Dear members,

Please find hereafter the summary  of the EACT Board Meeting, held in Helsinki on May 23rd and 24th, 2008.

The Finnish Association of Corporate Treasurers combined its efforts with TMI and Eurofinance to organize very efficiently our first 2008 EACT Board Meeting. Many thanks for giving us the best possible working environment.

Sixteen out of eighteen Members’ Associations were present. One was represented. One was excused.

The minutes of the Vienna Board Meeting have been accepted and the financials have been approved. The Board thanked Jimmy Doyle (Irish ACT) for his work.

The  Executive Board reported on the achievements of the past period.
The Chairman, with the help of the Head of the Payments Commission, has been visiting a number of Portuguese Corporate Treasurers in an attempt to propose our support for the creation of an Association of Corporate Treasurers in Portugal. Our message has been received and we have serious reasons to think that this will succeed. We are still deploying efforts towards countries where we do not seem to find any Association so far, like Denmark, Greece, the Baltic Countries, Malta, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria. The Board agreed on the possibility for non EU country’s Associations to apply for an observer’s status; an Association from the French speaking part of Switzerland has applied and has been accepted as observer; some other may follow such as Croatia. The Chairman of the Hungarian Association volunteered to take on the mission of enlarging and consolidating EACT. Thanks to him. Any suggestions have to be submitted to Tamas Onody at the HTC.

ATEB reported on the progress done by the joint cooperation of ACT (UK), AFTE (France) and ATEB (Belgium)  on a guide for Treasurers in matters related to transfer pricing. An official EACT labelled document will be released as soon as the group has finalised the present draft.

The Chair reported on issues related to SEPA and particularly the worrying evolution of SEPA Direct Debits. The European Central Bank asked the EACT to facilitate the collection of information on SEPA adoption by corporate through a European survey conducted by Deloitte and Atos. The Board will support the initiative provided the questionnaire is short and straight to the point. The results will be commented in Barcelona at the next Eurofinance Conference.

The Board released the new EACT website co sponsored by TMI and Eurofinance. The new site will be available within short. The Board extended its thanks to the sponsors for their support.

One of the most important achievements of the EACT has been its support to the CAST initiative. CAST (Corporate Action on Standards) has been unanimously considered as a clear success; recommendations to the industry in areas of electronic invoicing, electronic/digital signature and electronic reconciliation have been delivered. The Board has decided to continue to support CAST and thanked Gianfranco Tabasso for its achievements.

ATEL (Luxembourg) reported on the subject “Reducing complexity in reporting financial instruments” and invited the NTA’s to issue comments on the discussion paper of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).

AFTE and ATEB support the creation of an EACT working group on Weather Risks. Any interested NTA can liaise with Richard Cordero at AFTE.

ACT and AFTE commented the S&P proposal on  Enterprise Risk Management. The Board of the EACT
Supports the comments issued and regrets the short period of time given to comment that did not enable a common EACT position.

ASSET (Spain) presented to the Board the latest developments of “confirming” a very efficient financing tool for SME’s. AFTE, AITI, ATEB among others support ASSET in their search for standardizing some financing instruments that have not been contemplated by SEPA (new instruments or AOS’s).

Regulatory framework for centralised cash management.  AFTE will distribute to interested NTA’s a Guide of Cash Management in Europe.

ATEL reported on an initiative of Eurofinance proposing to all corporates who want to participate to a survey on group affiliates treasury services satisfaction.

ATEL suggested that the IMFA (International Money Market Fund Association) should be invited to the next EACT Board Meeting in Barcelona. The proposal has been accepted by the Board.

Elections for the Executive Board have been triggered by the whish of the Chairman to step down. Very interesting discussions about what should the EACT focus on in the future have taken place. As no unanimity could be found on a common strategy and particularly the ways to achieve it, the Board has asked the Chair to keep its position until the next meeting with the mission to work towards a common strategy. The Executive Board has been elected with ATEB (Olivier Brissaud) as Chairman, ACT (Richard Reaburn), AITI (Cino Ricci), ATEL (François Masquelier) as vice-Chairmen, IACT (Jimmy Doyle) as our Treasurer and AFTE (Vincent Herlicq) as General Secretary. HTC of Hungary (Tamas Onody) is in charge of membership issues.

The Chairman thanks his colleagues from the Executive Board for their support and the Board  for the confidence expressed at the Meeting.

Olivier Brissaud
Chairman of ATEB and EACT