As a finance function we can ' t challenge the business if we don ' t understand the business
Sarah Kuijlaars Chief Financial Officer Tate & Lyle
WATCH NOW Welcome to Tate & Lyle buried in the risk disclosures.“ We are acting with urgency to return the business to top-line growth.” The word reads gloomy, but that is rather the point. A report earns trust by owning the bad year in daylight, up top, where a sceptical reader would go hunting for it anyway, and the numbers beneath it were the CFO’ s case for patience: free cash flow of £ 164m( US $ 220m) at 70 % cash conversion, net debt down £ 22m( US $ 29.7m) to £ 939m( US $ 1.26bn), and a dividend held at 19.8p. The savings programmes, which Tate & Lyle counts in dollars, delivered US $ 53m of productivity gains in the year, taking the three-year total to US $ 144m against a US $ 200m target for March 2028. Tariffs made the year harder to forecast than to report.“ Sometimes we can pass that surcharge on to the customer, and sometimes we can’ t,” Sarah says.“ It’ s a very fluid environment that impacts working capital.” A report can only be as honest as the finance team’ s grip on what the company actually does, and Sarah’ s is built on a global service centre in Łódź, Poland, where 200 finance staff have run the group’ s transactions since 2011, now reporting through three regional finance directors.“ The challenge is ensuring they are driving efficiencies within the broader portfolio through greater standardisation,” she says. The next phase is the one every CFO is being asked about.“ It will involve using tools to optimise reconciliations, payment of invoices, and then moving to predictive AI and agentic AI,” Sarah says,“ but that’ s still in the early stages.” The prize is time.
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