Treasury Management Services
The Lumen Collective provides treasury management services for UK SMEs, led by a Fellow of the Association of Corporate Treasurers (FCT). Our core specialism is FX risk management, including hedging policy design, derivatives advisory (forwards, options and structured products), automated exposure calculations and hedge accounting under FRS 102 and IFRS 9. We also advise on cash investment strategy through our partnership with TreasurySpring and quantify risk using VaR and CFaR.
Expert Treasury Support for Businesses Managing Cash, Currency and Risk
Most UK SMEs lack dedicated treasury capability, yet face the same cash management, foreign exchange and funding challenges as larger organisations. The Lumen Collective provides hands-on treasury services led by a Fellow of the Association of Corporate Treasurers (FCT), bringing institutional-grade expertise to businesses that need it most.
Whether you are managing multi-currency exposures, optimising your cash position or building treasury infrastructure from scratch, we deliver practical solutions, not just advisory reports.
FX Risk Management: A Key Specialism
Foreign exchange risk is one of the most misunderstood and undermanaged areas in mid-market businesses. We provide end-to-end FX risk management, from policy design through to execution infrastructure.
We are derivatives specialists with extensive knowledge of forward contracts, option contracts and structured hedging solutions.
Our FX risk capabilities include developing hedging policy and strategy aligned to your business model and risk appetite, building automated infrastructure for exposure calculations so you always know your position, preparing board-ready FX policies and risk guides that satisfy governance and audit requirements, hedge accounting expertise under both FRS 102 and IFRS 9 including the design and build of hedge effectiveness testing models, and quantifying FX risk using industry-standard metrics such as Value at Risk (VaR) and Cash Flow at Risk (CFaR) to give your board clear, measurable insight into currency exposure.
Cash Investment and Liquidity Management
Idle cash should be working for your business. We help you develop a cash investment strategy that balances yield, liquidity and counterparty risk.
The Lumen Collective partners with TreasurySpring, the institutional cash management platform, to give our clients access to institutional-grade money market funds and fixed-term deposits. TreasurySpring provides a single platform to deploy surplus cash across multiple counterparties, with full transparency on rates, maturity profiles and credit exposure. These are capabilities typically only available to large corporates and financial institutions.
We work with you to design the investment policy, select appropriate instruments and implement the operational processes around cash deployment and monitoring.
Treasury Infrastructure and Reporting
Many businesses need treasury capability built from the ground up. We design and implement treasury infrastructure including cash flow forecasting and reporting models, automated payment and receipt processes, bank account structures and cash pooling arrangements, funding structure advice covering both debt and equity, and treasury management system selection and implementation support.
Risk Quantification
Understanding your exposure is the foundation of good treasury management. We build quantitative risk frameworks using Value at Risk (VaR) to measure potential losses from market movements over a defined period, Cash Flow at Risk (CFaR) to assess the impact of market risk on forecast cash flows, and scenario and stress testing to evaluate how extreme but plausible market conditions would affect your business.
These metrics provide the basis for board-level risk reporting, hedging decisions and regulatory or investor discussions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need dedicated treasury if I am a small business?
Not necessarily as a permanent function, but if you have foreign currency revenues or costs, significant cash balances or borrowings, you are managing treasury risk whether you realise it or not. Fractional treasury support ensures these risks are identified, measured and managed properly.
What is hedge accounting and why does it matter?
Hedge accounting allows you to match the timing of gains and losses on hedging instruments with the items they hedge, reducing profit and loss volatility. Without it, mark-to-market movements on derivatives can create misleading swings in your reported results. We design hedge accounting frameworks that comply with FRS 102 or IFRS 9 and build the effectiveness testing models your auditors require.
What is TreasurySpring?
TreasurySpring is an institutional cash management platform that provides access to money market funds and fixed-term deposits from a range of counterparties through a single portal. Our partnership with TreasurySpring allows us to offer clients institutional-quality cash investment options with transparent pricing and diversified counterparty exposure.
Can you help with funding and capital structure?
Yes. We advise on debt versus equity funding decisions, bank facility negotiations and capital structure optimisation. For complex transactions we work alongside your corporate finance advisers to ensure the treasury aspects of any deal are properly structured.
What does VaR and CFaR mean in practice?
Value at Risk (VaR) tells you the maximum loss you might expect from market movements over a given time horizon at a specified confidence level. For example, there is a 95% probability that FX losses will not exceed £50,000 over the next month. Cash Flow at Risk (CFaR) applies similar logic to your forecast cash flows, helping you understand how exchange rate or interest rate movements could affect your actual cash position.