ASAA 2022 Citi Yearbook

Overall Winner Corporate Treasurer of the Year 2022 Joseph Chua Executive Director, Treasury, Lenovo • Working with partner banks to evaluate how short- and long term facilities could be linked to ESG projects, ie sustainability linked financing. This approach is also enabling Lenovo to access new sources of financing and a wider investor base, as well as contributing to the ESG agenda. • Looking at ways to align ESG objectives across the supplier base, including use of renewable electricity and reduction of waste, including sustainable supply chain financing. Innovative cash flow forecasting Joseph has instigated a new, comprehensive, weekly rolling short, medium- and long-term cash forecasting model across 20 categories of trade/non trade business flows. The forecast comprises more than three million data points, overlaid with predictive analytics that includes revenue forecast trends and historic customer payment behaviour. As a result, the team now enjoys 95%-100% forecasting accuracy at 30 days, and 92% at 90 days. This has proved instrumental in enabling treasury to make better financing decisions, including precise debt amount and tenor. The forecasting model is further distinguished by a sensitivity model that provides an ‘early warning system’ to anticipate and avoid financing or working capital disruption. Managing risk A complex and challenging geopolitical environment, rising commodity prices, fiscal tightening in the US to manage inflationary pressures and ongoing supply chain disruptions have depressed market demand, driven FX volatility and created significant headwinds. Joseph has pushed risk management to the top of the treasury agenda to minimise exposure through a series of risk transfer strategies. Joseph has expanded treasury’s risk management remit beyond financial risk to an Enterprise Risk Management view. Driving transformation and digitalisation Joseph has continued to pursue his digitisation strategy relentlessly in order to streamline processes, improve productivity and free-up capacity to support the business in new ways. For example, the team recognised certain intra-company processes were resulting in manual effort for accounting and tax colleagues. Treasury therefore designed an in-house fund transfer platform and integrated it at the front end with supply chain, logistics, accounting and tax teams, and at the back end with the FXall electronic trading platform to create an efficient, end-to-end process flow across 17 types of inter-company cash/non-cash settlements, 30 countries and 400+ bank accounts, so far. With a standardised, automatic process now in place, the accounting team benefits from auto reconciliation and auto posting, therefore reducing its manual workload. The tax team can now optimise transfer pricing mechanisms for timely and accurate tax true-up and a reduction in hedging costs. Joseph Chua, Executive Director, Treasury comments, “Our digitisation journey continues at pace, including taking our current solutions to the next level, such as through increased use of tokenisation. A lesson of the pandemic has been that as well as supporting suppliers and contract manufacturers, we need to look beyond our direct partners to their sub-contractors that may lack access to funding. Through tokenisation, we can be more precise in targeting financing to the parts of the supply chain where it is needed the most and has the greatest impact in terms of increasing supply chain resilience and bolstering continuity of supply.” Lenovo is a Chinese multinational technology company specialising in designing, manufacturing and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions and related services. treasurytodayasia Adam Smith Awards Asia © February 2023 | 15