Lately, more and more of the regional treasurer’s value-enhancing role is made up of business-support activities. These include activities like helping management understand changing financial regulations impacting business or arranging customer, distributor and supplier financing using the best mix of solutions from global, regional and local banks.
For one member of NeuGroup’s Asia Treasury Peer Group (AsiaTPG) this is critical as he works for a company where financing of equipment priced at millions of dollars is critical to sales. Having someone in the region to help close strategic sales with business leads also based there, helps to cement the idea of a strategic regional treasury.
On the other hand, if business leadership and strategic decisions are not found and being made in the region, then it’s going to be more challenging for the regional treasurer to be a leading business support partner. Also, increasingly, upward movement in treasury roles require that you rotate outside treasury into the business. If there are no business finance roles to be rotated into to move upward, regional treasury jobs can lead to a career dead end.
This should be weighed carefully in an MNC’s decision to set up a regional treasury center. That’s because sometimes it’s not the best idea for a multinational. One NeuGroup guest, a deputy treasurer, explained his company’s aversion to a regional treasury center as follows: “All of the finance team and the business leadership are centralized at headquarters, so it would be very difficult for a person in Asia to be made part of the team.” In such organizations, it’s almost impossible to create a rewarding regional treasury role. “It wouldn’t really be fair to that person, if we did hire them for such a role,” he added.
With business-finance partnerships in mind, NeuGroup sees a mandate to work with MNCs to make regional finance and treasury roles more rewarding. That’s because the never-ending impulse remains to centralize finance and treasury, enabled by robotic process automation tools that don’t mind working around the clock. Together, these will surely further erode the regional finance career mandate.