From busywork to adding value – Wolt’s treasury transformation
VIDEO | Helsinki-based Wolt, operating a commerce and delivery platform to support local businesses, has now made its splash across over 30 countries. Corporate Treasurer Annika Westerholm joined the group at its intense growth stage, with the mission to build and develop its treasury organisation. In the session titled "Leveraging technologies to enhance the treasury" at the Treasury 360° Nordic 2025 conference, she shared her journey, from making sure the policies and processes are in place, to exploring technology solutions for new efficiencies in various areas, such as cash flow forecasting.
When Westerholm joined Wolt, she walked into a firm with a finance department that was completely outsourced, that had a treasury function consisting of two people. It was not a complete blank slate – the firm had a treasury management system (TMS) – but the treasury team was kept occupied with the release of operating payments.
“All the payments had to be released by the treasury,” she recalls, “Because we needed to make sure that we had monies on all the accounts before the payments were released.” It was a lot of “managing liquidity on the go” and “very little forward looking”.
One of the first tasks Westerholm took on was thus to build a liquidity forecasting process into the TMS. Once that was in place, the team had better visibility of the firm’s liquidity, so that it could plan the liquidity of all of Wolt’s subsidiaries. Today, the treasury function no longer has the majority of its time tied up in releasing payments and is able to focus more on forward looking tasks.
But Wolt’s story with payments doesn’t end here. Due to the nature of its business, the firm frequently dealt with big volumes of small-sized payments. “Cost efficient local payments and a robust infrastructure for the payments is really key for us,” says Westerholm.
The firm’s TMS is also its global bank connectivity tool, which converts payments. “This means that we don’t need to build the final version of the payments in our source systems,” she explains. “We have quite a few source systems, but we do that in our bank connectivity tool. And we also have a centralised payment team and centralised payment process, which allows us to rapidly onboard new countries, test new payments, and ensure that we have the needed payment formats in place.”
Define priorities
For treasurers also embarking on a transformation journey, Westerholm offers a summary. “First of all, know your company. What’s important for your company? What are the business drivers in your company? Based on that, then define the treasury scope.” From that, a team can be built. “Define which skill sets you need in the company and hire that skill set and knowledge. Then, of course, you need to define a relevant policy for yourself and the processes to support implementing that policy in your company.” Finally, she recommends choosing tools wisely. “Get the tools that you need that serves you and are fit for purpose in your company.”
Annika Westerholm is Group Treasurer at Wolt.
• News from Treasury 360° Nordic 2025, at Stockholmsmässan on 22 May, is gathered here.
• And why not spread the posts in our LinkedIn flow? Sign up to follow if you don’t already – and share this post!
• Find here the main conference website, with the agenda.
• Download the 76-page event magazine here (including a packed 8-page agenda section).
• Many sessions appear in full as videos in the days or weeks after the event.