General Treasury

1. A strong CFO has a strong treasury — and vice versa.
2. Managing the company's debt investors is a job too important to be left to the Treasurer.
3. Old treasurers never die, they just lose interest.
4. Managing interest rate risk involves managing the treasury spread and the credit spread.
5. International tax schemes often reduce taxes at the cost of future unrepatriable profits.

Technology & Operations

1. Many treasuries are treated as cost centers and then starved of investment to reduce their costs.
2. The objective is world-class use of technology, not the use of world-class technology.
3. Buying a treasury system is like buying furniture: you live with your mistakes for a long time.
4. Never, ever be a beta treasury software tester.
5. Few treasurers know what their worldwide banking transactions costs are; even fewer manage them.
6. Banking costs are not managed because they are the only charges that are automatically paid without being approved by someone.
7. Treasury's to-do list will always include improving cash forecasting.

Structuring Global Treasuries

1. A world-class treasury is only possible with world-class tax, accounting, and internal audit.
2. By definition, with decentralized foreign unit treasuries, half of them will be below average.
3. Letting local management own their cash is letting them make the Group’s capital allocation decisions.
4. Foreign units should be focused on producing profits, not managing them — that's treasury's job.
5. If your company is global, why isn't your treasury?
6. Separate reporting of local unit treasury activities and risks is never equal to the quality of their regular financial reporting.
7. A centralized treasury is not only efficient, it is also easily scalable.

Foreign Exchange

1. Many American multinationals operate in FX risk denial.
2. The most common corporate FX hedging mistake is paralysis by analysis.
3. The most common hedge metric — did the hedges make money? — is also the most meaningless because it ignores the gain or loss on the hedged exposure.
4. If the foreign units are not measured on their FX and interest results, then they are being subsidized, and subsidies are always wasteful.
5. A Treasurer who can't fund his company's needs will be calling his bankers from his outplacement cubicle.
6. The smartest FX accountants in any MNC are the foreign unit controllers.
7. Master FAS 133's documentation requirements and you've mastered FAS 133.
8. If you are not willing to look after your own interests by competitively bidding your FX, you can't expect a bank trader to look after them either.
9. Without FX performance metrics, the default metric will always be whether the hedges made money, a loser's game for treasury.
10. While FX rates are mean-reverting in the long term, that does not mean that cumulative FX gains and losses on constantly changing exposures will ever equal zero.
11. The best way to reduce FX risk is to reengineer the business processes that generate them.
12. A common FX hedging mistake is treating options as if they are forwards - options are not buy-and-hold instruments.
13. Managing emerging market FX and funding positions is best done on a consolidated basis as an active trading position.