Treasury?

Did my internship in Treasury and IR for a $5B, 200-300 store retail company, so this is from a very limited experience. However, I was the first finance intern that company had, and I was filling in for a open role while the company was hiring, so my experience was a little more "real world" than being a coffee fetcher.

One of the main things that I did in treasury was tracking the cash for the company- Every day I would summarize all the inflows and outflows of cash and send the summary out to the leadership team. For that company, the summer was when the cash would dry up, so by the end of the summer we had to cash in some bonds that we had purchased the previous fall.

Another thing we did was ForeEx hedging. We had some decent international currency exposure and that summer there was talk of Grexit, so currencies were fluctuating pretty hard. We therefore bought some ForeEX hedges to limit our exposure.

That summer we also renegotiated our credit agreement to upscale our credit facility by around 50%. That involved meeting with various banks to get their pitches regarding their fees to be the lead bank, and a lot of cost analysis to determine which bank to go with.

Those were the "cool" things we did while I was there. The treasury team consisted of the VP of IR who was also the treasurer, a Sr. Manager of treasury, and me, the intern. The IR side was just me and the VP. The Sr. Manager of treasury handled all the treasury minutia, and from what I could see, his job was boring as hell. It seemed like what he did was mainly handle situations where customer's credit cards got double charged in our stores. He handled making sure the store managers got their register cash picked up on time. He handled making sure each store had the cash it needed for the week. He had like 10 RSA keys for all the various bank accounts, and transferred money between them as needed. He interfaced with A/P and A/R a lot. He handled setting up subsidiaries for tax purposes. Frankly, it was basically just "treasury accounting".

The interesting stuff was the stuff I got to do (the special projects). The FT treasury analyst who was there before me got to do some cool stuff as well, like participating in the road show to raise debt for the company. He said he got to fly in private jets and shit.. Really baller stuff. He also did special projects like setting up armored car service to pick up cash from our stores (resulting in more liquidity for the company-he completely spearheaded that project). He left treasury for FP&A (internal promotion from analyst-> manager) when the cool stuff in treasury kinda wrapped up.

Bottom line- Treasury can be really cool, and it can be boring as hell. It depends on your role and the company and how much the IR team is blended with treasury. Treasury teams are pretty lean, so its a good role when you are doing analysis and can put your name on important projects and get promoted to different areas. The team is lean though, so there isn't a lot of upward mobility if you remain in treasury.