Several topics came up in this week’s International Treasurer editorial meeting, including the evolution of the investment policy, alternatives to SAP treasury and further examination of pensions.
Investment policy evolution
On a recent NeuGroup Assistant Treasurers’ Group of Thirty peer group topic call, one larger member of the group discussed how his company’s investment policy had evolved during an acquisitive phase of the company’s growth as well as how it changed after the acquisitions slowed down. Another member however suggested getting a smaller company’s perspective on a company’s investment policy.
SAP Treasury alternatives
Many companies that have implemented an SAP ERP system have been pressuring their treasuries to adopt that system’s treasury module. While this has been a trend that several companies in the NeuGroup peer group universe have been willing to do, others have been less than eager. One of the pros for those with an SAP ERP is that that treasury module is easily integrated; despite that, others think it isn’t user-friendly.
Pensions
A recent NeuGroup webinar on pensions included several companies that still have active pensions, along with the usual assortment of those companies that have frozen their pensions or stopped offering them altogether.
But regardless of what one has, if you’ve had a pension, it’s still necessary to manage it. With the markets beginning to pick up, some companies are taking the “glide path” approach to managing their pensions. Glide path is a structured and conservative way of managing the pension; a glide path strategy derives its “path” by the pension’s current funded status, and future funding objectives as well as the time frame in which each reaches his or her goals. We’ll take a closer look at what some of these companies are doing in this regard.