Operational program support

Today’s treasury and accounting teams play an increasingly valuable role in maintaining operational continuity amid shifting priorities. External market triggers or changes to your organization’s risk profile may prompt you to review your risk programs, making tactical adjustments to ensure they still achieve their objectives. At the same time, you must guard against operational risks stemming from key-person risk, employee turnover, remote trading, and inefficiency.

Whether you wish to augment internal resources or obtain an independent, third-party perspective, Chatham Financial provides robust, flexible operational support.

• We can support front, middle, and back-office functions within your operational hedging program without disrupting your workflows.
• Our team can fill short- and long-term resource gaps, creating process documentation and providing treasury personnel training to ensure timely and complete hand-offs of workflows back to your organization once internal roles are filled.
• You can also partner with us to access transaction preparation, pricing, execution, and analysis for your operational hedging programs, informed by our global daily trading volume.

Operational continuity

Because business disruptions can occur with no warning, treasury teams must prepare to maintain their front, middle, and back-office operations and workflows for the unexpected. Chatham can help you assess the impacts a sudden key-person departure, major technology disruption, or an unexpected disaster could have on all areas of risk management operations and create an actionable plan for maintaining operational continuity. Chatham can even run your treasury team's activities, giving your company time to plan and react to the disruption.

Process documentation

One key area of preparation companies can implement to provide process continuity and enhance controls across hybrid workspaces is documenting their risk management workflows and processes in the form of desktop procedures or standard work documents. By partnering with Chatham to develop a comprehensive process map — including how functional roles and processes should shift during specific crisis scenarios — you can avoid lost time and critical errors.

Personnel transition planning

Whether prompted by temporary leave, internal backfills, role changes, or new team members, timely and complete workflow hand-offs can ensure consistent operations. Determining which internal or external resources you will utilize and then preparing adequate training for personnel in these new roles is a critical component of treasury department continuity.

Financial risk exposure reassessment

For companies conducting a periodic review of their exposure profile and hedging strategies, it can be a material draw on resources to gather data from business units and run analysis to gain insight into the risk profile versus working with a partner who has visibility into how other corporates model their risk and inform stakeholders. Leveraging Chatham’s proven expertise, methodology and scenarios can be more efficient, accurate, and impactful than building custom models, obtaining the right data sources, and determining the appropriate methodology in-house.

Hedge accounting reassessment

While economic priorities often drive a hedging strategy, treasury teams also seek to align the accounting results with the economic objectives. Selecting the appropriate hedge accounting approach can maximize the flexibility and capacity of a hedging program while minimizing P&L impact.

Policy and governance review

After you’ve reimagined and implemented your risk management infrastructure, plan to review and improve it at regular intervals. Periodically conducting a comprehensive review ensures greater confidence in the program from investors, the board, senior management, and other stakeholders. As markets and business practices change, regularly reviewing and comparing your governance and policy documents against leading practices for risk management elevates the level of assurance that treasury can provide to senior management teams.

Ongoing assessment and benchmarking

Continuing to assess your programs across the key functions and benchmark them against peer organizations in your industry can ensure that you follow leading treasury practices and maintain operational continuity.