As I write this, the course of Brexit remains just too close to call. UK prime minister Theresa May has put the deal she negotiated with Brussels to successive votes in the House of Commons only to see decisive defeats against both her agreement with the EU and her back-up plan to leave the EU without a deal. Rarely has a prime minister been so embattled or a parliament so caught up on a single issue. The UK’s means of exiting the EU remains firmly in the ‘decision-pending’ file. Brexit or no, the euro reached a significant milestone this year – its 20th anniversary. The world’s second-largest currency, brought in electronically initially and then as notes and coins in 2002, has survived the global financial crisis and the debt crisis of 2009–12, and confounded many critics – notably US economists – who believed the economies of the currency area too diverse to be shackled together. The euro still faces that very issue. Tensions in the eurozone are writ large and imbalances between the dominant economies persist. On page 20, writer and speaker Frances Coppola tracks the euro’s ups and downs. Our profile interviewee for this edition is Joanna Bonnett, group treasurer at PageGroup.
Since her arrival at the recruiter in 2017, Bonnett has overseen a treasury transformation project, including the rationalisation of transactional banking alongside the automation and centralisation of banking interfaces into a new global finance system. To prevent this workload from toppling the treasury’s day-to-day work, Bonnett’s small in-house team and consultants adopted rigorous project-management parameters and smarter working practices. Find out more on page 16. Elsewhere in this edition we have our usual mix of technical and professional issues: treasury management system implementation, modelling risk scenarios, the great Libor transition and post-reform money market fund investment. And alongside your magazine, you will receive the ACT Cash Management Report, sharing the many insights and lessons from The Association of Corporate Treasurers’ (ACT’s) annual conference. Coming up in our next edition, we look forward to celebrating the ACT’s 40th anniversary with a special edition focusing on the achievements of treasurers and the Association over the past four decades. It is not too late if you want to share where you were when the banks nearly broke or what you did in the face of any number of commodity crises. Feel free to get in touch. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the issue. -Liz Loxton, editor of The Treasurer
