When Damian Glendinning joined Chinese computer manufacturerLenovo in 2005, he faced an unusual challenge. Lenovo was in theprocess of acquiring IBM's PC division, a business three times itssize. At the time Lenovo had no operations outside of China, whileIBM's PC division had no treasury of its own. Glendinning wasappointed treasurer and vice president and given the task ofsetting up a treasury and cash management operation covering 66countries. And he had less than five months to get the new treasuryup and running.

“This was with no staff, no systems and no functioning bankrelationships outside of China,” Glendinning says. “While this wasan enormous challenge, it was also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunityto design a treasury from a completely clean sheet of paper. Ifyou're in a large corporation, your existing operations tend to bea constraining factor—it's very unusual not to have that.”

Prior to joining Lenovo, Glendinning had spent 21 years workingfor IBM, where he served seven years as treasurer of theAsia-Pacific region in Singapore and two years as director ofglobal treasury operations in New York.

Without the constraints of legacy systems and mindful of theproject's tight deadline, Glendinning decided on a structure thatwas simpler than most.

Lenovo's highly streamlined and centralized treasury, based inSingapore, has no local treasury staff and, with the exception ofChina, works with a single global bank.

His decision to go with a single global bank weathered thefinancial crisis, when many other corporates were looking todiversify their bank relationships. That arrangement has givenLenovo unusually high visibility into its cash position and allowstreasury to provide senior management with a daily cash report.

“Going into the crisis, we were not rushing around trying tofind out which banks we had accounts with,” Glendinning says. “Weknew how much we had andwhere.”

Despite his decades of experience, Glendinning keeps an openmind, and his experiences at Lenovo, which reported 2010 revenue of$21.6 billion, continue to provide the occasional surprise.

“IBM had been factoring its receivables to its credit division,and one of the terms of the acquisition was that we would continueto do so for five years,” he says. Despite his initial reservationsabout factoring, Glendinning has been impressed by the benefits ofthis approach. “It's actually a very flexible form of funding whichadjusts automatically to the level of business.” He recentlyextended the factoring arrangement beyond the original five-yearterm.

Looking forward, Glendinning says Lenovo's growth ambitionscould result in M&A activity, and the associated tasks offunding acquisitions and integrating the acquired entities.Meanwhile, as president of Singapore's Association of CorporateTreasurers, Glendinning also has an eye on the bigger picture.

“Treasurers around the world face a number of challenges interms of how we and our banks use technology,” he says. “The nextstep in terms of making treasury more efficient is to significantlyincrease the level of straight-through processing. For me, that'sreally the next area that treasurers collectively need to focuson.”

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