From a function to a platform, and across two different business systems

At a large industrial transportation group I took over corporate finance and treasury just as the business was getting ready to grow a lot bigger. The plan needed capital to move faster, in larger amounts and on tighter timing than the function could manage. Finance had become the main thing holding the plan back.

Treasury and corporate finance were two separate teams with their own people, tools and habits, and they coordinated ad hoc. Each worked fine day to day. Under the new load they didn’t: liquidity and funding reached the business as two slow, separate processes, when it needed one.

Tuning either side wasn’t going to fix that, so I rebuilt the two as a single corporate treasury platform. I based it on the process framework from my doctoral research and on the integrated model that large multinationals use. To run it, we built our own fintech layer: direct-method cash positioning on a rolling 60-day window, interest-rate management, mid-term cash flow forecasting, and one view of debt and liquidity across the group. Each module followed how the business actually made decisions. We also changed how the team worked: leading by example, horizontal accountability, and treating the rest of the business as our client.

Funding lines grew several times over, the debt portfolio was spread across instruments, and bringing in new capital went from quarters to weeks. After I left, the parent holding took the approach further.

Later, as interim Deputy CEO for finance and economics at a fast-growing tech venture working across several countries, I used the same architecture again. Different business, months instead of years. It held.

Two very different companies, one design. That tells me the design did the work, not the circumstances.