A sparkling WEBchat between a very experienced panel: - Caroline Stockmann, CEO, Association Of Corporate Treasurers; Bas Rebel, Sr. Director Corporate Treasury Solutions, PwC Netherlands; and Bengt Elvinsson, Interim Treasurer - revealed several key ideas and practices:

1. What is corporate treasury:
   • ACT: take big picture view - corporate treasurers strategically balance risk and opportunity to ensure that organisations are successful and protected
   • About long term funding and investments
   • corporate treasury department is the custodian of cashflow and financial risk within the company
2. What should corporate treasury do:
   • Understand the basics, the ins&outs, and flows of your compay’s business
   • Add value to your business, e.g. by using FX to be a strategic partner to the business units
   • Ensure that company has the liquidity when and where needed
   • Align maturity profile of your investments with the corporate needs, and decide where to invest excess cash
   • Need to have a vision, a plan on the development of corporate treasury  
   • Be diplomatic and co-operate with other departments and businesses
   • Focus on the framework of corporate treasury, so guide systems and processes, AND integrate with rest of corporation 
   • Collaborate with SSCs and procurement
   • Ensure that other people are doing the right things
3. What corporate treasury should not do:
   • Sit behind your spreadsheet and purely focus on the figures
   • See the corporate treasury function as having chinese walls, as being a silo
   • Get involved in processes, e.g. involved in the day-to-day operations of collecting and moving cash, rather they should organise the process
   • Tasks that others can do better, and those that technology can do for you.

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CTMfile take: The ideas here reflect the essence of corporate treasury and where it is travelling.