It's fair to say that Sarah-Jane Chilver-Stainer is a highachiever. When she spoke to Treasury & Risk earlierthis month, she had just completed a record-breaking dollar bondissue for GlaxoSmithKline, the London-based pharmaceutical andhealthcare company. The $5 billion issue, which attracted $15billion in demand, included three-, five- and 10-year notes withcoupons of 0.75%, 1.5% and 2.85%, respectively—the lowest couponsever achieved on U.S. dollar bonds sold by a UK company.

For Chilver-Stainer, the transaction was just the latest in aseries of accomplishments at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which had $44.2billion in 2011 revenue and employs more than 97,000 around theworld. GSK's group treasurer and senior vice president recently setup a new pension risk management team and took on responsibilityfor the company's insurance activities. She completed a majorreorganization of the treasury team at the beginning of the yearand recently established an in-house bank.

Aside from these projects, Chilver-Stainer points out theimportance of keeping the nuts and bolts of treasury on track, suchas managing the company's $23 billion debt portfolio and its $9.5billion investment portfolio. She joined SmithKline Beecham, one ofGSK's predecessor companies, in 1995 and held a number of treasuryroles before she was appointed to her current position in 2008.Today Chilver-Stainer manages a centralized treasury team coveringGSK's activities in more than 100 countries. Her areas ofresponsibility include corporate finance, the global treasuryconsultancy, cash management and the new pension team, as well asher insurance responsibilities.

Minimizing risk is a top priority across thesefunctions. For example, the investment portfolio is mostly investedin AAA-rated Treasury-only money market funds. Meanwhile, GSK isclosely tracking the impact of the eurozone crisis and chiefexecutive Andrew Witty revealed in February that the company issweeping 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 adaily basis, we've looked to reduce other risks on the balancesheet—for example, we've sold some of our receivables portfolio inEurope. We've also created an enterprise-wide risk managementproject team, so if something does happen in Europe and we have togo into crisis mode, we have an established crisis management teamin place.”

Chilver-Stainer is not resting on her laurels, but is lookingahead to the challenges of the next 12 months.

“The agenda is always event-driven, which is what makes life intreasury so interesting because you never know what's coming up,”she says. “We're continuing to develop the euro crisis issuesmanagement team, and we've promised to reduce our externalfinancing costs by 200 basis points by the end of 2013, so that'sgetting a lot of focus internally. We're looking to continue toreduce our insurance costs and to build up the activities of thepensions risk management team—those are my main challenges at themoment.”

See the 2012 Women in Finance list here.

See Part I of the Women in Finance slideshow here, Part II here and Part III here.

See the 2011 Women in Finance list here.