16 TMI | THE SOUTHAFRICANTREASURER NEXT GENERATIONTREASURY Many of today’s top treasurers cut their teethmanaging the falls in the rand or spikes in interest rates that were common during many of those periods. This institutional memory has stood the South African corporate treasurer in good stead during more recent volatility events. These include the war in Ukraine, lockdowns in China, rising inflation and shortages of key commodities and components on the global front; and load shedding, transport infrastructure problems and the recent floods in KwaZulu Natal, on the local front. In short, the South African corporate treasurer understands that market swings are part of life and has many of the tools South African corporate treasurers are a resilient lot. Going back a few decades, they’ve endured events such as the Russian debt crisis of the late 1990s, the rand selloff of 2001, the global financial crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and a number of other volatile episodes in between. By Peter Rattey, Head of Treasury Sales and Structuring, Investec needed to tackle them – including the skills, experience and temperament to manage risk. A new toolset for a changing world However, we perhaps need to ask if this set of tools is enough for an increasingly complex world. Looking more closely at recent events, some common threads emerge that reveal the extent of this complexity. From a geopolitical perspective, a global realignment appears to be taking place, from the unipolar, USdominated world that characterised the world in previous decades, to a multipolar world in which China stakes its claim as AToolkit for theNext GenerationTreasurer
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