When she was growing up in her native Madagascar, Toavina Ramamonjiarisoa never thought of working in the finance/insurance industry. She dreamed of setting up her own company in the agribusiness field or eventually becoming the country’s Minister of Environment. A natural born problem solver, she was motivated to clean up the smog, which at that time was so thick it was “often hard to breathe,” notes the dynamic recently appointed Chief Financial Officer of ATI.
Her early ambitions led her to France where she earned a Master’s degree in Microbiology. To hedge her bets, she also earned two other Master’s degrees in Accounting and Finance and Business Administration.
“After my studies, I wanted to move back to Madagascar and pursue my dreams but life took me in a different direction.”
That different direction came in the form of a lucrative offer as a financial auditor in the insurance and reinsurance department of Mazars, an international audit firm based in France. At Mazars, she cut her teeth working on the accounts of large-scale clients such as AXA, GAN and MEDERIC, a subsidiary of the German firm, Allianz.
She spent four years working at Mazars as a financial auditor, where she gained the respect of her peers through a reputation for hard work and integrity. A headhunting firm quickly took notice of the up-and-coming young star and recruited her for the position of Group Financial Controller of the French credit insurance giant, Coface.
“At that time Coface had 160 subsidiaries and branches in 60 countries and above 4,000 employees spanning the regions of Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia.”
At Coface, Ramamonjiarisoa managed the budget, plans, forecasts and prepared management reports for the executive committee and for their sole shareholder, Natixis. When she eventually left the company, they were earning €1 billion in annual premium.
Just when she thought things were settled, life again intervened. After four years at Coface she made a decision to follow her husband to the U.K. where he had a job offer that was ‘too good to pass’. And as luck would have it, she landed a job with a UK-based asset management company where she began working “even before my husband reported to work at his job in London” she explains.
This job proved to be the most challenging of her career.
“I was hired in 2007 by a start up fund manager and I was supposed to hire a team. Then the big global financial crisis hit and the head office in the US froze our budget. I had to build up the financial systems from scratch and consolidate all the vehicles we invested in with very limited resources. We underwent the terrifying waves of the global financial crisis and had to make difficult decisions in order to preserve as much as possible the value of the fund we managed.”
It may have been frightening but the diminutive Ramamonjiarisoa saw this as just another challenge.
Two years later, she was appointed as a Director, member of Board, and as the compliance and anti-money-laundering officer. As proof of just how many balls she had in the air, at the time of her departure from this company, her duties and responsibilities were allocated to seven people!
In 2010, the fund had started to recover. It was at this time that an ad for the position of CFO caught Ramamonjiarisoa’s attention.
“I still had not lost sight of my original goal, to return to Africa. I believe in this continent. You have only to look at how many times Clinton and Obama have visited to realise that the future is here.” As she completes her first month in office, the new CFO is inspired to be back in Africa. With quarterly deadlines to meet, forecasts to project and reports to produce, she sees the job as just another challenge – one that will no doubt benefit from her unique brand of down-to-earth and no-nonsense solutions.
And just in case you thought she had abandoned her dreams of tackling environmental issues, she is now pondering how to make use of Madagascar’s medicinal plants. While the biology side of her brain is occupied with trying to solve that problem, ATI will proceed to reap the financial assets from this ‘green’ finance whiz.
