speed. Most start-ups are small with narrow scopes and challenges, while most mega-cap companies have large scale problems but generally years of precedent and institutional know-how to help combat them. GE HealthCare&#8217;s Treasury organisation represented a rare exception to that rule. It was a true outlier on the spectrum of complexity and capability.



The ultimate output of this transformational project was to achieve a fully functioning Treasury team, with standardised processes, supporting technology, and appropriate governance/controls in just one year.



Highlights of the project’s achievements are as follows:



1.&nbsp;Achieved fit-for purpose operations and systems ahead of schedule



2.&nbsp;Established GE HealthCare treasury as a strategic business partner across the broader organisation with focus on delivering shareholder value



3.&nbsp;Consolidated tech stack from 35 to 9 applications and stood up of a modern, streamlined infrastructure that creates efficiency, automation, visibility, and control, resulting in 80% treasury IT cost reduction forecast compared to treasury IT cost of GE Corporate



<a>4.&nbsp;Through redesign of FX exposure management processes, identified opportunities to reduce FX trading volumes by 25%</a>



5.&nbsp;Identified opportunities to improve liquidity management, release working capital and enhanced free cash flow including future in-house-banking structure



6.&nbsp;Identified opportunities to rationalise bank accounts by up to half in the coming years, reducing fees, management time, and risk.



7.&nbsp;Established right governance policies and risk control framework to operate a publicly traded company and comply with necessary regulations and reporting requirements.



8.&nbsp;Built the foundation of treasury organisation culture and operating model tailored to fit to the new standalone company



9.&nbsp;Rallied around five-year treasury specific vision that sets the course for future wins

GE Healthcare (USA)

<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A mammoth team effort to manage growing regulatory requirements and sanctions through an ambitious payments centralisation and screening project</h2>



DEME is a world leader in the highly specialised fields of dredging, marine engineering, and environmental remediation. Due to the nature of its business, DEME is active in highly regulated areas, for example Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. To ensure the corporate always complies with constantly changing regulation, the treasury team embarked on an ambitious project to enhance its payments and treasury processes.



The team was keen to address inefficiencies and operational risks, including the risk of payment fraud, human errors, and payments made to sanctioned parties and countries, as well as the lack of visibility and control over bank accounts and cash.



As such, DEME’s treasury team embarked on a multi-year project with the following objectives:



<ul class='tw-list-disc tw-list-outside tw-pl-4 '>
<li>Increase control over company-wide payments through centralisation and automation</li>



<li>Screen all outgoing payments against latest available sanctions lists (e.g. OFAC, UN, EU, etc)</li>



<li>Optimise the treasury system infrastructure to enable efficiency of treasury processes, enhanced controls, and reduced operational risk</li>
</ul>



Given the impact on the overall DEME group, the project required a collaboration between various internal teams (treasury, compliance, finance ICT, tax, legal, financial controllers and the shared services centre) as well as external partners (banks, system vendors, and suppliers, and PwC as an adviser). This is where the soft skills of the team came into play, as well as members’ technical knowledge and subject-matter expertise.



Details of the solution included:



<ul class='tw-list-disc tw-list-outside tw-pl-4 '>
<li>Replacing the local banking systems by a centralised payments system implementing a central SWIFT connection</li>



<li>Replacing local FX payments by payments-on-behalf-of (POBO) out of central treasury accounts for all countries where there was no restriction from a legal or tax perspective</li>



<li>Linking the new central payments infrastructure to a sanctions screening tool that would highlight all outgoing payments against the latest sanctions lists before transmission to the external bank</li>
</ul>



A number of milestones have been achieved during the project. Major successes include reducing the number of banking partners from more than 85 to 10 core relationship banks, while closing 606 accounts and automated daily visibility on at least 95% of cash across the DEME group using the new centralised banking connection via Swift.



These wins have been made possible only through the close collaboration of DEME’s treasury team with a variety of internal and external stakeholders, as well as the team’s determination to embrace best practice and innovation.

Treasury Team of the Year