All Posts By

Ted Howard

FXRisk Management
April 14, 2020

As Day Follows Night: China Exposures Grow and So Do the Hedges Against Them

Members whose companies have material exposure to the Chinese market exchange experiences with how to manage the currency risk. What’s the best course of action when corporates need to blunt their growing cash-flow exposures in China? The answer, hedge. But what’s the best approach? Depends on the company of course. At a recent FX summit of NeuGroup’s two FX Managers’ Peer Groups – which due to COVID-19 was NeuGroup’s first-ever virtual peer group meeting – one session dealt with managing…
Ted Howard
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COVID-19Risk Management
April 14, 2020

“Too Soon” Is Now “Let’s Do It”: Risk Managers Start Planning for Life Beyond COVID

Up until about a week ago, companies were so busy handling the immediate issues related to COVID-19, they were putting off thinking of future risks. Enterprise risk management professionals are paid to look into the future and help companies prepare for it. But COVID-19 changed all that. “Too soon,” was the answer from most members of NeuGroup’s ERM peer group two weeks ago when we asked them about post-pandemic planning and their thoughts about the future. One member back then…
Ted Howard
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COVID-19FunctionalRisk ManagementSenior Executive
April 2, 2020

Closing a Quarter for SOX Can be Difficult in New, Remote World

An internal auditor describes what his company has done to successfully close a quarter when some physical tasks can’t be done. Part of Sarbanes-Oxley, the internal controls act released in 2002, requires a corporate’s chief executive and financial officers to certify financial and other information contained in the issuer’s quarterly and annual reports. But what happens in a crisis? What if some of that info requires someone in place to record inventory or in-person meetings when employee movement is heavily…
Ted Howard
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COVID-19Treasury Management
March 17, 2020

A Coronavirus Crisis Treasury Playbook

Treasurers probably haven’t seen crises like this before. Here’s what they can learn from past events. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the modern world with an almost unprecedented crisis. And the daily onslaught of worrying headlines—cancelled sports seasons and parades, Tom Hanks and wife infected, travel bans—seems to be triggering, mystifying actions by panicked consumers, like the run on toilet paper. But despite COVID-19’s unprecedented nature, for treasurers there actually is precedent, so there should be no mystery about what needs to be done (and…
Ted Howard
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BankingCapital Markets
March 17, 2020

Not All Bank Fees Are Created Equal

In good times and bad, treasury teams benefit from knowing how their banks look at the world. That's one reason this chart, created by NeuGroup's Scott Flieger, is compelling. It shows which products are especially important to banks by measuring both their relative profitability and how much balance sheet impact they have. A third dimension shows which products result in predictable revenue and which are more episodic in nature. Most members found the slide "directionally accurate" and helpful in explaining why…
Ted Howard
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Zoom Screen
NeuGroup News
March 12, 2020

Zoom in to NeuGroup Meetings

This week’s 2020 FX Managers’ Peer Group Summit was transformational. Due to COVID-19 and the health and safety concerns we have for our members, our team, our sponsor partners and our respective stakeholders, we decided last week to make all NeuGroup meetings virtual until further notice. As such, we just this week executed our first virtual meeting with NeuGroup’s FX Managers’ Peer Group 2020 Summit. The decision was made in consultation with our long-standing partner, Chatham Financial, which was to…
Ted Howard
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Capital MarketsNGIPension and Benefits
March 5, 2020

Actuarial Agony: Falling Interest Rates and the Plight of Pension Fund Managers

Private equity helps matters, but track records of outperformance don’t sway actuaries. Falling interest rates are pushing down the expected return on assets (EROA) at pension funds, an unwanted development for all managers and especially aggravating, perhaps, for those who have historically been able to outperform expectations. That was among the takeaways from a recent NeuGroup pension roundtable. Blame it on the actuaries. The pension fund manager at a major media company maintained an EROA of 7.5% over the last…
Ted Howard
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COVID-19Treasury Management
March 5, 2020

What Should Treasury and Finance Functions Be Doing About the Coronavirus?

Something that warrants a rare FOMC inter-meeting rate cut calls for broader finance engagement. There is a lot of information, advice and checklists coming out on how businesses should respond to the coronavirus, or COVID-19. This one from McKinsey is a good example.  Health and safety first. A majority of companies, rightly, start with the most important steps to ensure the health and safety of employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. Tabletop crisis response and planning. The next most important item tends to be the crisis…
Ted Howard
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Risk Management
March 3, 2020

How to Convince Business Units That ERM Has Real Value

Integrating it with strategic planning shifts perceptions that ERM is a bureaucratic exercise. Enterprise risk management (ERM) is often viewed by business leaders as a check-the-box exercise that interferes with the profit engines they’re seeking to run. A treasurer at a recent NeuGroup meeting who also chairs his company’s risk committee sought advice on how to convince the leaders of business units and other corporate entities that the ERM process adds value. Ed Scott, senior executive advisor at NeuGroup and…
Ted Howard
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Capital AllocationCash & Working Capital
February 27, 2020

A Look Back at Our Enterprise Reconciliation Insight

Founder’s Edition, by Joseph Neu A 20-year-old best practice guide says a lot about the state of working capital management today. There seems to be a lot of renewed interest in working capital management lately, with a focus on automating processes, capturing data and deploying technology. The goal: to improve analysis and predictability of the quote-to-cash, order-to-delivery and purchase-to-pay cycles. This stands to vastly improve working capital management, but especially cash and liquidity management. I kept thinking, all of this…
Ted Howard
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