Wired for Treasury

My Life in Treasury: Kemi Bolarin

Kemi Bolarin, Head of Treasury, Europe, GXO Logistics Inc, has a passion for digital transformation. She believes the arrival of APIs, AI, and RPA in treasury will bring renewed power to the role. But there’s a growing need for softer treasury skills too, as she tells TMI.

Having joined global contract logistics firm GXO in July 2021, Bolarin was almost immediately thrown in at the deep end, with the company completing its spin-off from XPO the following month. With that landmark event came a pressing need to create a new treasury team in Europe, and to begin “lifting and shifting” the processes and systems from XPO into GXO, to build a functioning unit from the outset.

Kemi Bolarin
Head of Treasury, Europe, GXO

With Europe contributing two-thirds of GXO’s $7.9bn annual revenues (2021), the responsibility for overseeing “typical treasury activities” (and accompanying treasury policy development) across 14 countries in the region is a major undertaking. It has seen Bolarin adopt what she refers to as “a hybrid structure”. This enables “optimal balance” between local knowledge and central control, where a number of GXO’s key country operations are given on-the-ground treasury support, with direct oversight from the London-based corporate treasury function. This has two senior treasury managers and a brace of newly recruited treasury analysts, all reporting up to Bolarin.

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