ASAA 2022 Citi Yearbook

Overall Winner A Rising Star Gwendolyn Ng, Treasury Manager – Asia Pacific & Middle East Team Danone The markings of a seasoned professional Gwendolyn Ng joined the Danone Asia Pacific & Middle East (ASPAME) three-man treasury team in 2020, playing an instrumental role in their ambitious transformation to create a robust scalable system to manage the business growth in the region. Within a short period, Gwen adapted to the organisational culture and priorities, demonstrating a willingness to lead initiatives and deliver targeted outcomes. Handling projects with all the markings of a seasoned professional – razor sharp planning and time management. These projects, while led by Gwen, were also dependent on other team members from Danone. Gwen was able to convince them of the larger vision to ensure the successful implementation. Regional centralisation and standardisation of banking access management With the support of banking partners, Gwen embarked on the centralisation of banking access management with the aim of standardising. All 12 countries’ e-banking across multiple banks were centralised out of Singapore which ultimately reduced the number of e-banking portals from over 20 to a single portal for each bank. Proper back office procedure was established to manage the authorities of over 250 users and 300 accounts in a compliant and efficient way in line with the group’s banking control policies. Since the banking accesses were managed centrally, it eliminated the maintenance efforts for the local countries which translated to 170 man-hours saved per year. There were also opportunities for savings by enrolling products on the regional e-banking profile. Enhanced payment process This was an initiative to streamline and standardise payment operations through Danone’s in-house bank. Gwen identified gaps in existing processes and coordinated with external consultants to eliminate slow and error-prone manual tasks with the help of technology. The team was able to improve operational efficiency and cut down payment processing time by 40%. More time previously spent on manual execution could be set aside for value-added tasks. Cash management optimisation A three-phased approach was adopted to improve the cash management in Indonesia. Under Phase 1, payment operations for 16 warehouses and 22 plant factories were streamlined by aggregating the funds from several locations to a centralised location. The flows were migrated from 33 accounts with a local bank to two accounts with a core bank. This improvement in account structure led to greater efficiencies such as lower bank commissions, reduced administrative and reporting efforts, increased visibility and control through the centralised regional profile and even reduced counterparty risk at company level. Through the migration, the team was able to revisit existing ways of working and develop a compliant payment creation method. 16 | treasurytodayasia Adam Smith Awards Asia © February 2023