Treasury, Forecasting and Financial Strategy
Treasury is where institutions survive bad weeks. In five days you will build the treasury craft institutions depend on: cash-flow forecasting, liquidity management, FX and interest-rate hedging, funding strategy and the treasury policy that governs all of it — on African market conditions.
The executive challenge
The problem this program solves
This is treasury as a strategic function, not a back office. You will build rolling cash forecasts, design liquidity and counterparty policies, hedge currency and rate exposure with the instruments African markets actually offer, and defend funding decisions in the language of the board and the bank. Taught by faculty led by Dr. Simon Kamau, who have managed treasury and funding through African currency crises and capital-market closures, with Dr. Kennedy Mwai (Roche) leading the forecasting analytics labs.
Context
Why this matters now
Capability
What you will be able to do
- Build rolling direct and indirect cash-flow forecasts with variance discipline your CFO can sign
- Set liquidity policy: buffers, stress horizons, counterparty limits and early-warning triggers
- Hedge FX and interest-rate exposure with forwards, swaps and natural hedges — sized and documented to policy
- Design the funding strategy: bank lines, DFI facilities, capital-market access and the cost of each door
- Run a liquidity stress test across market closure, currency events and deposit-behaviour shocks
- Write and defend the treasury policy that makes all of the above survive your successor
The IPAT Course Standard
The five-day journey
Each day is a deliberate progression in managerial capability — from strategic context, to analytical frameworks, to applied practice, to executive judgement under pressure, to a capstone that produces something your organisation keeps.
IPAT Signature Case™
The Currency That Moved Forty Percent
An East African manufacturer imports components invoiced in USD, sells domestically in local currency, and has never hedged — “the currency always comes back”. In the quarter under review it did not: a 40 percent depreciation arrived in six weeks, gross margin inverted on three product lines, and the banks’ forward rates moved beyond anything the annual budget assumed. The CFO now faces a second shock decision with no policy in place and bankers questioning covenant headroom.
Your decision: Hedge the full forward exposure at current rates (expensive but defined), build a layered programme starting with 50 percent cover and a policy for the rest (balanced, still exposed to the next move), or fix the margin problem structurally with pricing and local sourcing (right long-term, no protection this quarter) — balancing margin survival, cost and the governance vacuum the shock exposed.
Real-World Case Study
Metallgesellschaft: The Hedge That Was Right and Wrong at Once
In 1993, German industrial group Metallgesellschaft’s US oil-marketing subsidiary hedged long-term fixed-price sales with short-dated futures — an economically coherent hedge that generated massive margin calls as oil prices fell, forcing the group to unwind positions at a loss of roughly $1.3 billion before the economics could play out. The case, taught in every serious treasury curriculum, separates economic exposure from cash-flow survivability.
The lesson: A hedge that is correct in economics can be fatal in cash flow: tenor, liquidity and margin mechanics are treasury decisions, not afterthoughts.
IPAT Data Lab™
A group treasury discovers mid-quarter that its “cash visibility” missed a subsidiary’s off-system balances — and the consolidation was three weeks stale.
Dataset: A realistic multi-entity, multi-currency cash dataset: account balances, flows, FX exposures, facility terms and the visibility gaps real groups carry.
Your task: Build the treasury analytics in Python and Excel: rolling forecast, variance engine, exposure ladder, stress tests and the policy pack.
A working treasury analytics stack and a defended treasury framework.
Data → Analysis → Decision, not Data → Code → Certificate
Day 5 · The Capstone
What will you change when you return to work?
Design the finance function your institution needs: data architecture, automated processes, and a decision dashboard — with a 90-day starting sequence.
Methodology
Frameworks you will master
- • IPAT DIOS™ Decision-Integrity Standard
- • 13-week cash-flow forecasting discipline
- • Liquidity stress testing and buffer sizing
- • FX/rate hedging: forwards, swaps, natural hedges
- • Treasury policy and mandate governance
Career Outcomes
Where this program takes you
Salary bands reflect 2025–26 market benchmarking across African markets plus global mobility ranges.
Cohorts
Upcoming cohorts
New dates are being scheduled
Register with your preferred start date and our admissions team will match you to the next available cohort — or contact us to arrange an in-house delivery for your organisation.
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