Navigating treasury transformation: From startups to mature companies

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, treasury departments face the dual challenge of maintaining stability while driving innovation. At the recent Treasury 360 Nordic event, Susanne Stenborg, Head of Treasury Operations at SKF, shared valuable insights from her journey across both established and startup treasuries. Her fireside chat with Kristoffer Jansell from the FX Sales team at Nordea revealed key lessons for treasury professionals navigating transformation in companies of all sizes.

The value of experience in building from scratch

Stenborg, who started her career in the treasury team at Swedish industrial bearings manufacturer SKF, has navigated roles in Volvo Cars and Polestar, where she had the opportunity to create a treasury operation from scratch. For the past year, she has been back at SKF, working on improving processes, small and large, as part of treasury’s digital transformation journey. 

When faced with the exciting opportunity to start with a blank slate at Polestar, she found her prior experience from a large, established treasury invaluable: “I would not have been comfortable doing that if I didn’t have the experience from the large treasury, with all the treasury processes, and knowing what I needed to put in place.”

At the time, Polestar had not started selling cars, and Stenborg was thrown into preparations for the business to go live. She had to balance immediate business requirements with her vision for building a lean, automated treasury. While the blank canvas offered freedom from legacy systems, it also presented unique challenges. 

“There is a challenge to not having any history. No figures for the banks to look at when they do due diligence,” she noted.

Despite these challenges, Stenborg was able to come quite far in setting a long-term treasury strategy for Polestar while still focusing on short-term deliverables. 

“You had to take decisions quickly, move forward, and then if something didn’t go as planned, you just simply had to go back and do differently,” she said. This “fail fast” approach allowed for rapid innovation and continuous improvement, ensuring that each step supported the long-term goal. 

Applying startup agility to mature treasuries

When Stenborg returned to SKF, she brought with her the startup mindsets of flexibility and cross-functional collaboration. She implemented a job rotation for two open positions, which allowed the new hires to experience both front and back office roles. This approach not only creates more generalists in treasury, it also promotes a deeper understanding of process inefficiencies and potential improvements, according to Stenborg. 

She emphasised the importance of continually questioning established processes. This has resulted in efficiency gains at SKF, for example, in simplifying FX settlement processes. By eliminating manual steps, the team has freed up time for more value-adding activities. In a mature treasury, it’s also important to periodically revisit the question of treasury’s core purpose – examining the rationale behind certain practices and how to do them even better.

One of Stenborg’s key points was to also empower treasury professionals to innovate and try out solutions themselves – instead of going through traditional IT channels, where resources may be squeezed.

“Not everything has to go through the IT department,” she said. She cited an example of an SKF colleague using generative AI to code the send-out of automated emails. “Often it works; sometimes it doesn’t. We should not be too afraid to try the IT tools ourselves.”