Building a Well-Rounded Treasury Career with Robert Lau

Foreign.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to them about how they've built their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. Let's get on with the show. In this week's show, delighted to be joined by Robert Lau, the vice president and treasurer at Informatica LLC. Founded in 1993, headquartered in Redwood City, California, the group believed data is a soul of business transformation. That's right. You can hear me reading from my notes. But this is what they do. Basically the company itself. They have customers in over 100 countries. 84 of the Fortune 100 rely on the group to drive their data led digital transformation. And one of the visions for the group is to create a world where organizational data is poised for greatness, ready to deliver brilliant outcomes and everything else. Again, as always, I'm going to get Robert to describe the group a bit later in the show and some of the transformations that's happened with his career more recently. But again, we're going to start way back when back, you know, a few years ago now. Robert, take us back, if you would, how you first got started in finance and then discovered the wonderful world that's Treasury. Over to you, sir.

Hey Mike, thanks, thanks for the introduction and happy to join today and just share my journey to how I got to my position today and what I hope to accomplish before I set off on retirement and hopefully have a very pleasant life kind of in the tropics somewhere. So I've had a really interesting journey. I would say that I wasn't someone who in college knew exactly what I wanted to do. So I didn't go in a straight line to become a treasurer of the company. I kind of zigzagged along the way and I think eventually I got there. But it was really interesting in some sense on how I actually got there. So let me kind of go back and start prior to doing treasury, actually my first job was being a public accountant at Coopers and Library, which is the pre like PricewaterhouseCoopers. I was there for five years. I actually did tax as a specialty at Coopers and Lybrand. And what was really interesting was I loved the technical aspects of the job. But what I didn't like was, you know, at the age of 23, I wasn't a very good salesman. And at the time, you know, public accounting became more of a commodity product, which is very different from it is today. And the pressure to Sell was actually one of the key drivers to becoming successful in a public accounting firm. And so that point I felt this isn't exactly what I wanted to do at the time. Retail investing, investing in equities, those kind of things became very popular. And that was a big interest of mine. So I decided to go back to business school and got a degree at Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley, and really had a good experience at business school. And when coming out of business school, what I really wanted to do was work at a mutual fund. So looking at equities investing and what I found was depending on, you know, your personality, I was. There's a term, kind of an introvert, but an extrovert. Mike. There's a term out there. I don't know what it's called, but it's kind of a mix.

But I think everybody's a blend of both on they sort of depending on the day.

Yeah. So because of that, you know, I felt what I found was I didn't have that personality to like switch careers from what I used to do. And so getting into the investment world out of business school without any experience was a little hard for me because I wasn't the type who was very expressive and could kind of convince someone that I could do it without any type of experience. So I ended up going into corporate. I did a number of finance jobs, but I always had an interest in capital markets and investments and such. Went and got a CFA on my own thinking, you know, if I learned that, maybe I would have that opportunity. And what was interesting was when I was at agile, Hewlett Packard 1999, that's when Hewlett Packard decided to spin off Agilent Technologies as a public company. And so I had been at my job for less than a year, but I knew that this was an opportunity of a lifetime where if I was able to participate in this transaction, this is exactly what I wanted to do in terms of a career, is to work on a special transaction, be a key part of that team, and really accomplish something. I actually left my job at the Hewlett Packard division I was working in and volunteered to work on the spinoff. And it was very grueling, but it was a wonderful experience where I actually led splitting off the financials for all of the Asia countries within Hewlett Packard to create new Agilent entities in all of Asia Pacific. What was interesting was I worked very closely with the future treasurer of Agilent Technologies. And fast forward like three or four years, I was having a discussion with my HR representative And in, I think five years at Agilent Technologies, I had roughly three or four jobs. So at the HP Leasing Group for less than a year, I did the Agilent spinoff, I did transfer pricing for Agilent Technologies. Then I worked for the communications group doing corporate FP and a. And then the treasurer at Agilent came up to me and said, you know, we have an opportunity to do foreign exchange. Is that of interest to you? Because the point was, he remembered three or four years ago when we were doing the spinoff, he liked how I could just take over a project, lead a group of people who I just started working with and really be able to communicate across different cultures, different departments, et cetera. And I said, you know what, that's really interesting. I never thought of actually doing treasury because treasury is not a career that people know about when you go to business school, right? So then I basically started, you know, doing foreign exchange management at Agilent Technologies. And Agilent had a really big FX program. We hedged, you know, in the billions of dollars, let's say, on an annual basis.

Let me jump in there because now I know Agilent, you know, Medical Technologies, the spin out of HP and everything else. And we talked about this on our pre book. There are people here going agilent, who. Can you just briefly explain to the audience who Agilent were and what they did? And insofar as, because then you had this role in FX and then you did more corporate financing, why that was so important? Because again, we'll have listeners going, right, well, you know, who are they? You know, what are they, you know, perhaps looking them up. So just, just explain why that was so important in treasury terms. Because, you know, I know that treasury was at the heart of things a lot of the time with Agilent and stuff globally.

So over to you, HP obviously was a very large company and what they decided to do was spin off a division of Agilent Technologies, which was the real core beginning of hp. So it's the electronics component testing, it was the medical devices testing, it was the semiconductor division, and it was a global manufacturing company that, you know, was about probably like 30, 40,000 employees at the time and revenues close to 5 to $10 billion. So a very large company. And treasury is actually very complex in that organization because you have intercompany transactions between the manufacturing entities in Southeast Asia, let's say, and then all the sales entities around the world. And there's a lot of FX exposures because you manufacture in Singapore dollars, but you sell in Europe, sterling, et cetera. So my Job really was to manage the FX program there. And that's where when I saw that I was like, this is actually a really interesting opportunity. And what evolved in was Agilent had this run up where they did a lot of large transactions. And so with the success of the Agilent spinoff, Agilent then spun off a semiconductor division which, which now became Avago Technologies and now is a part of Broadcom, which is one of the biggest semiconductor companies in the world. So that was an interesting part because at that time they asked me whether I wanted to go to Singapore to help run the treasury group at Avago. The treasurer at the time said, you know Robert, that's an interesting opportunity, but there's a lot of things that are going to happen corporate that you're going to be really interested in. And then I shift my career shifted from managing FX to actually doing a lot of capital markets work. So as part of the spinoff we sold the company for a few billion dollars. We executed a $3 billion tender offer. We had over a billion dollars of cash overseas. So what we ended up doing was executing a structured finance deal where we secured the cash overseas to raise over a billion dollar debt to actually fund part of the tender. So I got involved in a lot of really, really interesting transactions. It was something that was very interesting and fun for me to do.

It's an interesting one. I was talking to a candidate just today and really great candidate, but he, his career, rightly or wrongly, and he was sort of saying, been with one company for a number of years but he's gone, you know, got the strength in cash and he's done touched on some of the other areas. But he then made a move overseas and he was sort of beating himself up a little bit saying oh, you know, I didn't get and you know, as much corporate finance experience and much foreign exchange done a bit more cash focus, which was fine. Now you were blending at quite an early stage in your career those three and working within those areas, if you like, those real pillars of treasury, if you reflect back on that now and you look to the future, was that really the sort of springboard for the other stuff? Because you know, if you went on as you, you're about to go on to the next companies that you went on, you know, they said, well, you know, have you done corporate finance? Yep. Done corporate foreign exchange? Yep. Done that, yeah.

Done cash?

Yeah. Did you notice that against some of maybe your peers that you'd cover quite a range of stuff over five, six, seven years or what would that be right?

Yeah, I think that's a good observation because I actually resonate with the individual that you just spoke with, spoke about is what I see a lot is you have people who do cash for their entire treasury career, and they're totally happy with that. And what I think what was interesting was when people look at my background and they see that Robert's a cpa, Robert's invested to get his CFA degree. He has a general MBA kind of background. I think I was lucky because I had that educational background or that training to allow me to pivot to all of these different areas in treasury and be able to be successful. I think because of my educational kind of studies, for me to jump into capital markets or for me to jump into fx, you know, I think I was able to do that and to kind of progress in that area. And so I think the challenge for young professionals is can you find an organization where management team is willing to invest in you? And what you should always be doing is always looking for external ways to kind of build up your experience and that, you know, that could be joining a Treasury association or that could be going out and doing independent study in an area of focus that you're really interested in. I really thought the CFA was a very key springboard for me because bankers, when you work with bankers, the key with being successful is getting through all the complexities that they kind of present and trying to understand exactly economically, what is this going to do for us and how do you look at it? And I think with my training, it was helpful for me because I was able to interpret these things pretty carefully and pretty easily able to communicate or formulate how to look at it, how to present it, how do you evaluate the different opportunities? Like, you know, when we did the tender offer at Agilent, you know, was the tender offer the right thing to do or was it big structured, accelerate share repurchase program, et cetera. So I think you're right. It's like to be a treasurer of a company, you have to build the various kind of components that cover Treasury. And the key really is to find an environment where you're given the opportunity to try and experience. Yeah.

And I think also, you know, you talk about the cfa. I was actually asked by someone just last week about whether they should invest in themselves and do the ctp. I said, you don't have to do it. I said, yeah, but it's a great thing to have because then the way that you are viewed, I said, if someone is wanting to hire you, they will look at you and go, oh, you've got, they've got ctp, you know, or they've got a CFA or they've got, in the uk, ACA accountant or whatever. They will identify with you and make that first step easier. And I've talked about it before, it's sometimes a simply a passport to getting an interview. It doesn't, you know, the rest of the stuff you do interview is up to you. But I said, look, it's a good rubber stamp of your, you know, level of treasury expertise. I said, there are lots of other qualifications, you know, we've got other accounting qualifications. So I'm not saying, you know, mega pro, I'm not saying mega negative, I'm saying it's, it's a great thing to have in your back pocket. But they, it would have to be their choice. And they, they actually, they are going to do the ctb, which I think is a great idea. But yeah, it's not dissimilar to that. But now I know we're going to run short time and I don't want to because as said to Robert before the show, we could sit in a pub and talk for 10 hours and get thrown out, but that's a totally different story. So you then were Agilent for a period of time. Bring us then through the next couple of roles because you went to a little known company called Yahoo. So go on there, talk us through.

When I was at Agilent, I did a lot of interesting treasury areas and from a technical treasury perspective it was a great job. But from a career perspective, we hired in an assistant treasurer and I talked to the treasurer about whether he thought there was an opportunity for me to progress from manager to assistant treasurer. And he felt that given his organization, he really didn't think at the time that he wanted more than one assistant treasurer for the organization. So I had felt I spent a good close to 10 years at Agilent Technologies and I felt I was ready. And because of that I decided to look at opportunities. And Yahoo was interesting because that was a sexy company at the time. And the one thing that attracted me there was I never managed a large cash portfolio. So we did money funds at Adjunct Technologies, but we never had investment managers manage the portfolio. So that was a key area of treasury that I never did. And so I interviewed for a position, I got the job, gave me the chance to go through. How do you structure an investment policy? How do you manage cash? How do you look at risk? And the fortunate thing that happened for me, although in hindsight it was unfortunate that it did happen, was the financial crisis happened and 2008, 2009, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. The whole mortgage industry went down the toilet. It was a challenging time because one day when we invested in Bear Stearns stock, our entire, let's say, five to $10 million of paper became worthless. The next day, JP Morgan decides to buy Bear Stearns and luckily the value of the paper went back to par or close to par. So it was really interesting just to manage a cash portfolio throughout that crisis. And that was another really good learning point for me where as long as you have a good investment policy or as long as you properly look at things, regardless of what happens, whether you lose money or make money, it really doesn't matter as long as the way you approach it is very sound. So we were able to get through that and that was a really good experience and really helped shaped how I view treasury in a sense that you're there to safeguard your assets and you're there to develop policies that maximize returns, but you never do it in a way where you ever feel that there's risk for the company. So when I hear about companies investing in cryptocurrency is very against my philosophy of treasury is not a profit center per se.

I remember we used, we used to have that back in the day. When I first ever started the salary survey in 2003, I had that question, you know, because it was, you know, treasury moved away from the business. You know, is Treasury a service center or profit center? And the weird bit was the first ever time I ran it. And okay, we were ZO3 but about 10 to 15% had some kind of trading element or there was some latitude and things, but by 2004 it was like 1%. And in fact, it wasn't even that. I'm like, oh, okay, I think they might have clicked the wrong button. It just went, it disappeared. And probably a good thing, you know, because it's, you know, let's. I'm going, you know, it's about de risking. And you and I talked about this. But so you, you made the move. Talk us through then, you know, keep, keep going through the progression, otherwise, you know, we're going to run out when we don't want to. So keep going, sir.

Yeah, absolutely. So I built a really good career in terms of doing a lot of complex transactions or managing a lot of complex areas in treasury, from cash to investments to FX to corporate finance. But what I never did was help build a Treasury organization. So I got that opportunity at Informatica. And so Informatica was started in 93, they went public in 99, but in 2010 they still did treasury in corporate accounting in the controllership function. So hired there to basically start the treasury organization. And that was a wonderful experience because there again I started building more experiences, adding to my a resume. I managed insurance, I started managing credit and collections on the accounts receivable side, as a smaller company you can do a lot more. So when I was at HP Agilent, I only did fx, I only did capital markets. When I was at Yahoo, I only did investments and cash management. So but going to a smaller company, I can actually do everything. And believe it or not, software companies are much less complex. So we were sub $1 billion of revenue, whereas, you know, the other companies that I worked with were heading closer to 10 billion of annual revenue. So the scope was totally different. But it was a good career move for me because I was able to use a lot of the experience I had at large complex companies. Understand how do you approach things? When I was talking about the investment philosophy, I was able to use those learnings and really start thinking about, well, how do I manage investments of 300 million versus 4 billion? How do I manage an ethics program that may be 100 million a year versus a billion? Right. So it was really that, it was very interesting because I think what helped me succeed at Informatica was all of those experiences at large complex companies helped me figure out how do I structure the organization, what areas do I really need to focus on? What areas can I cut corners on while I'm building the organization? So there, you know, we grew from myself to hiring one individual, to hiring two individuals, to incorporating a finance rotation program where we brought in new grads to come in, do treasury work for a year. That was a really good experience for me because it really helped me understand how to build an organization. And that's really important when you start progressing in your career is, you know, when you start young, you technically, you need to know how to, how to do different kind of things. And as a young person, I think that's the area where, you know, in my job am I experiencing or able to contribute in various areas of Treasury. That's the most important thing as you start your career because if you just focus on cash, like Mike said earlier, your whole career could be cash management from beginning to end. And that's good if that's what you want to do, right? But if you have goals and ambitions to really run a Treasury organization, you need to make sure. That you're not pigeonholed in that large corporation where you're just doing one thing all the time. I think the one area that I would encourage people look for as you're interviewing for new opportunities is if you're working for a large organization, do they have a program where they're moving people around every couple years to develop people, to give people different experiences that they need to have in treasury to really be kind of that all around, kind of treasury professional. And so, you know, I did it through multiple companies there. I'm sure there are companies out there who have more structure programs and those are all obviously really good opportunities to go into. But as I look back, I think again, the key is building that technical expertise, that background. That's a key. But then also having the opportunity to kind of structure an organization. Build an organization. That's another key in terms of growing your career.

Now, Robert, what I want to do is just touch on if you'd like, if you would, or just, just give us a quick hold our hand as we go through the description of Informatica. And you ably described it. But what I was going to say you went private through an LBO in August 2015, then you went public through traditional IPO. And I know that's something you recently spoke at a conference where we originally connected from. Can you just give us a quick run through those processes just at quite a high level? Because otherwise for you as a treasurer, what was that like and what's that like?

It's interesting, is like most people want to work for a public company, but working at a LBO at a private company is actually really interesting from a Treasury perspective. So Informatica sells data management software and the software is used to consolidate data, is used to interpret data. A good example of some of the key use cases for us is a bank might have data on customers and it's in separate databases, etc. And our company consolidates that data so that when a salesperson looks at a customer, they'll say, okay, Mr. Mr. Richards, a mortgage, he has an investment account, he works for Investment Advisor. So you know, they're able to consult, consolidate all that data, look at it and you know, so what was interesting was before we used to sell software on a perpetual license basis. So a company would buy our software, implement it and then we would receive maintenance revenue for support. But the business was very lumpy. And so as a public company, it was always challenging to kind of continue to show growth and not have a lot of lumpiness in our revenue. And so we were underperforming. Some investors came in and advocated that we go ahead and sell the company. And so what I got the opportunity to go through was some private equity firms purchased us and we did a leverage buyout and we went from having zero debt and maybe 600 million of cash on our books to having two and a half billion of debt and closer to 100 million of cash to run our organization. So my job totally changed from very easy uncomplex company managing cash with a few investment managers to pivoting to looking at interest rate risk. So we put in interest rate hedge north of $1 billion. That's something I never done in my career, but I was able to do it through this LBO process, just managing the debt, doing all the debt compliance reporting, implementing a global cash forecasting process where I was able to know country by country on a weekly basis what my cash was going to look like. Just going through that whole process was really interesting. The other thing that is kind of interesting, going private was I was able to do even more because as a private company it's not as complex. So I took over stock administration. I took, because as a private company you just have an option program. There's no exercises or anything like that. I took over investor relations because as a private company we just did conference calls with our debt investors. So it kind of aligned with what I was also doing as well. Able to take over global travel because, you know, I bet my boss saw that, you know, Robert can do a lot of these things. Maybe, you know, we can give him something he's never done before, see how he gets on it. So as a private company I was able to do a lot of different things outside of just core Treasury. And again, this kind of builds up credibility within the organization, ability to manage functions, but yet still be involved in really interesting treasury kind of problem solutions. And that was a really good experience. And then we redesigned the business by moving away from a perpetual license model to selling software on a subscription basis. We put all of our software out in the cloud because now most customers like to buy enterprise software that's hosted in the cloud so that they don't have to invest in an internal IT infrastructure. So because we move from, let's say a 50% business, where 50% was perpetual licensed business and very choppy, to now we have 90% of our revenue that's actually recurring. So every year, 90% of our revenue is from annual subscriptions or maintenance renewals where that's a very steady and predictable revenue stream. And because we were able to achieve that, we felt that this was the right time to go out back out into the public market. And the markets have been choppy. So the timing of our IPO wasn't exactly ideal. But we're doing very well as a public company, so the business is very healthy. We've got a lot of Runway in terms of growth and we're very positive in the whole digital transformation space that we play in.

And we spoke before the show about the development of you in a development of you and your role there. And as we're doing now, we sort of talk to people about their career journeys and then we also talk about where things are going now and things are actually evolving for you as well within your role as a treasurer. You're not just a Treasury. Your treasury plus in a nice way.

Yeah.

Can you explain the plus and how that came about? Because again, people listening today will be going, oh, one, you know, that's great, that's very well. But how do you take it the next level when you're doing that? So can you explain that to the list?

Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting because as like I said, as a private company, a lot of things are as complex. So you can, you know, as the treasurer of a company, you can take on more. And when we decided to go public, stock administration as a private company is very easy. But as a public company, you've got to manage ESPP program, an RSU program. And even though I was successful in implementing with my team, global ESPP and RSU program with over 5,000 employees, which, you know, in like 30 countries, assisted in the IPO process where I put together the story as part of my job as running investor relations before what the executive management team. And because we're private equity owned, they're very conservative in a sense that they said, well, I want someone who's done it before. So we hired a VP of ir, we hired a stock administrator who had done stock administration professionally for close to 20 years. I was kind of at that point where I was thinking, well, what else can I do? And I had a really honest conversation. And this is the hard part of growing up is you've got to challenge your boss. And I challenged the chief accounting officer, who's my boss. I said, I've done all these things. I've successfully implemented a global equity program. I managed investor relations up to the point where we went ipo. Now that I don't have that, I can't just go back and just do regular Treasury Even though there's a lot to do, I feel like I could do more. And unfortunately, I'm the type of person who enjoys challenges. And I just felt, if this is my job for the next five to 10 years, I'm not the type of person that just wants to skate. And so I had that really hard conversation with my boss, and he didn't know what to do, just to be honest. And it was really challenging. But again, another opportunity happened. And so throughout my career, what I've always done is if there's an interesting transaction opportunity, I volunteer for it because I know that's what I love to do. So going back to when HP decided to spin off Agilent Technologies, I had only been at the job for less than a year, but I volunteered to do that because I knew that was something that would be interesting and positive for my career. So I had the conversation with my colleague who has real estate, and he told me he was retiring. And we're good friends, so we keep ourselves up to date about our families, et cetera. And what was interesting was a few years ago, the finance manager went on maternity leave. And I told my friend, I said, you know, I've done FP and A before. I could just manage your real estate budget for you for like six to nine months while, while she goes on maternity leave and just do that for you and gives me a chance to see another part of the organization, right? And so we had a good six to nine months. And so fast forward to today. I said, you know, would your team be interested in me running the group? And my rationale was, you have, I think it's like six senior directors reporting to you. And he was the VP of real estate. And I told him, I said, you have such experienced people, I don't know that it's not unreasonable to think that a general kind of finance executive could actually manage the team. And I explained to him that I really need something new to keep me interested in my job and my position at the company as we continue to grow. And his thought was, you know what, that's a really interesting idea because he never thought about it either. They are already ready to hire experienced professional. So he went back, he rationalized it, talked to a couple of his direct reports, and what they came back with, because I had worked with them three years ago, they said, yeah, I know Robert, we get along really well. I think he actually, but be good for the job. And then it evolved. I told my boss, who I shocked when I said, I need something new. I said, I Talked to the real estate guy and thinking, can I run real estate as part of my job? And he was so negative about it. It literally drove me crazy, because I just don't believe in that management style. I believe that you should give people who are bright or motivated opportunities to do something different. If you feel that they have the aptitude and the drive to succeed.

Yeah. The way to help them.

Yeah. And so what's funny is, he was so negative about it. And then the next day when the real estate guy talked to him, he came back and said, you know, Robert, I think this can actually work. Because I think he needed to hear it from someone who ran real estate to really understand, can a person like Robert, who's done a lot of different things in his career, take on a new challenge in kind of that role and be successful? And what was interesting is then the real estate person went to the cfo, and the cfo, when he heard it, he said, that's an intriguing idea. The reason why he said that was me and the CFO have a great relationship. He's been very impressed with the fact of how I could do all these different things and be successful. And he really liked my approach in terms of how I look at complex problems, issues, and present it in a way that he can really kind of interpret what's important, what's not important, and help. I think he appreciates that I give him the information to make the right decision. And so, because I built that rapport with the CFO through my treasurer role, he actually, in less than day, said, let's give Robert the job. It just happened. And I went out and talked to everybody in the real estate organization, felt that they would be supportive because I sit in their shoes. I always do. This is when I talk to people, I always sit in their shoes and say, okay, what would they be concerned about? What would they think? And what I wanted to make sure that they understood was, I'm going to allow you to do your job because you know what you're doing. You're very experienced. You've accomplished a lot through the last six years under the leadership. The former person. What I'm there to do is really help you guys make decisions from a company perspective, not just a pure real estate perspective. And I think they appreciate the fact that I'm very connected with senior management through my role as the treasurer. And because of that, they were supportive. And so now I'm the treasurer and head of real estate and workplace services. And it's a really different role, but I really Truly enjoy it because it's, it's invigorating my career. And so, you know, I think the great thing growing up in treasury is as you go through your career, the key for me was always, am I learning something? Am I being given the opportunity to take a chance on something and successfully manage it? If I successfully managed it, am I given another opportunity to continue to learn? And that's the real key is getting opportunities, succeeding. And then when you're kind of at that time, which I was just recently, where I really struggle to say, should I just go to another company, should I be a treasurer of a larger companies? So I could feel good about just doing Treasury. Right. But that's where, you know, you do need to have confidence in yourself and you do need to have hard conversations. And when my boss felt challenged the way he did, he understood me because I've been very honest with him all my career about, you know, I like to do interesting things. I can't just do the same job over and over and over again.

You got to keep seeking challenge.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so. So luckily I was able to find that position for me, that's going to be new and exciting and I still get to do the normal treasury things that I'm very good at. So, yeah, so I'm very excited because I wanted to see, is there a way for me to stay at the company and feel good about my job. And there's a great example of, again, when you're presented with opportunities, don't be afraid to try. I think that's the key. But obviously you have to be good at your job and build good relationships, build trust with senior management. That's kind of been my key is, I think when I. You're very early, the type of person who wants to have good experience, wants to feel that I have the experience or education to take up a challenge. Right. I have the soft skills to run an organization that I have no real experience with. And so the key for me and my career is really to feel confident in my background, of what I've done, take advantage of opportunities when they come, work hard and prove to people that you can do this and you can do it successfully. And because of those, those things, I've been able to develop a, you know, pretty decent career. You know, when I look back at my business school mates, you know, some people are CFOs, some people have started companies. You know, I've had a good career. You know, some people have done more interesting things. But, you know, as I look back I given the balance of family, personal life and career, I think I'm in a good place and I'm really excited to see what happens in the next few years at Informatica.

Although that is a nice wrap up. I do want to just close the show, as we will do in and we do in each and every week show with your LinkedIn details in the show notes. But what I wanted to sort of close off with as we do is you reflect over all of that. As you say, you've got this great career path and it's expanded and, you know, not been afraid to take that on. But the takeaway advice of people today, maybe their earlier stages, their career or later, what the two or three pieces of ice, you might just, you know, people listening today going, right, yeah, that's what I've got from today's show. What would you say to people?

I think the first thing is to understand what is your motivation. Do you want to strive to be finance executive in a company or are you happy managing a certain part of Treasury? So maybe you want to just be an FX expert as an example, right? That dictates how you should approach your career in a sense that if you want to just focus on one area, treasury, go work for that interesting global multinational company that has a lot of complex issues so that you can have experience in that area. If you want to strive to be a more broader finance person, whether it be a treasurer or even a cfo, what you have to do is find a company or find opportunities where you're able to experience different areas in treasury, work on very interesting projects, work for growth companies that you know will have very interesting transactions so that you get to experience a lot of different things in Treasury. So as you continue to grow, you can look back on that to apply those experiences to your new career, to your new position. So that's the first thing you decide is what is your true motivation in your professional life, Right. And then the next piece of advice is just keep your eyes open to opportunities. When a company is growing, there's always going to be opportunities for you to do different things. And even in treasury when you're working with the treasurer, you should be very upfront with the treasurer and say, you know, I really would be interested in working on capital markets and to do that, I'm going to go ahead and maybe do an online course on corporate finance if you don't have that background. Or maybe you decide you want to do a CTP so that you can do more complex cash management structuring like putting in a cash pool structure in Europe or something like that. Or maybe you just go out and get an MBA at night. That could be another option. Right, There's. I think if you're truly motivated, you've got to look for that external opportunity. You will get some training and opportunities at the company, but a lot of times that's not enough. And so, you know, I think, I think, you know, you have to push yourself if you truly want to build a career. You know, you got to push yourself and you've got to continue to build different experiences and, you know, learn about how different companies do things. And the best thing to do is help implement a new structure, a new process for your current job so that your manager understands, you know, this guy's. He or she is progressively thinking about how are we doing things and how are we approving it. And so as you demonstrate that, then if a new problem comes along or a new opportunity comes along, then your manager will give you that opportunity because you've demonstrated it. So I think that's the key, is keep on looking for opportunities, succeed in what you do when you take those opportunities and don't put too much pressure in the sense that, well, I've got to get here in five years, I got to get there in 10 years. You know, it took me after business school When I graduated 98, it took me, I guess, 12 years to become the treasurer of a company. Yeah, right. So people have done it much shorter, I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah, but don't rush yourself. I think, as you said, don't put yourself under that false pressure. What's the point? You know, it's like, as you said, it's like just focus on that. And I think, you know, you're going to get where you want to go. So as I said before the show, we could just keep talking. We're not going to, because we try to keep it half an hour, 40 minutes, I think we will do and stuff. Robert, amazing to talk to you. We will put your details in the show notes and people can connect to you and keep an eye on your career. You know, keep watching as you continue to develop and expand it and everything else. And it's onwards and upwards from here, so, you know, you're already up there, but where does it go next? It's an exciting journey. So, as always, thanks for your time and look forward to seeing you.

Yeah, thank you, Mike. You know, really enjoyed the conversation and I think what you're doing is great for the treasury community in general and Yeah, I just, I enjoyed the time and hopefully the tidbits of my career can can help the treasury community that you reach out to on a daily basis.

Thank you. So much appreciated. Hello, it's Mike here again. I hope you enjoyed this week's show. If you did, then maybe you want to follow the show or subscribe, depending on where you listen, whether that's itunes, Spotify or another great place to listen to the show from. It's totally free and means that you'll be the first to see each and every week when we release a new show. And maybe whilst you're there, you could even leave a quick review. Reviews and ratings are among the most important metrics for a podcast to effectively rank. And as you can probably appreciate the podcast, there's a lot of hard work to produce every week it be amazing. Just take say, 20 seconds, leave a quick review of my amazing guests and their great career stories. We'd really appreciate it. Thanks very much and I can't wait to see you soon.