It's fair to say that Sarah-Jane Chilver-Stainer is a high achiever. When she spoke to Treasury & Risk earlier this month, she had just completed a record-breaking dollar bond issue for GlaxoSmithKline, the London-based pharmaceutical and healthcare company. The $5 billion issue, which attracted $15 billion in demand, included three-, five- and 10-year notes with coupons of 0.75%, 1.5% and 2.85%, respectively—the lowest coupons ever achieved on U.S. dollar bonds sold by a UK company.
For Chilver-Stainer, the transaction was just the latest in a series of accomplishments at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which had $44.2 billion in 2011 revenue and employs more than 97,000 around the world. GSK's group treasurer and senior vice president recently set up a new pension risk management team and took on responsibility for the company's insurance activities. She completed a major reorganization of the treasury team at the beginning of the year and recently established an in-house bank.
Aside from these projects, Chilver-Stainer points out the importance of keeping the nuts and bolts of treasury on track, such as managing the company's $23 billion debt portfolio and its $9.5 billion investment portfolio. She joined SmithKline Beecham, one of GSK's predecessor companies, in 1995 and held a number of treasury roles before she was appointed to her current position in 2008. Today Chilver-Stainer manages a centralized treasury team covering GSK's activities in more than 100 countries. Her areas of responsibility include corporate finance, the global treasury consultancy, cash management and the new pension team, as well as her insurance responsibilities.
Minimizing risk is a top priority across these functions. For example, the investment portfolio is mostly invested in AAA-rated Treasury-only money market funds. Meanwhile, GSK is closely tracking the impact of the eurozone crisis and chief executive Andrew Witty revealed in February that the company is sweeping cash out of the eurozone every day.
“The European risk reduction agenda is a huge focus for GSK,” Chilver-Stainer says. “As well as sweeping cash back to London on a daily basis, we've looked to reduce other risks on the balance sheet—for example, we've sold some of our receivables portfolio in Europe. We've also created an enterprise-wide risk management project team, so if something does happen in Europe and we have to go into crisis mode, we have an established crisis management team in place.”
Chilver-Stainer is not resting on her laurels, but is looking ahead to the challenges of the next 12 months.
“The agenda is always event-driven, which is what makes life in treasury so interesting because you never know what's coming up,” she says. “We're continuing to develop the euro crisis issues management team, and we've promised to reduce our external financing costs by 200 basis points by the end of 2013, so that's getting a lot of focus internally. We're looking to continue to reduce our insurance costs and to build up the activities of the pensions risk management team—those are my main challenges at the moment.”
See the 2012 Women in Finance list here.
See the 2011 Women in Finance list here.
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