Quickly assessing the maturity of your treasury and cash activities

I have a challenge for the treasury community. After the past year can you, as a treasury professional, say with a reasonable amount of confidence that you have a treasury set-up that is robust and effective? Can you also say that you do not have material challenges monitoring and managing your cash and risks? Other key questions might be:

• Do you have the necessary insight and awareness of what ‘good’ looks like and how your peers are developing?
• Are you sufficiently making use of technology or should you seek further investments in this area?
• Do you have the necessary data and tools available to appropriately manage FX risks?
• Are you getting the best deal from your banking providers and using the best available cash management solutions?

You may believe you can get by for now, but my challenge is whether you could aim a bit higher. Progressive CFOs aim for their finance function to be one that is supporting the business to grow by making effective use of new technologies and data analytics to provide valuable insight. As Treasury is a key part of Finance, I believe that the treasury community should be part of this and aim for the same.

So, you want to do something, the question is where to start?  A good first step to avoid wasting your effort is to assess the maturity of your treasury activities to determine where you are at and what you should be aiming for. In the past many treasurers and, more importantly, their CFOs have been put off from moving forward as such analysis, often done by an independent party, might take several weeks and cost a significant amount of money.

The good news for the Treasurer is that this is no longer the case.  My colleagues at PwC and I have combined our expert experience into an online Treasury and Cash Maturity Assessment Tool. It allows us to work with you to undertake a comprehensive maturity assessment more efficiently in a very short period of time.

The questions assess your maturity in seven areas; the importance of each will vary between businesses. Focus areas include strategy, people, liquidity, risk management, financing, technology and reporting. Each question is assessed against five maturity levels from ‘basic’ all the way to ‘leading’. Specific examples of each maturity level are provided to give real insight.

Importantly, the outputs show where you are doing well against peers and good practice and those areas where you could improve. It also provides you with a view on where you would benefit most from change. So, you get the incisive output that the independent review gives you, but much more quickly and economically.

Seem like a good deal?  I have included a link below with more details and would happy to discuss how a Treasury and Cash Maturity Assessment can help you move your Treasury function forward.