Never a Dull Day

My Life in Treasury with Jeannot Jonas, Assistant Treasurer, Cash & Capital Markets at Carrier Global Corporation

Carrier Global Corporation is an $18.6bn S&P 500 company and a global provider of sustainable building and refrigeration solutions. It serves customers in 160 countries on six continents, employing around 53,000. It emerged as part of a spin-off in 2020 from the United Technologies conglomerate.

The call to treasury for Jeannot Jonas, Assistant Treasurer, Cash & Capital Markets, Carrier Global Corporation, came in 1989. After 31 years and counting, he is able to state: “I have never had a dull day.”

Jeannot Jonas, Assistant Treasurer, Cash & Capital Markets at Carrier Global Corporation

It’s a quite a claim but nonetheless one he believes will resonate with many others in the profession, being an occupation that delivers change on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. And it is never knowing what will happen next that has proven to be the foundation for many a long career, including his own.

An accountant by training, remarkably Jonas has never worked in that field. He started his career in banking in his home country of Luxembourg, before making the switch “from the dark side” into the “light” of treasury, moving up the ranks and on the way becoming Chair of the Luxembourg Association of Corporate Treasurers.

Today, he oversees all past, present and future capital markets transactions of the $18.6bn S&P 500 company, Carrier Global Corporation. This he does alongside managing all of the firm’s domestic cash and global cash pooling operations, and, more recently, its pension and benefits plans.

“I fell in love with treasury because there is never a boring moment. You never know what’s going to happen,” states Jonas. “What’s more, you also really get to know the company you work for, from A to Z, because in almost every aspect of corporate life, trJeaeasury is somehow involved.”

Of course, a business is made up of many people and skills, and Jonas is quick to acknowledge this. Without the people on the shop floor making the product, there is no treasury or anything else. “It’s my opinion that the shop floor is the most important element in any business, and I’m not budging on that!”

Naturally, he believes that treasury is a vital element too, attracting people of great talent. Indeed, he describes the individual who gave him his first treasury break, as a Cash Manager, as “one of the smartest people I have ever met”. Here, he learned a vital lesson that has stayed with him throughout his career.

“It was drilled into me that the last thing you should do as treasurer every night is to write yourself a to-do list for the next day,” he recalls. “What has kept me in treasury so long is the fact that every time I did that, in the morning when I arrived for work, the first thing I had to do was take that list and throw it in the bin.”

Needless to say, the lists stopped a long time ago, but the unpredictability of treasury life persists. It is a feature that not only holds the interest for people like Jonas, but also serves to uncover the best practitioners. As Jonas notes, “most of the successful treasurers I have met over the years share a common, essential feature: adaptability”. 

Great responsibility

It’s part of the remit for most treasurers to be dealing in large numbers. Not just the billions of dollars being transacted, but also, for Jonas, the sheer scale and geographic reach of operations; 160 countries and six continents makes Carrier an indisputably global entity.

But by adopting a “focused approach” to treasury, he is not fazed by the enormity of some of the figures. “Often we don’t have the time to stop and think about the scale. As treasury, we know that if we are not able to fund these operations, for whatever reason, it is going to impact the lives of many.” But, he adds, “We never stop thinking about the numbers”.

The responsibility attached to the role can sometimes give him “less rest” than he otherwise might have, but he has learnt to approach his duties armed with the right mindset, and some pretty useful technology too.

“Smartphones and laptops didn’t exist when I first started in treasury. I had a computer screen and when I left the office, that was it for the day,” he says. Nowadays, like many professionals, he can stay in touch anywhere, at any time.

Accepting that ‘always on’ mode “comes with the territory,” Jonas admits a preference to being alert to any event to which he is able to respond, wherever and whenever it happens – even if that happens to be on the other side of the world. “I’d rather know so that I can address it in the morning or redirect it to a team member in a different time zone to tackle head-on. It means there are no nasty shocks.” It’s a rational approach that comes with experience.

Clone and cleanse

Jonas joined United Technologies Corporation (UTC) in 2012 via its acquisition of Goodrich Corporation, a company he had been with since 2001. He started at Goodrich as its Geneva-based Director of European Treasury, moving to the US in 2007 as Director, Global Treasury Operations, and then from 2010 as Director, International Treasury and Corporate Finance. With the acquisition Jonas became UTC’s Senior Treasury Manager, rising in 2017 to Associate Director of Treasury, before the spin-off in 2020 placed him in his current role.

The experience gained as he has risen through the ranks has served Jonas well, not just in his approach to tackling emergencies, but in planned activities too, being appointed treasury-lead for the spin-off charged with overseeing the creation of two brand new treasury departments (Otis Elevators was also part of the split, with the simultaneous merger of UTC with Raytheon Technologies).

“There was a famous in-house term that came from this period,” he recalls. “We all laugh about it now, but the concept of ‘clone and cleanse’ really helped us through those initial stages.” The idea was, as the phrase suggests, to replicate UTC’s treasury systems and processes within Carrier and Otis, with all unrelated aspects being removed.

From the announcement of the spin-off to the point where all parties were standalone publicly traded companies, it took 15 months. The timescale was set by the board of directors of UTC. This was driven by the merger of UTC into Raytheon that was contingent upon the spin-offs taking place by 3 April, 2020.

With no leeway, ‘clone and cleanse’ became more than just a convenient mechanism: it was essential. But now, with the world remaining in a constant state of flux, Carrier’s new treasury is “taking a hard look at all and any inherited systems and processes, to make sure they are truly adapted to Carrier’s needs.”

Although it has multiple banks in its current revolver – Jonas sees continuity in this instance as “a good thing,” with most relationships intact. However, the shift of Carrier from its position as part of the UTC conglomerate, to being a standalone player, heralded change on the bank DCM and with the ratings agencies.

To date, Carrier by itself has not yet been able to match the former UTC conglomerate’s across-the-board A ratings – it is BBB by S&P, and BBB – by Moody’s and Fitch. The difference may generate a slight price premium, but with Carrier mostly trading as BBB or BBB+, Jonas is not concerned. Indeed, as a condition of UTC’s merger with Raytheon, both Carrier and Otis are already highly leveraged. However, with a strong cash position on its balance sheet, Carrier has no immediate funding needs.

Ahead of the curve

With all the changes and the challenges met head-on by Jonas, clearly he harbours more than just technical know-how. He is a linguist, speaking six European languages fluently. He is also highly adaptable and ready to “listen and learn from anybody, from superiors, to peers, to direct reports”.

Formal learning is important to him and as a member of the AFP, he encourages his team to consider pursuing AFP’s Certified Treasury Professional “as something that will be a benefit to them in their career”. But he emphasises the importance of continuous education for all, a commitment that he says will often find him reading the literature voraciously, and attending events and courses, “to keep ahead of the curve”.

One area that he feels deserves special attention is treasury technology. He believes artificial intelligence (AI) in particular is going to have a huge impact on the profession. “There is still a lot of time in the day that treasurers spend on non- value-adding tasks,” he explains. “To free up that time, to be able to devote it to value-adding activities, systems are needed that can take over the administrative aspects of the job.”

Whilst Jonas accepts that tools such as AI and robotic process automation (RPA) may see treasury departments of the future staffed by fewer full-time employees (FTEs), he does not foresee a fully automated AI-driven function. “There are many aspects of a business that AI cannot know,” he argues. “We’ll still need human treasurers.”

The future treasurer can expect a number of changes, but then for Jonas, that’s precisely what keeps it interesting. “It’s now a matter of the individual making sure they acquire the necessary skillset to go to the next level,” he advises.

For juniors seeking a life in treasury, “learn, learn, learn” is the mantra he suggests. “When I started my career, people in finance were told they didn’t need to understand what the company did. That turned out to be completely untrue.” Anyone entering the profession today should, he feels, gain exposure to as many different aspects of corporate treasury as possible, making certain to “pick the brains of as many other treasury professionals as you can find”.

For all treasury professionals, he avidly encourages “exposure to the business units, talking to the people on the ground so you know what they do, and they know what treasury does. Only this way “can we work together to make the company more effective”. The process, dubbed the ‘360 philosophy’, was implemented within Goodrich treasury. Today, Jonas is fully intent on bringing it to Carrier, describing it as “extremely informative for us all”.

With so much still to learn, and with the thrill of its unpredictability unwavering, Jonas still finds joy in his life in treasury. Despite early protestations from a wary father that he was “throwing away a safe career” in banking for the Wild West of corporate life, he continues to move onwards and upwards, quite clear in his mind when he says, “I’ve never looked back.”