FP&A or Treasury?

I have 2 offers / anticipated offers in hand. The first, a corporate FP&A position within a F50. It is my understanding that the this is a high-level consolidation role that provides reporting and commentary to senior management. My biggest concerns are that is on the "expense-only" side which really narrows the scope, and that it might not be too analytical / data driven, given that it is a consolidation role.

The other offer is not so surely in hand, but I feel confident that I can lock it up. It is within the Treasury at another F50 working on daily / monthly forecasting for risk. It's not your typical risk role but encompasses a business-wide view, and does a lot of modeling and forecasting.

My long-term goal is to work within strategic analytics. Whether that be corp strategy or corp dev, I'm not sure, but it really interests me to be a part of the overall decision making. Do you think I would get good enough exposure to the analytical / data side with the FP&A role to make it down this route? Or should I pass up that offer and take my chances with the Treasury role?

 
Best Response

I've said this in other threads but I'll go ahead and mention it for you. Treasury is hit or miss- you can have a really awesome experience, or the whole thing could be more like accounting.

I had an internship in treasury and it was awesome- the team was small, so I reported directly to the VP and got to interact with the CFO. The other neat thing is that in some companies, the treasury and IR functions have overlapping responsibilities. That summer we were renegotiating our credit agreement, so I got to build the models to help determine which bank was giving us the best deal. At the end of the summer we had a huge meeting with all the banks who were part of the credit facility, so that was cool. The other thing is that treasury is the "buyer" of most corporate banking services. So I got to be there for pitches and analysis of different offers for our loyalty card business, our transaction processing, etc. The guy before me in my role got to be part of when the company issued some debt. He got to be on the roadshow, fly in private jets, etc etc. He also ran a project to have armored vehicles pick up the cash from our stores, which ended up helping the cash liquidity position. great experience, and he was promoted to a manager role after 2 years.

Now on the flip side, there was one guy on the team who had all the RSA keys and had access to all the accounts and did all the releasing of funds and all the daily treasury tasks. His job was boring as all hell. It was basically an accounting job with no external exposure, no special projects- just repeated daily activates like releasing funds to AP, double checking work from AR, issuing refunds to customers. Boring.

FP&A will give you really transferrable experience and will likely be the typical financial planning role- forecasting, month-end reporting, some ad hoc analysis. It's a fairly predicable job. Treasury can mean a lot of things- I'd encourage you to ask more questions about the role and learn what an average week and month would look like. If it's a repetitive, accounting-like role, I'd stay very far away. If it's an interactive, "corporate buyside", investor-facing role, go for it- you'll get a wealth of experience and networking.

 

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