The Treasurer Nobody Hired

Wanted: Treasurer.

Part-time, and I mean very part-time. We pay around 30 bills a year in foreign currency and send maybe 20 invoices the other way, so most weeks there is nothing to do. You should know what a forward is, what a currency wallet is for, and roughly what the pound did in 2008, 2016 and 2022. Salary: none, because we are a small business and there has never been a budget line for this.

Nobody has ever answered that ad, mostly because nobody has ever posted it.

And that, more than anything, is why fewer than 5% of SMEs protect themselves against currency moves. The products were built for companies that have a treasury department, with credit lines, margin deposits and someone whose job is to watch the market all day. A business owner has a business to run. They don’t want to think about currencies, and frankly they shouldn’t have to, until the day one of them moves 10 or 15% and takes the year’s profit with it (and sometimes the business).

I spent many years on bank Markets desks, so I can say this with some confidence: the analysis was never the hard part. The hard part was getting the information out of the client. Which contracts, which invoices, which dates, in which currency, and which ones might slip. Days of emails and spreadsheets, when they came at all. We did it for the big names because the big names could pay for those days. Nobody was going to do it for the florist importing from Holland, let alone for the millions of small businesses with currency exposure and no idea what to do about it, or even whether they have one.

Last week we hired the treasurer, sort of.

We asked an AI agent to go into our accounting software (we use Xero; QuickBooks, FreshBooks and the others now have the same connectors), find every foreign currency bill and invoice coming up, net what could be netted by currency, check which currencies we hold in wallets so a receivable could wait for a payable, and show us what was left exposed. Then show us how far those currencies have moved over 5, 10 and 25 years on that exposure. Then price a Guard, a forward, and doing nothing, side by side. Doing nothing is a decision too, it just doesn’t usually get priced.

17 invoices, 5 currencies, netting took the exposure down by 38%, and it took under a minute. We didn’t type a single number.

I want to be clear that none of this is rocket science. The accounting data was always sitting there, and so were the prices. What changed is that the agent can now go and get the data itself and come back with a page a business owner can actually read. The treasurer finally costs what the job is worth when the job is 30 bills a year, which is close to nothing.

The product had to fit the same minute, and that is the bit we spent two and a half years on. You can’t give someone a one-minute answer and then ask for a credit line, a deposit and the occasional margin call. A Guard attaches to a payment, protects the downside, leaves the upside, scales with the payment, and costs nothing if the payment never happens.

You still can’t buy one through an agent today. That will come through the payment providers, and a few of them are further along than people assume. I’d expect the 5% to move before the products do.

You don’t have to take my word on the “simple” part, and you probably shouldn’t, since I’m the one selling it. Two ways to check. The easy one is our FX Exposure page here: give it your payments, it nets them, shows the history and prices the protection. The slightly nerdier one, if you use Claude, is Settings, Connectors, search “CurrencyGuard”, and then ask it about your next foreign currency invoice in plain English. If your accounting software is connected too, ask it to do the whole thing we did above with your own numbers. Either way, let us know what you think. I know that a few years back, on the desk, we’d have given a lot for tools like these. These days we get to use them as business owners, which is more fun.