Arts Graduate to Treasury Professional with Julia Fordham

Well, I think. I think quite a lot of people were quite surprised when I ended up in finance and I was probably one of them in the early days because I think I'd gone to university, I'm an arts graduate, I studied classics and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I had some vague idea about going into journalism. I'd had an internship in market research. I thought maybe I was going to go into marketing or advertising. It was the time when advertising was a very cool thing to do. Then there was a kind of Plan B, which I'd always had in mind, that was maybe banking would be a good sort of generalist intro to industry and to a career that might lead in lots of different directions. So it wasn't really intentional. But the big banks and the accounting firms were hiring quite a lot in those days. There they were. I remember my first couple of years in branches thinking this wasn't what I thought I was going to be doing, what's this all about kind of thing. But it's important to remember that you can learn something everywhere you work and that knowledge about UK clearing systems and how money is actually processed and where it is was just so valuable later during the financial crisis. Treasury is not just one job, it's sort of. It's many different disciplines. It's at least four major disciplines and probably more than that now, when you think about the sort of development and risk management over the years. But in terms of the future of treasury, you will often hear, when I hear people ask this question and they immediately kind of dive technology generally and artificial intelligence. And I agree with all of that. But to me, I still think the biggest challenge is getting the message out there about what treasury really is. It still amazes me that not just small companies, but even larger, well established companies, household names, some of them just don't really have much of a Treasury function.