HSBC presented to our southern region members at the recent Roundtable in the River Lee Hotel in Cork.

IACT and CIMA co-hosted their annual Southern Region Winter Economic Briefing and Outlook on 26th November in Cork.

Dr Loretta O’Sullivan, Group Chief Economist of Bank of Ireland gave a talk on the economic outlook for 2020.

A huge success again this year with 230 delegates signed up for this year’s 2019 conference This was up more than 15% on last year’s event, making it the biggest attendee level ever.  The audience was made up of an almost 50/50 split of treasurers and service providers and the 2019 conference speakers were again outstanding this year.  

http://www.corporatetreasury.ie

Peter Shea of Salmon Software discussed the factors that a Treasurer should consider while transitioning to Sonia. The presentation included the following:

• Brief history of SONIA
• Background of Salmon Software
• Collaboration with UK clients to understand the SONIA requirements
• Development of new modules to accommodate SONIA (interest calculations and accruals)
• Live demo of the Salmon Treasurer application which show how the SONIA interest and accruals are managed:

o             Daily SONIA interest Rates

o             Loan Management

o             Interest Accruals

o             Interest Dashboards

The purpose of the demo highlighted the many challenges that need to be overcome for people considering using Excel as a tool to manage SONIA based instruments.

This roundtable meeting was hosted by Publicis. 

Topics  discussed included:

1) Implementation of centralised cash management, hedging combined with payments and receivables on behalf of (POBO/ROBO)

2) brief overview of funding and extracting cash from complex countries.

With this initiative the IACT hopes to further promote treasury best practice among our corporate members.

The theme for this breakfast meeting was FX Risk and Effective FX Risk Management and  covered the topics below.

• The trader’s view on significant geo-political events & dealing with market shocks
• Hedging Strategies utilised to support clients - from portfolio to basic
• Availability of current research and existing tools to clients.

Speakers were Johnny Grimes, Global Head of GTB FX, Head of GTB Ireland, David Leigh, Global Head of FX Spot and eTrading and Konrad Haunit, Head of FX, Institutional & Treasury Coverage

The presentation by Senan Moloney from Barclays started with a demonstration of how seriously the bank takes security - he was unable to connect his laptop to the hotel's system. However the slides were not needed as Senan certainly gave a compelling talk on the variety of risks posed by cyber crime.

The key message I took away from the session was that a company's best defence against this threat is education and awareness - across all levels of the business. 

The IACT trip to the races at Leopardstown was a great success. Two tables were taken by the association with tables also taken by Barclays and Deutsche Bank. 

The Annual Golf outing took place on Friday 24th May this year. Optimistic that the weather would be on our side given the previous week’s sunny skies, we were all delighted to watch the  clouds disappear over the mountains as the afternoon progressed. 

The dinner and prize giving after the golf allowed for plenty of conversation and networking among the participants.

Our thanks go to Anne Fitzgerald and Keith Lynch who did a great job in getting us out on time and in tallying the scorecards to produce team winners AIB.