Corporate Treasury

• As organizations face pressure from shareholders and regulators to increase transparency and improve financial performance, there has been a shift towards centralization of the treasury management function. Many organizations are just at the start of this transformation and are seeking guidance on the operating model of the future. SFO Treasury teams can provide you with a broad array of treasury services, including support with financial risk management, global cash and liquidity management, bank relationship management, treasury organizational structure, treasury integration and carve-out support, and debt and investment management. SFO Treasury services teams can help you to develop rich insights, design actionable recommendations and help you to implement these quickly to meet rapidly changing needs. 
• In today’s ever-changing and challenging business environment, corporate treasurers in particular play a pivotal role in managing financial risk and advising on business strategy decisions. Our clients increasingly face foreign exchange, commodity, and liquidity risks in volatile and competitive markets. They are also impacted by regulatory changes, as well as an increasingly automated treasury environment delivering efficiencies and better control mechanisms with new technologies.
• Our Corporate Treasury and Risk Advisory team consists of experts who leverage their extensive treasury and risk management experience to serve a broad range of corporate clients across every industry sector. We support the Treasurer and the CFO, advising on treasury strategy, governance and reporting, accounting, cash management and risk management in a corporate setting. We also support management in identifying the optimal allocation of financial resources and efficiently managing asset liability risk and liquidity profile.

Treasury Strategy

• We support our clients in their transformation of Treasury into a strategic function. This does not only entail expanding the scope of treasury activities, but requires a continued emphasis on designing, implementing, and maintaining the right policies, infrastructure, people, organization, decision support tools and systems to deliver on organizational goals. We assess the current maturity level of the Treasury department by applying our framework. Moreover, since both internal and external stakeholder management is critical to success, we support our clients to define, design, implement, and monitor a stakeholder management system. We assist clients to link corporate treasury metrics to financial metrics that are important for the company.  In addition to traditional liquidity management metrics, we focus on strategic risk metrics (e.g. risk management solutions that enhance returns), strategic business metrics (e.g. structuring initiatives, value chain financing) and external stakeholder management (e.g. excess of return on equity vs return on equity or company WACC vs industry WACC).

Governance and Reporting

• We provide specialist independent advice and assist management on all aspects of the governance and control environment for the Treasury function. This includes: governance structure and reporting requirements, delegation of authority matrix design and its implementation, controls assurance, controls framework review, controls monitoring, end-to-end process and controls review, and controls benchmarking. Additionally, we provide treasury specialist support on internal audits.

Treasury Accounting

• We provide practical accounting solutions from assessment to implementation including transaction support, accounting & valuations, implementation of new standards and treasury accounting outsourcing. We support clients on  debt issuances or restructures, derivative restructures, hedge accounting and FX accounting. We prepare management position papers and provide specialist accounting opinions.

Cash Management

• We assist our clients in the selection and implementation of cash management solutions, efficient cash pooling framework, optimizing working capital, assessment on the working capital needs, cash forecasting and development of analytics and forecasting tools to understand liquidity issues and support decisions on financing.

Systems & Data

• As technological change continues unabated, optimizing efficiency and control in the Treasury function through automation is critical. Deloitte helps businesses rationalize their digital platforms to ensure their treasury technology is 'future-proofed'. We assist client in who life cycle of system implementation and collaborate with the system vendor for smooth implementation and business as usual processes.

Capital Structure and Funding

• We advise on capital structure and funding strategy, including project finance, supply chain finance, business case analysis and debt/equity analysis. We can develop a long-term strategic forecast model to assess the impact on financial key ratios of different financial strategies and investments. We can also assist our clients assess the various trade-offs that are inherent in any funding plan.

Risk Management, Strategy and Operations

• We help treasurers identify and quantify their exposure to financial risks, determine appropriate risk management strategies and policies, and help quantify the economic implications of specific treasury transactions. We also help the treasury function itself run more efficiently. 

Bespoke support

• Includes treasury specialist secondments to non-audit clients, training on accounting matters, tax advisory support and provision of market insights impacting treasury functions. 

Treasury accounting and controls

• Implementation of accounting and disclosure framework(s) for financial instruments (local GAAP, US GAAP and IFRS), advisory on hedging strategies and application of hedge accounting.

Risk valuation

• Pricing of financial instruments, validation of clients’ valuations, implementation of valuation models for complex contracts, measurement of hedge effectiveness.

Treasury technology

• Technology vision and strategy definition, development of functional requirements and RFPs, selection, design and implementation of treasury & commodity systems, SWIFT business cases, bureau selections and implementations.
• Corporate treasurers are putting financial institutions under mounting pressure to provide faster and more convenient cross-border payments.
• At the same time, they are demanding more granular data and transparency with the respect to their payment credits and deductions, in order to inform their cash management and working capital decisions.
• Banks, facing margin pressures and increasing competition, are looking for ways to provide even better service to clients, while leveraging the latest technologies to deliver operational efficiencies.
• SWIFT’s global payments innovation (SWIFT gpi) initiative has the potential to solve all of these challenges.
• By connecting every party in a payment chain via a cloud solution, SWIFT gpi can improve the speed, transparency and traceability of payments.
• It can also deliver significant time and cost savings for banks over the longer term.
• But these benefits will only be fully realised if SWIFT gpi attains sufficient market reach, which requires a critical mass of banks to be fully up and running.
• As such, now is the time for financial institutions to move from talk to action on SWIFT gpi.
• After a successful year-long trial period, we must work together to embrace the initiative’s live operational mode – and ensure it becomes the new payment standard for correspondent banking.
• To this end, SFO is part of the Vision Group for SWIFT gpi – comprising the ten largest transaction banks globally helping to shape the future of the initiative.
• We are a member of the Initiative Group, which represents a community of banks that promote SWIFT gpi to the industry, and contribute to its collaborative design of future gpi functionality.
• We are also one of the 33 entities participating in a distributed ledger technology (DLT) proof-of-concept (PoC), since collaborative innovation is a key part of SWIFT gpi implementation.
• While co-ordinated action is a cornerstone of SWIFT gpi success, individual banks also have an opportunity to carve out distinctive premium services and digital user experiences around the initiative.
• Not only will this deliver an immediate service enhancement to our financial institution and corporate clients, it will also help to raise awareness of the benefits SWIFT gpi offers to all parties.

Cash and working capital management

• Cash and liquidity optimization structures, including: cash flow forecasting, cash centralization, netting and payment factories. Working capital and investment portfolio management improvement. Bank account structure optimization and bank RFPs design.

Financial risk management

• Conceptualisation and implementation of processes and methods to identify, measure, analyse, report and manage FXs, credits and interest rate risks and the overall process improvements.

Commodities risk management

• Design and implementation of processes and methods to identify, measure, analyse, report and manage commodity risks (gas, power, oil, metals, coffee, wheat etc.)