Christina Victor challenges treasury professionals to move beyond compliance-led thinking and focus on institution-specific resilience. The article argues that regulatory requirements should provide a foundation rather than define strategy. As volatility,
Treasury professionals have spent years
concentrating on regulatory expectations, but the future of the discipline may
depend on a far more fundamental question: what risks actually matter to their
own institutions?
According to Christina Victor, Executive Director,
SMBC Americas Division, treasury teams are entering a period where managing
risk based solely on regulatory requirements is no longer enough.
Instead, institutions must increasingly focus on
understanding their own unique exposures and building the flexibility needed to
respond to a rapidly changing environment.
Speaking at CeFPro’s 2026 Risk Americas conference
earlier this year, Victor said: “For a long time, we’ve been focused on what
does the regulator need. “We’ve been focused on reading the fine print in regulations,
focused on things like enhancing your documentation and peer reviews to see
what others are doing so we can do something comparable.”
But that approach, she believes, is beginning to
change.
“Now, gradually, we’ll see a shift towards the
question of what is our risk,” Victor said. “Every bank is unique, our products
are unique, our risks are unique, and we probably understand our risks better
than the regulators do.”
Drawing on more than two decades of treasury
experience, including living through both the Lehman Brothers collapse and the
failure of Silicon Valley Bank, Victor argues that institutions now have enough
experience to move beyond simply implementing regulatory prescriptions and
instead focus on managing risks that are specific to their balance sheets and
business models.
“At the end of the day, we are risk managers,” she
said. “In this expansionary environment, we allow and help our businesses to
grow by managing risks.”
That shift comes at a time when treasury teams face
unprecedented uncertainty. Geopolitical conflict, economic volatility,
pandemics, technological disruption, and changing customer behavior have made
forecasting increasingly difficult.
“Flexibility is essential with the very rapidly
changing macroeconomic environment,” Victor said.
But rather than attempting to predict every possible
shock, she believes treasury functions must build capabilities that instead
allow them to react quickly as events develop without ignoring the importance of
horizon scanning to pre-empt challenges.
“We need to be able to run these ad hoc scenarios,
which sometimes we don’t expect,” she explained. “Who expected the war? Or who
expected COVID, for that matter?”
For Victor, the key question is not whether
institutions can predict every crisis, but whether they can adapt when
conditions change.
