Every so often, I hear the same claim…
Treasury is too small to produce reliable salary benchmarks.
Apparently, there simply isn’t enough data.
That simply is NOT true.
Having benchmarked treasury salaries for more than 20 years, and with nearly 1,800 treasury professionals now contributing to our Global Treasury Salary Survey, I have to disagree.
The problem isn’t that the treasury is too small.
The problem is how the data is being interpreted.
There are many salary surveys out there that are a joke.
They’ll tell you that the expected salary for a treasurer is between £100,000 and £300,000…
Useful, if all you wanted to know was that some Treasurers earn more than others…
Duh!
So, where do these salary surveys go wrong?
Well, the problem isn’t that treasury is too small. Far from it…
The problem is that people look at job titles instead of the job itself.
For instance, a Treasurer running treasury for a housing association simply can’t be benchmarked against a Global Treasurer responsible for six international treasury centres.
Same title, but one might earn £100,000, the other £250,000+.
They’re completely different jobs. And if you just throw both into the same spreadsheet, your salary data rapidly becomes meaningless.
That’s not how we do it.
When someone completes our salary survey, we don’t just accept whatever title is on their LinkedIn profile. After recruiting treasury professionals for nearly 30 years, it doesn’t take us long to place people in the right bucket.
We ask ourselves:
- How big is their team?
- Who do they report to?
- How international is the role?
- What’s the level of responsibility?
We can quickly see that someone might call themselves a Treasurer, but in reality they’re doing what most companies would describe as a Treasury Manager.
Or someone might be Head of Treasury, but the scope of the role is more equivalent to a Global Treasurer.
(And that’s not even taking into account all the variables that come with a role in the UK vs the US, for example).
That’s why titles on their own don’t work.
The role does.
It’s exactly the same when clients ask me to benchmark a salary.
I’m not comparing one job title with another; I compare the actual role.
That’s why I have to disagree with anyone who says that treasury is too small to produce reliable salary benchmarks.
If you think treasury doesn’t produce neat salary reports because the profession is too niche.
Well…
We’ve now had more than 1,800 treasury professionals take part in our Global Treasury Salary Survey.
That gives us a pretty robust dataset.
But the important part is that the numbers only really become useful when someone understands what they’re looking at.
If you’re wondering whether you’re paid fairly, click here to take part in our salary survey
If you’re hiring, building a team, or trying to benchmark a role, that’s usually when it’s worth picking up the phone.
You might think the data will tell you the answer, but sometimes you need someone who’s spent nearly three decades looking at treasury roles to explain what the data is actually saying.
Best regards,
Mike
P.S. The more treasury professionals who participate in our salary survey, the stronger and more useful the results become for everyone. So click here to take part and get your personalised salary benchmark!
