EuroFinance

In a world where geopolitical shocks, currency restrictions and regional instability can change quickly, GE Vernova’s treasury organisation has built a resilient and adaptable liquidity model. Leading operations across 40 markets and managing relationships with more than 30 banks, Mohamed Torayah, Regional treasury leader – METAP (Middle East, Africa, Turkey, and Pakistan) for GE Vernova an energy equipment manufacturing and services company, navigates jurisdictions with regulatory constraints, trapped cash and liquidity mismatches as part of everyday treasury operations.

In a conversation at the  34th EuroFinance International Treasury Management in Budapest, Torayah described a function that has changed culturally, improved forecasting discipline and is now pushing towards real-time cash visibility. “We operate over 100 countries,” he said, with “multi-digit billion-dollar revenue,” making liquidity management a strategic necessity.

Rewriting the rules of liquidity management

Torayah began by acknowledging the persistent challenges of liquidity risk. “From a liquidity point of view, we have to diversify our funding operations,” he said — starting with maximising internal financing.

An internal shift has reshaped the flow of collections. Treasury worked to break the traditional habit of allowing inflows to accumulate at the end of the quarter. “Instead of backloading your collections at the end of the quarter… we tried to change the culture in a way that we make the collections come through the month,” he explained. This reduced volatility and allowed GE Vernova to rely more consistently on its own liquidity.

Challenging markets and managing trapped cash

GE Vernova continues to face liquidity constraints in several difficult markets. Torayah pointed out that “of the 40 markets in the META region, 25 are classified as restricted.” Countries such as Nigeria, Angola and Ivory coast remain especially complex due to regulations that limit the movement of funds.

To address this, treasury focuses on addressing the root cause, beginning with commercial deal structuring. As he explained, “We try to make it in a way that you have the minimum collections onshore that covers operations” often through consortium models that keep only a smaller percentage of the contract onshore. 

Generally, when legacy contracts offer no such flexibility, the company turns to alternatives such as intercompany loans, cash concentration structures, like the USD structure developed in Egypt or FX dealers in extreme cases. Torayah added that notional aggregation across banking partners has greatly improved returns

For Torayah, the most crucial step in avoiding trapped-cash buildup is ensuring treasury is involved before commercial terms are finalised. “The contract should not happen before treasury sign-off,” he said. Early participation helps shape currency structures grounded in reality. “One dollar generated in Nigeria is not equivalent to one dollar generated in the UAE or Europe,” he cautioned, emphasising the need to minimize local-currency collections and plan cash use ahead of time.

Scenario analysis as a weekly discipline

With multibillion-dollar cash flows spread across more than 100 countries, forecasting is one of GE Vernova’s most complex tasks. Torayah called it “a very exciting topic” but stressed the limitations of relying on any single dataset. “It’s very difficult if you only have one source of forecasting,” he said. “We have always kept some sort of scenario analysis.”

This scenario-based approach is continuous. “Weekly, monthly we revise where our available cash, which is the untrapped cash, versus where our expectations from trapped cash are,” Torayah explained. These reviews test whether operating buffers remain at the appropriate levels. 

According to Torayah, the aim is to keep the operating buffers lower and lower and lower and still… make sure that it absorbs the volatility and the geopolitical shocks. “If the treasury finds itself “above or below” its thresholds, long-term plans are recalibrated, he added.

Building protection into the deal itself

When asked about geopolitical tensions and macroeconomic changes, Torayah emphasised that risk mitigation begins before any payment is made. “It all starts from the deal structuring,” he said.

In unstable jurisdictions, GE Vernova prefer offshore collection. “It’s preferred to collect offshore if possible and preferably in major foreign currencies.”

Torayah added that if a contract can be structured so that revenues are heavily loaded from a foreign currency point of view and just a smaller portion on the local currency, the treasury team gains a degree of natural protection.

The treasury must then ask the next question: “Does treasury have a hedging plan in place?” 

If cash collected in local currency cannot be deployed and risks becoming trapped, treasury pre-builds liquidity structures to extract or redeploy funds. Torayah put it succinctly: “If… this is going to be trapped cash, then do you have the right liquidity structure… to take the money out or not?”

Automation, APIs and the path to real-time treasury

Although AI in treasury is still maturing, GE Vernova is laying the groundwork. “AI itself is still at the very beginning of the journey,” Torayah said, describing progress to date as limited by scalability and regulatory fragmentation.

Despite this, technology underpins treasury’s ambition. “We have our own treasury management system,” he said, which supports short-term forecasting. A long-term forecasting tool, “fed automatically… from invoicing, from accounts payable [and] from a collection point of view,” consolidates everything into “one source of truth.”

Real-time data is the next step. “APIs… for real-time reporting is key,” he noted. While not yet deployed, GE Vernova has launched intraday reporting, moving closer to the vision of real-time treasury.

This ambition is reinforced by the company’s “follow the sun” model. Each morning begins with daily positioning before treasury teams move cash from east to west. “We… move the funds, extract the cash directly and send it to the US where it gets deployed,” Torayah explained.

While real-time treasury is a priority, Torayah believes the market remains early. “I didn’t see something happening yet in the market that is scalable enough to make a transformational change,” he said. GE Vernova’s priorities are real-time payments, virtual accounts, and in-house bank capabilities, supported by the internal infrastructure needed to adopt new technologies as they mature.

On stablecoins, however, he sees clear potential: “It settles in 30 seconds. It’s really, really efficient,” he said, adding that the technology could significantly speed-up treasury operations once organisations are comfortable deploying it at scale.

In the future, he believes tokenisation and enhanced connectivity will transform the role. Soon, corporates could “receive our cash in UAE today and… continue to receive the money in the US” across the same day. Treasury positioning will evolve “to become a multi-transaction” process instead of a once-daily routine.