The award for Small UK Treasury Team of the Year went to St Modwen Properties, a FTSE 250 property business with a £1.5bn portfolio across England and Wales.
St Modwen's team had a momentous year, which included carrying out £550m of refinancing activity and a move from secured to unsecured debt.
Led by the company’s treasurer, who is also the group financial controller, the St Modwen treasury team also includes a treasury manager currently working towards an AMCT and two apprentices who are working towards accounting qualifications – a relatively new structure that was put in place only 18 months ago.
The team’s achievements included a refinancing exercise to support the key business goal of trading out of income-producing retail assets in favour of income-producing industrial and logistics assets.
Working collaboratively with lenders and advisers, the team replaced seven secured bilateral loans with a new unsecured £475m club facility
Working collaboratively with lenders and advisers, the team replaced seven secured bilateral loans with a new unsecured £475m club facility, executed in December 2017.
This delivered greater flexibility for the business to execute its strategy, while also reducing the administrative burden on the treasury team. A fifth lender was also brought on board as part of the process.
Meanwhile, with St Modwen’s banks less able to support the growth of the company’s residential business, the property business’s team began discussions with the government’s housing accelerator Homes England. St Modwen subsequently executed a pioneering £75m loan facility with Homes England, which will accelerate the delivery of over 13,000 homes and aid the growth plans for its housing arm, St Modwen Homes.
Other activities included a review and restructuring of the company’s hedging arrangements, the introduction of enhanced reports and dashboards, and an improved short-term cash-flow forecast.
The team has also significantly improved the treasury’s back-office processes and controls, including the introduction of automated processes and the closure of 18 bank accounts following a bank account structure review.
“Despite having a very small team, the St Modwen treasury has achieved a lot this year, from a move from secured to unsecured lending to bread-and-butter treasury work.”
Renewi, which was also named joint winner in the Sustainable Finance category, achieved further success with recognition from the judges for its treasury team’s achievements.
Playing an integral role in the merger of Shanks and Van Gansewinkel to form Renewi, the team has since expanded from a manual and decentralised function to a redesigned department based on centralisation, automation and consistency.
The judges praised the team’s many achievements, which included carrying out a cash transformation project, renegotiating ancillary and bilateral guarantee facilities and implementing an enhanced treasury policy – as well as converting the main banking facility into a green facility.
Also highly commended in this category was PageGroup. The small treasury team undertook an ambitious project to rationalise banking in 94 subsidiaries across 41 jurisdictions and implement a liquidity structure, while simultaneously centralising and automating bank interfaces for a global finance system implementation.
Subsidiaries were required to transition their banking facilities and transactional processing to treasury and the shared service centres.
While the scale of the task, the volume of documentation and files to be transitioned, and the large number of external stakeholders involved presented numerous challenges, the treasury team worked efficiently to achieve its goals – while continuing to carry out day-to-day activities to the highest standard.
The Treasurer’s Deals of the Year Awards recognise the outstanding work of treasurers, both within the treasury community and the wider business world. Through them we champion the success and achievements of treasury teams that have stood out in the market over the prior 12 months. Winning an award is a great way to strengthen your organisation's and your treasury's profile, bringing peer and industry acknowledgement.
This article was taken from the Deals Edition 2019 issue of The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, log in to view the full issue or sign up for eAffiliate membership