Following 3 years of Maths at university, I spent a year travelling, before falling into my treasury career as an analyst in UPS EMEA treasury team, looking at cash flow forecasting, payments and bank guarantees. My career quickly progressed with the help of my AMCT qualification onto Vertu, Deloitte, GSK and now I am part of the treasury team at Chalhoub Group in Dubai.
With the variety and wide-reaching impact across a business treasury has, it brings so many opportunities and offers something for everyone. For me, the best part of treasury and my current role is the strategic view it provides, which gives you a lot of responsibility and ensures that I am challenged to be the best I can be.
In short, cashflow! At Chalhoub, our business was very well placed to deal with the pandemic, having had a long and successful history in the Middle East spanning 65 years and having faced challenging situations with agility in the past, such as wars and invasions. Due to the Group’s success the focus traditionally has been on the P&L and treasury have been working to push the focus onto cashflow, which was part of our transformational vision for 2020. The pandemic has helped to accelerate this transformation, but unfortunately, we still have a long way to go and were only able to utilise manual bottom-up cashflow forecasting techniques that require many stakeholders from 8 countries and many more hours of work. Our record was a 33-hour working day getting the consolidated Group cashflow forecast finalised and in the hands of our senior leadership team (I will admit I did have a 1-hour sleep in the middle when all the forecast numbers were blurring into one!).
The business has traditionally been reliant on ‘bricks and mortar’ retail, but over the past 3 years has been transitioning to being a hybrid retailer, investing in strengthening its core through people, processes and platforms, utilising eCommerce and many other digital channels, for example, WhatsApp. This transformation has borne many fruits and has seen further acceleration and the creation of 20+ websites across the Group.
These changes are here to stay and the Group will see further acceleration through its investments in eCommerce, data, tech, customer experience fulfilment and automation, which I am excited to be a part of.
Treasury along with the digital team have seen growth throughout this period and have reinforced the view that they are trusted advisors and indispensable to the Group.
Thankfully crisis mode is behind us and we are returning to a new normal, much stronger for the experience. Countries across the Middle East have been opening up for the last few weeks, with Dubai fully open and actively encouraging tourism and normal leisure activities across the city which has been great news for our retail stores (all whilst observing social distancing and wearing the appropriate PPE). If there is a second wave, we not only have a very well-rehearsed action plan, but have implemented a number of new procedures into our daily activities that will speed up our transition back into crisis mode. These include weekly forecasting and funding reporting and regional finance meetings focused on business performance, funding & operational efficiencies. Our new normal in treasury is going well, but we hope that we won’t have to call on our crisis mode playbook again anytime soon!
a. I have worked from home a lot during my career and found that I am more productive there than being in the office, which definitely has been the case. But… it has been very difficult for us all to adjust to the lack of social interaction and to define boundaries between work and social life for such a long time - my last day in the office was March 19th and one person moved to my team on April 1st and I have yet to see her in person! The key to our team continuing to be successful has been regular communication and importantly, purely social virtual events, so we have held weekly team breakfasts and Iftars (evening meal where Muslims end their fast during Ramadan) where we all get the same food delivered, team quizzes, yoga, fancy dress days and cooking lessons.
b. In Dubai, there have been curfews restricting movement during the day when you had to apply for permits to leave your home and only for trips to specific supermarkets/pharmacies. I have had thousands of zoom/teams/skype meetings, lost countless virtual quizzes but have also some great positives in that I have seen my family (virtually) more than I have since I arrived in Dubai, I have adopted a puppy and have a new girlfriend.
My Grandad has given me a lot of great advice, but here is one that always stick with me: Ask for forgiveness, not for permission. In treasury there are times when you need to be bold and must rely on your own values and technical knowledge.
'The subtle art of not giving a f*ck' by Mark Manson, which helps you focus on what is important and not get bogged-down by things that don’t matter and are out of your control. Very useful when times are good and even more so during lock-down when focus on mental health and wellbeing should be high on everyone’s agenda.