The global treasury profession

With the strong international commitment in our qualifications, as well as our events and publishing, we are particularly conscious of the rapid growth of the treasury profession in certain key markets and geographies. Two of those on which we are focusing are Asia and the Middle East, where we already have a number of members. In the case of the former we have an established position, through our strong links with the Hong Kong ACT (which started life as an ACT regional group) and through all our qualifications but especially the Certificate in International Cash Management (CertICM).

CertICM has attracted such high numbers in the Asia Pacific region that we have been able to run the teaching week for the qualification in Hong Kong (and also last year in Shanghai) annually for many years. We are hopeful that the new Certificate in International Treasury Management (CertITM) will have a similar success. The ACT’s qualifications rightly serve as a first step, allowing us to develop further our bilateral relationships with local treasury associations and then to introduce our events and publishing products with the support of these links. An excellent example of the implementation of this strategy is talkingtreasury, which is running in Hong Kong on 21 October.

In the Middle East we have identified strong local support from members and others for an ‘ACT Middle East’, as there is both a rapidly growing treasury community (especially in the Gulf area) and no local association to respond to this. We have launched ACT Middle East - with an invitation to register interest – and the first meeting will take place in Dubai on 13 October. Membership of ACT Middle East will be free to ACT members, with various fee levels for others.

In October we will be accepting the first enrolments for the new Certificate in Corporate Finance & Funding (CertCFF) which can be taken as a standalone certificate as well as counting towards the AMCT Diploma in Treasury. As part of our programme to develop and improve both the AMCT syllabus and the accessibility of our qualifications, delivery of the new course content will be through an online study programme – the model to which all our qualifications are being progressively moved.

Our briefing note on contingency planning for a downturn in the economy has attracted more website attention than we can recall for any previous ACT item and is bringing many new visitors to our relaunched website www.treasurers.org. I suppose we might all have hoped that our fairly sanguine advice in the note might have been overtaken by a more positive economic outlook as we moved towards Autumn – but we were confident that the advice we were offering had enduring relevance however short (or long) the current crisis would prove.

The response to our conference on 16 October in Manchester on working capital management has been so strong that we have had to switch to a larger capacity room to meet the demand. Treasurers have always been in pole position to drive efficient management of working capital and in this business and financial environment these skills should come to the fore. The Financial Times quoted John Grout, the ACT’s Policy and Technical Director, underlining how the treasurer can add value by focusing on the supply chain and how this impacts working capital.

We continue to take a strong interest in issues around pensions, with two important recent examples: we challenged the ASB over its advocacy of a risk-free rate to discount pension scheme liabilities; and in a letter to the Financial Times the ACT’s Martin O’Donovan expressed concern that the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) levy should not so influence investment strategy that it has the unintended consequence of concentrating risk and potentially increasing the demands on the PPF.

Planning the ACT’s Annual Conference (ACTAC) for 2009 is well underway. We were delighted with the response to ACTAC in Edinburgh this past April and will be striving to ensure that we can raise the bar further this time, in terms of the appeal of the keynote speeches as well as the appeal and relevance of the topics that we cover in the core of the programme. Clearly we will be putting a lot of focus on the treasury, risk and corporate finance role in an even more difficult and volatile environment than we debated in the Edinburgh conference. For 2009 we are moving ACTAC to Manchester – which has excellent facilities that we are confident will be welcomed by all attendees.

As in previous years I encourage all in the corporate sector to take part in the ACT/JPMorgan Global Cash Management Survey. This is the survey’s tenth year and its long record of consistent research means that the results provide valuable data on international cash management practices and trends. The final date for the survey responses is 30 September; online completion of the survey is available here.