Unusually, the judges chose to recognise two joint winners in this year’s Small Treasury Team category. The first was British speciality chemicals company Croda International. While the organisation had traditionally had a decentralised model for its treasury operations, the decision was taken to centralise treasury in 2020, with the creation of a new treasury team. The resulting team has just two key roles: a group treasurer and a group treasury manager.
Despite the small size, Croda’s treasury team hit the ground running – a road map for treasury was drawn up in 2020, which included the implementation of a treasury management system (TMS). In 2021, the team’s main priority was to put in place a netting arrangement between business units in unrestricted countries in order to standardise the settlement of more than 3,500 intercompany invoices per month. As a result, the team was able to reduce 100-plus cash flows per month to around 20.
Meanwhile, the team has used the debt modules within the TMS to achieve end-to-end processing for the company’s debt facilities, thereby reducing the need for manual payments. Other notable achievements include reviewing the environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics within the company’s revolving credit facility (RCF) following M&A activity and updating the RCF for the changes to IBOR. All in all, this is a team that has achieved much in a short space of time.
“Croda accomplished a huge amount during the course of the year, from implementing a new TMS to ESG metrics within the RCF update. A very forward-looking team with achievements across many different aspects of treasury.”
Vinted is Europe’s largest online C2C marketplace dedicated to second-hand fashion, with headquarters in Lithuania. With the company’s growth continuing apace, the decision was taken to hire a treasury team – the treasury director and treasury manager were recruited in 2020, with another manager added in 2021.
The new team had plenty of challenges to overcome, including fragmented banking relationships across six countries, a lack of clear responsibilities for user rights management and no FX risk management strategy in place. After taking steps to address the immediate issues and gain an understanding of business operations, the treasury team then raised the bar and set out to become a digital, scalable and value-enhancing treasury function by 2024.
With this strategic goal in mind, the treasury team embarked on a variety of projects and initiatives. Notable achievements include supporting the capital raise to finance the company’s expansion, beginning the process of implementing a treasury management system, raising awareness of working capital and currency risk management across the organisation, and starting work on a virtual cards project.
What’s more, while the treasury profession is relatively young in Lithuania, the team has set out to build a foundation for growth by following global best practices and adopting best-in-breed tools – a task that the team tackled by holding best practice, sharing calls with the treasury teams of other fast-growing European treasury companies.
“The Vinted team had a lot of issues to overcome at the outset, as well as the significant task of setting up a treasury function from scratch. A great story.”