ACT Deals of the Year Awards 2022: Small treasury team winner

The two-strong team completed a capital restructuring, a group treasury policy implementation and preparations for a US private placement debt raising

Keller Group’s head of treasury and the treasury manager’s significant achievements during the year were within the corporate governance and risk management areas, with the team finishing the year with a fully documented set of policies that have been cascaded through the group and will be reported against for the board and audit and risk committee reporting. 

In addition, during the year the team’s achievements included:

• completion of a capital structure review to support the future debt requirement plan
• completion of all preparations for a US private placement debt raise, quickly pivoting to completion of a bilateral term loan
• authoring and implementation of the board-approved group treasury policy, successfully documenting and consolidating the board’s risk appetite
• integration of HSBCnet in the UK and implementation of a new multi-currency notional pool and sweeping structure
• significant improvement to central liquidity management by tightening group reporting of over 450 bank accounts within more than 100 banking arrangements
• negotiation of numerous local facility limits and terms across the group
• successfully closing out the negotiation of the IBOR transition for the RCF facility and outstanding IBOR-linked swaps
• working closely and collaboratively with the global ERP implementation team building the business case for a group-wide TMS to be integrated into the ERP
• significant progression of the FX risk management processes and approach
• production of a suite of weekly and monthly treasury reports presenting quality information on 13-week cashflow forecasting, net debt, leverage, and facility headroom.

Global support

Keller is a broad geographic group, so providing global support meant early mornings to speak to Australian colleagues, through to later evenings working with the US. This broad jurisdiction also brought challenges in dealing with local nuance, particularly around the provision of project guarantees, to which the two-person team needed to be sensitive.

Relocation

The treasury manager recently relocated to Keller’s German office, as part of his own development plan, but the operations of the team have remained as high quality as before, with the added benefit that the manager is now able to provide more support and work collaboratively with the local divisional treasury manager based in the same office.

What the judges said

“This was a huge range of activities for just two people. From designing the group treasury policy to tightening the reporting of 450 bank accounts, this was a very operational but tidy piece of work.”

Highly commended

Cadent Gas Ltd

Cadent’s team of 3.5 full-time equivalent staff successfully delivered several large projects against the backdrop of a challenging external environment. These included a £300m debt capital market raising, a new TMS, a £1bn CPI swaps programme and a £1bn refinancing of core bank facilities, all closely aligned with the company’s core purpose of “keeping people warm while protecting the planet”.