Treasury Recruitment – Market Report, December 2020

As we reach the end of 2020, how active is the treasury jobs market?

Associate Director, Guy Middleton presents his December market report…

Where are the jobs?

Despite the continued presence of COVID-19, job opportunities for treasury professionals have started to reappear.

As companies start to look beyond the pandemic, we are seeing signs of investment in treasury. This hasn’t yet resulted in significant senior level opportunities for experienced treasurers, but many start-ups and SME’s have established treasury functions for the first time, and this has resulted in a number of opportunities for standalone Heads of Treasury with the potential to build a small team.

Many of these opportunities have been with private equity backed businesses, particularly in the FinTech space, but the demand for specialist treasury expertise in smaller companies is definitely on the rise.

There has also been an increase in the number of opportunities at both Manager and Analyst levels within businesses of all shapes and sizes, as they look to ensure they have an adequate treasury resource in place.

What are the current market trends?

The second national lockdown, and subsequent tiered local restrictions that have been implemented across the UK have caused continued cash flow problems for many businesses. The recent collapse of Arcadia has highlighted the scale of these problems. As a result, a maintained focus on cash flow forecasting and liquidity management has meant that treasury departments have been as busy as ever.

Many banks are focusing on ensuring they have sufficient resources in place to meet the Bank of England’s Resolvability Assessment Framework (RAF) deadlines for 2021, which is resulting in an increase in both permanent and temporary opportunities in Recovery and Resolution.

And the end of the Brexit transition period will require some degree of change in all organisations, and this will certainly affect treasury departments. Much of this change will fall on existing team members to implement, but it is likely to result in some increase in number of project focused interim opportunities coming to the market.

Is confidence returning?

Autumn 2020 has had its ups and downs, but the recent announcement and initial roll out of a COVID vaccination programme has resulted in a significant pick up in confidence as we move into 2021.

Although there may still be some difficult months ahead, businesses across all sectors can finally see some light at the end of the tunnel, and are starting to make plans for a post pandemic future. This will almost certainly result in increased investment in treasury expertise, and an increase in volumes of recruitment at all levels.

Guy Middleton is the Treasury Associate Director at Harvey John.

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