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7 February, 2024
Who are you and what do you do at Zanders?
My name is Daan de Vries, I am 29 years old and live in Utrecht. I did a bachelor in Business Economics and a master in Finance, both at Tilburg University. During my master, I started working as an analyst at Zanders. This went so well that I started as a consultant in December 2019. Since then, I have advanced to a role as manager within the Treasury Advisory Group department. This department advises (listed) companies worldwide in the area of treasury.
What is treasury?
Treasury involves managing money and controlling financial risks in a company. Treasury’s priority is to ensure that the company can meet its daily business obligations. At the same time, your role as treasurer is to help develop long-term financial strategy and policies.
Why did you choose Zanders?
Zanders is an internationally oriented organization that focuses on complex treasury issues. These are often issues concerning both finance and technology. Therefore you’ll need to be interested in both areas and in my case it was exactly what I was looking for after completing my studies. I wanted to get an inside look at (international) companies in different industries and that is possible in this role. Although treasury is a niche area within finance, many study aspects are reflected in my work – such as financial risk management and debt financing.
Zanders also has a flat organization structure where lines of communication are short and where you get a lot of freedom to develop yourself. In your first year as a consultant you participate in the Talent Program, which consists of three training weeks that take place throughout the year. During these weeks you will receive both professional and soft skill training from experienced colleagues and external trainers. The final week is at a location outside the Netherlands with other starting consultants from different departments and offices.
Finally, at Zanders there is a good work-life balance, which is very important to me. Zanders also has a young team and fun activities are organized with and by colleagues. For example, once a year the Zanders Trip is organized; we then go with the whole company for an entire weekend to a destination in Europe that is secret until the last moment. There we then have all kinds of fun activities together.
What do you deal with on a daily basis?
This is a question that is often asked and is obviously very important. The answer depends on the projects I work on. I usually work on two projects at the same time. For each project, we have client meetings, provide reports and conduct workshops. In addition to the projects for clients, I also work on internal projects, which helps me develop myself in other areas of work. One of my internal projects is business development, where I have contact with existing and potential clients.
For example, a day while conducting a strategic consulting project looks like this:
09:00-10:00 – Meeting with the client about actions regarding the Treasury Policy to be taken up today
10:00-12:00 – Edit the Treasury Policy and actions resulting from the meeting
12:00-13:00 – Lunch with colleagues, walk around
13:00-15:00 – Preparing a Treasury Policy workshop for next week
15:00-17:00 – Business development
17:00-20:00 – Friday drinks
What advice would you give students?
Most important is to know what interests you. Take your time to find out which companies match that. Go to recruitment days/events, in-house days and approach companies that seem interesting to you. You can visit us for an informal talk to see if Zanders and treasury suit you. Would you like to know more about Zanders and/or my experiences? Then send me a message via LinkedIn!
