Shuzhen Pay: Head of Corporate Finance & Treasury
With new challenges and opportunities emerging across the organization, it has been a very exciting year for Hafnia. While virtually every area of the business has been impacted by ongoing global trends, one of the departments that has seen the most action has without a doubt been Corporate Finance & Treasury.
Shuzhen Pay is our Head of Corporate Finance & Treasury, where one of her primary responsibilities is creating value for shareholders by ensuring Hafnia has strong access to funding. Additionally, Shuzhen is responsible for active financial risk management, supervising and managing treasury activities – including liquidity management, facilitating the development of treasury infrastructure, and handling other loan and finance administrative duties.
Among her various responsibilities, Shuzhen places a high priority on securing reliable sources of financing.
“Hafnia has one of the lowest costs of funding in the industry due to our strong relationships with banks and other sources of financing. Our aim is to be engaged with our lenders and to continue building new relationships in order to access funds that support our existing liquidity and working capital requirements, as well as new investment projects.”
So far this year, Shuzhen has overseen the signing of our first syndicated sustainability linked loan facility, as well as the completion of a $100m unsecured facility in July to improve cash flow for existing and new pool partners. In addition to carrying out these projects, Shuzhen and her team recently decided on a new global cash management bank for Hafnia.
“Since the merger in 2019, one of our priorities has been optimising our cash solutions to meet not only the current needs of Hafnia, but also our future ambitions. Seamless exchange of account balance and transaction information, global management solutions and support, and the ability to co-create data solutions to enhance business intelligence were all high on our wish list. After rigorous evaluation of selected banks, Citi emerged as the right partner. Their expertise, responsiveness and global network are exactly what we look for in a partner, and they also share our culture of innovation and constant improvement.
But while 2021 has seen many successful developments, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed how Shuzhen and her team operate.
“We have leveraged our digital platform to stay in constant touch and communicate effectively during these times. To ensure good collaboration within and across departments, we have created quite a few channels in Microsoft Teams. We’ve actually ended up having even more Teams meetings than usual since we miss out on the casual conversation we’d have in the office.”
In addition to the pandemic, digitalization and decarbonization have strongly influenced the work of Corporate Finance & Treasury.
“Living in an increasingly digital world, we believe we can use technology to improve and enhance the department’s performance. We are looking to digitize our cash flow reporting to give us greater visibility and allow better analysis. We have also successfully integrated Citibank with our ERP system and are able to automate the payment process. Payments processed in the ERP flow directly to the Citibank platform and update with real time payment status reports. This allows us to quickly address any payment issues or failures.”
With regard to decarbonization, Shuzhen and her department’s work mirrors the efforts of Hafnia as a whole.
“We are seeing more and more lenders signing on to the Poseidon Principles, which is a global framework for assessing and disclosing the portfolios of financial institutions. We support the lenders by collating and reporting our emissions data to them (special thanks to the performance team). To further align our decarbonization ambitions with our lenders, we have an annual sustainability margin adjustment mechanism in our syndicated sustainability linked loan facility that is contingent upon Hafnia’s continuous improvement in emissions-related key performance indicators. Going forward, we will explore financing structures that have similar features and fit with our decarbonization strategy.”
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