In treasury, numbers tell only part of the story. Behind every liquidity ratio, debt covenant and funding line lies something less quantifiable but equally decisive: trust. Not the vague, aspirational variety that fills mission statements, but the hard-won kind built through years of transparent reporting, consistent conduct and genuine partnership with banking partners.
When COVID-19 struck, financial markets convulsed. Rental income streams froze. Debt capital markets effectively closed. Every assumption baked into a carefully prepared budget was rendered provisional overnight. For Vukile Property Fund — an international REIT with retail assets across South Africa and Spain at the time, and since in Portugal and Italy too — the crisis tested not only our balance sheet but the durability of the relationships that sit behind it.
What we found, when it mattered most, was that those relationships held. That is not a small thing, and at Vukile, we can share this from first-hand experience.
The Five Days That Shaped Our COVID Response
On Friday 13 March 2020, Spain went into lockdown. Not a gradual tightening. Shutdown. For a fund with substantial retail property exposure in Iberia, the implications were immediate and severe.
By Saturday evening, we had convened an impromptu executive meeting with our chairman — telephonically, this being before we had all mastered Zoom — to begin working through what it meant. Nobody was waiting for Monday. Nobody was waiting to understand the market reaction first. We started running numbers. By Monday morning we had established that, even in a scenario where Vukile collected zero rental income across all markets, we had sufficient cash to meet every financial obligation for the next twelve months.
South Africa had not yet locked down. We were, effectively, a week ahead of the crisis before the domestic conversation had properly begun.
That clarity came at a cost. Over the weeks that followed, the team stress-tested more than 3,000 individual scenarios — modelling partial rental recovery, full-market closure, multi-jurisdictional lockdown combinations, and everything in between. It was not elegant work. It was grinding, iterative and often uncomfortable. But it gave us something invaluable: certainty about our range of outcomes, and the confidence to go to our banking partners with answers rather than questions.
That sequence matters. Treasurers who approach their banks in crisis with a clear picture of their position, even an uncomfortable one, are received very differently from those who arrive unfamiliar, uncertain, looking for reassurance before they have done the work. The preparation is the credibility.
What Long-Term Relationships Actually Deliver
There is a school of thought in treasury that treats banking relationships as transactional: you need a facility, you run a process, you execute a deal. That view is not wrong, exactly. But it is insufficient — and COVID revealed precisely where it falls short.
When DCM markets closed and refinancing was not an option, what remained was relationship-based lending. The banks that stepped forward and worked with us did not do so because market conditions compelled them. They did so because we had spent years building a track record that justified their confidence.
That track record rested on three things. First, transparency: we had never withheld difficult information from our banking partners. When the news was uncomfortable, we shared it early and in full context, rather than hoping circumstances would improve before we had to disclose them. Second, consistency: our financial conduct over many years meant that bankers understood our business model, our risk appetite and how we approached capital allocation. They knew what we stood for before the crisis told them whether we meant it. Third, genuine engagement: we had treated our banking partners as strategic advisers, not merely providers of facilities. That relationship ran both ways.
None of this is technically complex. All of it requires sustained commitment, including in the years when nothing appears to be at stake.
When the Rules Changed Mid-Game
I want to be direct about something that is seldom said plainly in treasury circles: the COVID period was disorienting in ways that went beyond the financial numbers. There were moments when the rules of engagement seemed to shift without warning — when you had every reason to believe you understood the game being played and discovered you did not.
We turned to sport to describe it internally. It felt like preparing carefully for a football match — working on your passing, your positioning, your set pieces — only to arrive on the day and find that you were expected to play cricket. And every time you tried to kick the ball, you were given out LBW.
The analogy is absurd, which is precisely why it captured the experience accurately. Much of what treasurers navigated during COVID was not a matter of applying known playbooks to known conditions. It was genuine ambiguity: decisions taken with incomplete information, guidance that shifted as governments improvised, and an operating environment that offered no stable footing. There were moments when the technically correct answer and the commercially reasonable one pulled in opposite directions, and choosing between them required judgement that no model had prepared you to exercise.
What stabilised us — and I believe this is true of most treasury teams that came through the period well — was the quality of our banking relationships. Not market conditions. Not hedging programmes. Relationships.
Relationships as a Risk Management Discipline
Treasury professionals are disciplined about quantifiable risk. We hedge currency exposure, stagger debt maturity profiles, maintain liquidity buffers calibrated to stress scenarios. These are sound practices and I certainly would not diminish them.
But I would argue that we are less systematic about relationship risk — the risk of finding yourself, at a moment of acute need, without a banking partner willing to act.
COVID surfaced this risk in real time, across the real estate sector, with consequences that were not evenly distributed. The funds that had invested in relationships fared differently from those that had not.
The principles are not complicated, but they require genuine application:
Transparency over convenience. Share difficult information early and in context. Banking partners who learn about problems through your disclosure will respond differently from those who discover problems themselves. The first conversation deepens trust; the second erodes it.
A track record worth calling on. Credibility is spent in a crisis and rebuilt slowly. The treasury function that has consistently managed liquidity conservatively, kept covenants with headroom, and behaved with financial discipline will find its banking partners extend more latitude when conditions deteriorate. That latitude does not materialise at short notice; it is deposited over years.
Engagement as a standing practice. Treat your bankers as genuine strategic partners. Involve them in your thinking, share your strategy and understand their constraints. The relationship cannot begin in earnest at the moment you need a waiver.
Diversification of relationships. Concentration risk in banking relationships is real and underappreciated. A treasury function that has built meaningful relationships across multiple institutions is materially better positioned than one that has concentrated its banking with a small number of counterparties.
The Treasurer as Strategic Leader
For much of its history, treasury was regarded — including, sometimes, by treasurers themselves — as a technical back-office function. COVID challenged that framing decisively and, I would argue, permanently.
At Vukile, treasury decisions during the crisis directly shaped our strategic flexibility, our investor communications, our ability to support tenants under genuine financial pressure and our commitment to maintaining properties to the standard our customers expect. These were not back-office considerations. They were strategic ones, requiring the treasurer to function as a genuine member of the executive team — with the relationships, the information and the credibility to lead through uncertainty rather than simply to report on it.
Treasurers who had positioned themselves as strategic partners before the crisis were prepared for that moment. Those who had not found themselves having to earn that standing in real time, while also managing the crisis itself. The sequencing is unforgiving.
A Final Thought
Viktor Frankl wrote that what matters is not what we expected from life, but what life expected from us — and that our answers must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.
That framing resonates deeply in treasury. The steady hands needed in treasury are not hands that never shake. They are hands that act correctly under pressure, that hold to long-established principles when the environment is applying pressure to compromise them, and that have built — through consistent conduct over many years — the relationships that make sound action possible when the moment requires it.
COVID asked a great deal of treasury functions across South Africa and the world. The ones that answered well were, in almost every case, the ones that had invested in trust long before the crisis arrived.
Build those relationships now, while you do not need them. When you do need them, it is often too late to begin.