treasury of the future is to achieve the goal of increased resource utilization for the
benefit of the business—strategic activity—while the total treasury burden continues
to contract (the sum of the three activities). The shifting of resources from the tradi-
tional administrative and transaction roles to strategic activities will put treasury staff
and functions into a business partnership with the other business units of the firm.
This is the ideal, and is the goal of treasury managers worldwide.
(d) Treasury Organization. Although people manage, not organizational structures
(or charts), the generic organizational structure used by multinational firms to organ-
ize their financial management activities is a good place to start in understanding the
multitude of activities required of management. The “typical” organizational chart of
a multinational firm’s treasury department—if there is such a thing as typical—might
appear as that in Exhibit 5.3, illustrating the functional vice presidents and frequent
staffing below the vice president level. The international treasury is actually more
“typical” than the superstructure in which it falls.
In principle and in order, the activities focus on the financial strategy and decision-
making of the firm (corporate finance), the management of the cash flows of the firm
(cash management), the funding of the firm (capital markets), the tax planning func-
tions of the firm as they are understood across all functional areas (tax management),
and the international financial activities of the firm (international treasury). Obvi-
ously there are as many organizational charts and combinations of vice presidents, di-
rectors, managers, and assistants, as there are firms, but this minimum requirement
list serves as representative of the underlying functional areas required of all treasury
departments.
Exhibit 5.3 also illustrates a fairly typical mix of function and geography in the in-
5.2 TREASURY MANAGEMENT 5 • 7Exhibit 5.2. The Changing Resource Use of Treasury Activities: The Evolution of Adminis-
trative, Transaction, and Strategic Activity in Treasury Management.