Group Treasurer: The Person Who Knows Where the Cash Is

Five of the six Gulf currencies are pegged to the US dollar, and that single fact explains why so many Gulf boards treat treasury as a quiet corner of finance. The group treasurer is tested somewhere else entirely. A Gulf group finds out how good its group treasurer is at one of three moments: a refinancing, a loan covenant test, or the day one subsidiary runs short of cash and nobody at the centre saw it coming. JOH Partners sees the same pattern across holding companies, family groups and sovereign-adjacent platforms. This piece explains what the role really owns, why the appointment is under-valued, and what a board can ask for to check it.

Group treasurer: the one role that touches every entity

A group treasurer sits across the whole group in a way few other senior finance jobs do. The role owns five things. It knows how much cash each company holds and where. It knows how much the group owes, to whom, and when each loan falls due. It manages the group's banks, which in a large group can number in the dozens. It manages exposure to currency and interest rates. And it watches the terms that lenders attach to their loans, because a breach of one can turn a healthy business into an emergency.

The boundaries with neighbouring jobs need stating, because boards blur them. The chief financial officer owns the financial strategy and the relationship with the board and investors. The group financial controller owns the consolidated accounts and keeps them ready for an auditor. The group treasurer owns the cash and the funding. Put simply, the controller says what happened, the treasurer says what the group can do next, and the chief financial officer decides what it should do.

Why a pegged currency makes boards relax

Currency risk is what most directors think of when they hear the word treasury. In the Gulf it looks small, because the Saudi riyal, the UAE dirham, the Qatari riyal, the Bahraini dinar and the Omani rial are all pegged to the dollar, and the Kuwaiti dinar is managed against a basket. A board that sees little currency risk concludes that treasury is simple.

That conclusion is wrong, and in JOH's experience it is where the problems start. The risks that hurt a Gulf group are of a different kind. Debt can be arranged so that several loans fall due in the same year. Cash can build up in a subsidiary that, for legal or practical reasons, cannot easily be moved to the company that needs it. A group can find that most of its borrowing comes from two or three banks, which makes it fragile if one of them changes its appetite. And loan covenants, the financial tests a lender sets, can tighten as a business grows, without anyone updating the headroom calculation.

None of these shows up in a currency report. All of them are the group treasurer's to see.

A board that sees no currency risk thinks it has no treasury risk. The risk is in when the debt falls due, where the cash is, and how many banks the group depends on.

Three moments that expose the appointment

The first moment is a refinancing. A group needs to raise or extend a large loan and finds that its lenders want a clear picture of cash, debt and forecasts across every entity. If the treasurer has the picture, the process takes weeks. If not, it takes months, and the delay has a price in the terms that are offered.

The second is a covenant test. Most loans carry conditions, such as a ratio of debt to earnings that must stay under a stated level. A group that tests itself regularly knows its headroom a year ahead. A group that tests only when the bank asks can discover, with a few weeks to go, that a recent acquisition or a weak quarter has taken it near the line.

The third is a shortfall. One subsidiary, often a quiet one, runs short of cash to pay salaries or suppliers, while another entity in the same group holds a surplus. A group treasurer who runs a proper cash view across entities sees that gap weeks early and moves money in an orderly way. One who does not finds out when a supplier calls.

JOH's research on the control layer beneath the Gulf chief executive looks at legal, risk and audit as the functions that check the numbers. Treasury is the function that makes the cash position, and in a group with many entities, the two need to be read together. JOH's wider work on the finance line beneath the chief financial officer is set out in the research on group finance leadership in the Gulf.

Where treasury meets the accounts

Treasury decisions now show up in published accounts in ways boards did not expect a few years ago. The International Accounting Standards Board's amendments on supplier finance arrangements, effective for annual periods from 1 January 2024, require companies to disclose how they use arrangements in which a bank pays a supplier early and the company pays the bank later. The amendments sit in IAS 7 and IFRS 7, and they put a treasury choice in front of the reader of the accounts.

The practical result is that the treasurer and the controller need to talk to each other. A financing decision taken for good commercial reasons has to be reported correctly, and a controller who finds out about it at year-end has a harder job than one who was told in March. David Daly, a managing partner who advises on turnarounds, covers related ground in his conversation on finance transformation, tax compliance and radical honesty in the UAE, and it is a helpful listen for any board thinking about how its finance functions share information.

A composite: the covenant nobody was watching

The details below are changed and combined from several situations. This is not any one client's story.

A family-owned industrial group buys a distribution business in a neighbouring country. The purchase is funded by new borrowing. The group's treasurer is a long-serving employee who handles bank relationships personally and keeps most of the detail in his head and his own spreadsheets. In the following year, the acquired business has a weak quarter. Earnings fall, and debt is higher than before. Nobody has recalculated covenant headroom since the deal, and the bank's quarterly test is three weeks away.

The test is passed, narrowly, after an anxious fortnight in which the finance team rebuilds the numbers by hand. The family learns two things. The group was closer to a breach than anyone knew. And the person who held the knowledge was one resignation away from taking it with him.

Groups in transition are particularly exposed to this. JOH's work placing the first non-family chief executive into a Saudi industrial group is a reminder of what changes when a group moves from personal trust to professional management: banking relationships that rested on a family name have to be documented, and the person who holds them becomes a succession question as well as a finance one.

What a board can ask for

A board does not need to understand every instrument its treasurer uses. It can ask for one page, and it can note how long it takes to arrive.

The page should show cash held by entity, the group's debt by maturity date, the headroom against each loan covenant for the next four quarters, and the share of funding that each bank provides. A treasurer who can produce it in a day has the group under control. One who needs a week has told the board something important, even if the page itself is fine.

Boards that want a standing view of how the control and finance appointments are performing, rather than a one-off request, increasingly use platforms such as Board Pulse to follow them against the brief they were given. The group treasurer is worth adding to that list. JOH's research on the chairs of Gulf-listed family businesses is a useful companion for any chair deciding how much of this detail belongs on the board agenda. The sector context for groups with many entities and several lenders is set out on the group holdings sector page.

The person who knows where a group's cash is, and which bank it depends on, is usually not on the board's list of senior appointments. They should be.

The question behind the question

Underneath all of this is a simple point about attention. Boards spend their time on the appointments they can see, the chief executive, the chief financial officer, and the heads of the big business lines. The group treasurer does their best work when nothing is going wrong, and so is judged, if at all, on a day nobody would have chosen. That is the reason to ask the board's one-page question now, while the answer is a matter of curiosity and not of urgency.

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Key takeaways

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JOH Partners is an executive search and senior executive recruitment firm advising boards, family groups and sovereign-adjacent platforms on group treasurer and wider finance-line appointments across the GCC, the UK and Singapore. A board that wants a continuing view of its senior finance and control appointments can request a Board Pulse demo, or engage a partner for a confidential conversation about who holds the cash picture in the group today and who would hold it if they left.