Daniele Vecchi says that being a treasurer of a development company is a lot like being a risk officer at a bank: Nobody listens to you during good times and deverybody scrutinizes you when the economy takes a turn for the worse.
Vecchi is senior vice president and head of group treasury at Majid Al Futtaim Group LLC, one of the Middle East’s premier developers of shopping malls and hypermarkets. The lessons he has learned over the past couple years are proof that even the most successful businesses benefit from the creation of a strong, internal treasury culture.
Centralization is key, according to Vecchi. When he first arrived at Al Futtaim,the company treasury appeared to be disconnected from the rest of the company’s operations. “We had a lack of treasury
culture, I’ll admit. In the past, different sections of the company were talking to and borrowing from the same bank without knowing what the other was doing.
The bank must have had a good laugh,” he said at EuroFinance’s recent Trade, Treasury, and Cash Management in the Middle East conference.

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