Trésorier/Treasurer magazine - N°98 - July/Aug/Sep 2017 - 15

FOCUS

Over to you! And over to our Associations to help you do
it.

/ AUG / SEP 2017

- JULY
N°98

What should the Treasury Associations do?
We need to become aware of a problem that gives associations an opportunity to make themselves indispensable. EACT should take a leading role and coordinate
local initiatives, spreading best practice. Publishing in
publications other than treasury publications would
make a big contribution to this. There are a thousand
and one things that might be done to help our treasurer members first to attract and then to retain their
young talents. This is a mission for associations, and
their members should push them harder to perform
it, because many do not take this challenge seriously

Let us be more persuasive in promoting the work we
enjoy. Some people stay in treasury, others move on.
Plenty of people will pass through and more and more
will leave us. We need to retain them (after screening
them), and salary alone is not enough, because the
coming generations have expectations other than just
money which does not always provide satisfaction. A
young finance professional is not a money-grabbing
footballer driven only by Dollars. If you understand this
point, and work on it daily in your department with your
team (and this requires some effort) you will retain
them, or at least some of the best of them. Believe me,
this is a major challenge that many people often ignore.
If you don't attend to it now there will be painful consequences and prices or salaries will rise over time. That
is not the solution. Giving them a good job and making
it into a super job, a function that evolves and expands,
while sidestepping routine, will be a big help in retaining
them. A team will be harder to put together in the future,
and keeping it competitive will be more difficult.

Not training and preparing tomorrow's treasurers also
gives rise to another risk, that of running into another
type of illiquidity - the lack of talented people. Laying
out a career for young treasurers and giving them a
glimpse of an attractive path ahead would encourage
them to give the job a try even if they didn't stay in it. We
must not allow the fount of future treasurers to dry up
because of an unenticing well. The diversity of profiles
(as well as diversity per se) is perhaps one of the keys to
success. Today, the skills needed for risk management
should be an attraction because of the broad range
of tasks that need to be performed. Profiles that are
more IT-oriented, for example, are in high demand, as
are more mathematical and more engineering-related
profiles, too. In the challenge of more predictive data
analytics, the skills needed will change, and become yet
more technical. It is probable that we will see treasurer
version 5.0 emerge over the next few years with the
rising importance of IT in the range of skills required in
treasury. We talk about FinTechs but never of TreasTechs. The job will keep on evolving beyond a shadow
of a doubt, demanding agility more than ever before,
a sort of millennial DNA. Older people will also have to
adapt to younger people, and not only to their external
environment.

enough. The world is changing, and with it the way young
people think. Tomorrow, careers will be built differently.
Anyone failing to take note of this difficulty and carrying
on as before is in danger of making a big mistake. For
once, let us be more (pro)active in finding solutions and
putting them into practice. Since it is ever more difficult
to find people with known talent at an acceptable price,
the technique of continuous training through employing
trainees to be retained for a considerable time (or not,
after a trial period) is a wonderfully efficient method.
Let us give them a demonstration of the attractiveness
of the job we love, the job that won us over.

François Masquelier,
Honorary Chairman EACT

LE MAGAZINE DU TRESORIER / TREASURER MAGAZINE

Treasurer illiquidity?

Trésorier/Treasurer magazine - N°98 - July/Aug/Sep 2017

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