COVER STORY: PRIMETALS TECHNOLOGIES
Hamon explains in a BELLIN video, titled ‘Is an in-house bank the right option for you?’, that there are two main points in the in- house banking process: • An internal one of mapping one standard payment format in an affiliate to any format required outside; and
• An external one of sending that format aligned with each bank to the many banks around the world.
Daily routine
What of Hamon’s daily routine for keeping on top of everything? Unsurprisingly for a millennial ‘Generation Y’ professional, the first port of call is his iPhone: “The first two things I see each day on my phone are the cash position and then the FX rates.” While he checks that the company can manage everything it is contracted to deliver, he has to keep on top of the FX risk during a customer journey. At the beginning of a bidding phase for a potential customer project, a price has to be committed. However, Primetals doesn’t know until the end of the bidding process whether the project will proceed. If it does, it is important that the pricing ensures the company is selling within the right range. Otherwise, with FX moving in the wrong direction, the company could end up selling at a loss.
“They placed a lot of trust in me. Every day I learn a tremendous amount from Japanese culture, such as the dedication people bring to their company,” he reflects.
Implementing treasury
Back in early 2015, when Hamon began building the Primetals treasury up from scratch, he was effectively given a blank sheet of paper. “There was nobody and nothing in place, as everything was centralised in Siemens, with a Siemens- developed system for cash management,” he recalls. “I was asked to implement a treasury management system (TMS) in as lean a setup as possible, while having to reach best-in-class standards.”
Over a five-year period, he took the treasury from “nothing, no people, no bank accounts and no process” to a fully functioning structure that centralises nostro accounts and can handle ESG-based FX trading.
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Once Primetals was wholly owned by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in January 2020, he was asked to expand the function to the wider group.
The core treasury team rose from zero to eight, with more colleagues spread across the UK, Austria, Brazil, China and India. Once his role expanded to Head of Group Finance, it brought the numbers up to 30 globally. He installed the BELLIN cloud- based TMS platform because it was “so easy to use”. Customisation followed as the treasury function developed, with BELLIN founder Martin Bellin and Hamon working together (evidenced by a number of engaging videos on the former BELLIN website) on the improvements. “We worked together on building a payment factory and artificial intelligence capability on fraud prevention, as I always try to pioneer as much as possible to get the development that centralised treasury departments need,” he says.
Hamon makes a point of avoiding non- essential meetings, keeping his calendar free for managing exceptions. “I don’t want my day mapped out,” he admits. He also keeps administration to a minimum by ensuring there is just one bank account per currency for the group and that everything runs through that account. “I don’t like bank accounts in general, which is strange for a treasurer,” he smiles. But there is a practical rationale behind it – a small number of banks where the relationship is intuitive, the technology state of the art and the pricing sustainable is much easier to manage, particularly when the main need is liquidity provision and FX services. “It will be detrimental on the mid-run to the quality of the rates we get if there are too many banks all quoting against each other,” he explains. “A bank, at the end of the day, will give us a good rate for a month and after acknowledging the adverse effect will end up adjusting margins accordingly.”
FX needs
Primetals trades in more than 20 currencies on a regular basis, so banks are selected for their strength in each currency and their ability to net their exposures in that respective currency internally. As Hamon
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