Day in the life of a Treasury Analyst

Hello,

I'm in job search mode again, and am wondering what exactly it is that a corporate Treasury Analyst does on a day to day basis. How much modeling is there, and how involved are they in M&A, debt issuance, IPOs, etc? I work with corporate Treasury guys a bit but don't 100% understand what exactly they do.

Thanks!

 
Best Response

At least in my company (healthcare sector), it's insanely boring. Admittedly, I work in FP&A at a smaller company (around $750 MM in consolidated annual expenditures across 4 active related cos)

That said, if we aren't issuing debt or in surveillance season (two months after the audit comes back), you're literally moving money from one money market account to another and making transfers between your operating accounts and payroll/debt service funds. We are just completing a debt program now which provided some interesting activity for our Treasury group (and my team, as all of our debt is project-related).

Granted...in my company, I (FP&A) handle nearly all of the capital planning including cash needs, not treasury...ymmv

We recently went through some M&A activities, and I was involved in modelling and planning; none of our treasury folks were (until integration when they started to merge account services and lines of credit etc.)

Director of Finance and Corporate Development: 2020 - Present Manager of FP&A and Corporate Development: 2019 - 2020 Corporate Finance, Strategy and Development: 2011 - 2019 "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin
 

Thanks for the help. So basically it seems like FP&A does more of the modeling/M&A/debt issuance work. Is that what I should be getting from this?

"There's nothing you can do if you're too scared to try." - Nickel Creek
 

At the very least in my organization that's the case.

Again -- could very well be different elsewhere. But the vast majority of all modelling happening in my organization (healthcare sector) comes from the FP&A group

Director of Finance and Corporate Development: 2020 - Present Manager of FP&A and Corporate Development: 2019 - 2020 Corporate Finance, Strategy and Development: 2011 - 2019 "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin
 

Every company is different. Usually the larger companies will have an FP&A, Corp Dev, and Treasury department. If that is the case, you probably won't do much or any M&A related work in FP&A. If its a smaller company with no corp dev team, yes I think FP&A will be more involved with the modeling.. but that is assuming they have some prior experience.

The same goes for Treasury... is the company involved in a lot of acquisitions every year? Are they leveraged? etc.. But I'd like to hear from some people with current/prior Treasury experience.

 

Treasury is the most back-office job you can have. It sucks. Don't do it. You are the intermediary between the company's operators and the company's bank accounts. Every treasury department I have seen (and I have had the displeasure to start in one, which I managed to fanagle myself into the IBD during the 12 weeks internship) has been filled with black females, many without college degrees. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with any of those things, but from a sample size of 3 different treasury groups I have had direct interaction with this is what I saw. Since the topic of priviledge is so widely discussed and recognized I only mean to point out some major differences between what the majority of this site is shooting for and what you are asking about.

I also had the opportunity to work in an FP&A group in a ~10BB O&G company which is acquisition and capital markets heavy. The Finance department was set up into 3.5 groups. Corp dev, Investor Relations /FP&A (my group), Treasury. Corp Dev did 100% of acquisitions, and capital markets related modeling and strategies. The closest thing we did in FP&A was to build an operating model for the company to forecast budget. This was a pretty cool and very large project which put the analyst in direct contact with business unit presidents and the corp dev team. Other than that it was very basic budget and forecast models, no valuations based modeling. We also write the 10k, and jumped on investor relations calls with analysts and quarterly earnings. Most of our work was based on forecasting how much money each business unit would need each quarter. This treasury department did some insurance work as well, but again for the most part it was getting on the phone with the bank and saying, "Please clear the Check to XX subsidiary for $XX MM Today by 3 or we are going to switch banks."

 

Incredibly accurate, your description of FP&A is 10/10 correct. At the moment, I'm working at a F500 in FP&A and my other window is a model to forecast budgets for the BU for the Q2. If I had an SB, I'd give you one.

 

Similar to what others have been posting, I'd say the day-to-day tasks in Treasury are definitely less than thrilling. That said, I did work on several higher profile assignments on an ad-hoc basis. Our group was very heavily involved in all Capital Market related activity. Specifically, we managed any share buybacks, debt issuances, and worked very closely alongside the Corp. Development and Planning groups.

.......from what I've seen Treasury typically gets shit on, but for anyone who is unsure exactly where they would like to land in finance, it is certainly a good starting place simply due to the breadth of exposure you will get. Outside of our organization I was able to build a pretty legit network of Corporate Bankers, Money Market Traders and Debt Origination Traders....

In terms of pedigree, you'll see a bit of everything. Our department had CFAs, CPAs and MBAs - there was definitely no lack of education/accreditation. The hours were pretty slack, atmosphere chill and salary decent.

 

At my F500 there are 2 groups - cash management and treasury ops

Cash management is what realjackryan said. Essentially managing the bank accounts to ensure short term liquidity to meet daily cash disbursements. Also they maintain credit facilities.

Treasury ops has a couple of sub groups. They do long term planning. They analyze cash flow and determine if debt or equity needs to be issed. There is also a group to do specific project finance. There is also a risk management group...aka insurance.

There are worse groups.

 

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