Career Advice from the President of the ACT with Ian Chisholm

Hello, it's Mike Richards here from the treasury recruitment company. I hope you're enjoying the Treasury Career Corner.

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Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. I talk to them about how they got started in treasury, where they are now and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going next. In this week's show, I'm delighted to be joined by Ian Chisholm, Vice President of Corporate Finance at bhp. BHP are one of the world's leading resources companies and they're headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and offices over here in the uk. They extract and process minerals, oil and gas. With more than 62,000 employees and contractors, mainly in Australia and the Americas, but actually a global reach. As a company, their products are sold worldwide, so they've got a number of offices across the world. They operate under dual listed company structure with two parent companies, but they operate as if they're a single economic entity which we refer to as bhp, as we will do throughout this. Ian is currently the vp, as I say, of Corporate Finance there, responsible for financial strategy, dividends, funding at the corporate level. But he'll explain that a bit more. But prior to moving to BHP and I've known Ian for many years of my career, Ian worked at Royal Dutch Shell for 26 years, predominantly throughout treasury with roles including managing their London Treasury Centre, the pension fund, treasury of the gas and power business, as well as being a qualified management accountant. He's a FCT and he currently the President of the act, so I'll salute to that, El Presidente. But Ian, take me back if we may. You did a geology degree loving breaking up the rocks and things like that at Cambridge and then you decided to move to Shell, was that right? Or how did it all start back.

In the beginning, back in the day. Thanks, Mike. So after the geology degree I actually went and worked as a geologist for three months in Australia in an iron ore mine. And actually, ironically, it was a Rio Tinto iron ore mine, ironically, given my employer. But I did work as a geologist. But I decided at the end of that three months that I didn't want to be a geologist for the rest of my life. I wanted to work in the business side of things rather than the technical side of things. So I came back to the UK and applied to the oil companies and to Rio and a few others, and Shell offered me a job in their finance graduate training scheme. So that was the start of the Shell career. So I did my first kind of graduate rotations and a few different job and got my CEMA qualification as I was working. And then I think, as many people do, I fell into Treasury. It just was one of the next jobs on the Shell graduate rotation. And I did a Treasury job in Aberdeen and I worked as a Treasury advisor in the upstream oil and gas company in Aberdeen. And so looking at their foreign exchange exposure, their cash flow forecasting and some of their leasing as well, so that was my of treasury back in the day.

And then with the role from there, you sort of said, right, I want Treasury. How did it come about? Did you just sort of say, right, I've done my rotation, can I be in treasury please? Or what happened?

A little bit like that. So basically after that Aberdeen role for a couple of years, I realized I really liked Treasury. It was something that, you know, one of the best roles that I did during my rotation. And the job came up in what was then called Group Central Funds, Central treasury in London. And I applied for that job and I was fortunate enough to get it. And really, I suppose that was the start of me specializing my career within the treasury field. Because in that job in London, I got to invest cash and do foreign exchange and really understand the front office in great detail. I did my first set of corporate treasury exams and then I was extremely lucky to be at that point of my career to be at the right place at the right time. I think in the sense that what was happening at the end of the 90s, and it wasn't unique to Shell, was that there was a big change in treasury, which was the centralization of treasury historically. Certainly when I joined Shell in 1989, treasury had been very decentralized. Each operating company within the treasury world had its own treasurer. They talked to their local markets, they had all their local bank relationships, they did all their FX and their borrowing and their investing locally and they talked to the center. Once A year and sent dividends up or got funding from the center. So it was a very decentralized model. What happened over the following 10 years is that markets opened up, communications improved, technology improved and people realized that actually the decentralized model could be very inefficient. And so you'd be borrowing in Deutsche Shell and lending in Shell francaise. So that didn't make any sense. Right. And particularly also with the adv, the euro, the ability to actually offset exposures and get economies of scale was just enhanced a lot more. So what happened in Shell at the end of the 90s was that I was the treasury team which was centralizing the. I was the first manager of the European treasury center in Shell. And what that was was providing foreign exchange and borrowing and lending services to all of the operating companies in Europe in Shell. So we had to go out and persuade the treasurers in all those local companies to actually deal with the center and not deal with their local banks, which is a very interesting experience.

And then you had other centers, you did Singapore and one of the states in Houston, is that right? So you sort of passed the ball around the three.

That's right. So once we'd kind of made success of the European treasury center, then we opened up the Singapore treasury center to do the Asian markets. And of course they are a little more difficult because not all of them are open to international cross border flows. We then opened our Houston treasury center and finally there was one in Rio which did obviously the South American operating companies. So Shell ended up with I suppose a four center model in the middle of the Thousands to year 2005 or.

So by then and you were doing sort of operations and then you became the development manager. And what was the sort of difference, the evolution of your role? Because obviously, you know, someone could say, well, 26 years you weren't doing the same job. This progression, obviously with a company the size of Shell, it's some ways speaking to Mark, who's been, who's at Johnson controls, he's been 14 years there, you know, each of the bits the company's been different. Now Shell not a different company, but obviously evolution. How did it sort of flow for you if you like your career there?

Yes. So you're right. I mean 26 years in Shell. But if I tell you that I had 12 different jobs, it shows me that actually Shell has I suppose a strategy of moving people around within the company to get a wide range of experiences. And it's such a big company, the biggest company in Europe and one of the biggest in the world, that it has got a lot of different experiences that you can go and get. And even within a specialized function such as treasury, you can get a whole wide range of different experiences. So as you say, I started off in Aberdeen, I then moved down to London to do the central treasury role and then that was the treasury center manager for Europe and then the development manager for the Singapore and Houston centers. So that was kind of rolling out the model and making sure that they were having standard processes and doing things in the same way. I then went on to work in the M and A team providing all the kind of financial support to MA transactions for gas and power deals in the Far East. And from that I then became treasurer of the gas and power business and worked in the Hague for three years. I then came back to London, worked in treasury operations again for a couple of years before moving on to the pension fund for four years and then finally in Shell. My job was running the debt, being VP of financial markets there and doing all the balance sheet funding for Shell there.

And without, you know, we could go on for ages about each of the roles and dive into them but, you know, not a lot about it. But was it easy working at Shell? What I mean by that, in as far as some companies you're having to say, well, please deal with us, please deal with this. I know that when I spoken to some of the Shell cash management guys, I said we had to have an extra zero to, you know, to our spreadsheet sometimes because we were just such massive flows. How did you find sort of Shell as an organization and how did it evolve through that time?

Obviously Shell a massive company throughout that whole period and it's had a over 100 year history. All these big companies don't stand still. They evolve all the time. Whether it's moving from a decentralized model to a centralized model as I've described, or going into new bits of business and trying to see whether they will work or divestments that happen all the time. There's acquisitions that happen all the time. There's a lot of change even in a big company and of course trying to work out what the right strategy is for the future. And right now there's a big challenge about the energy transition which Shell are dealing with. But when I went into M and A In Shell in 2001, I was doing gas and power projects as well as renewables projects. I was involved in bidding for a wind farm in Holland. And so that was I think Shell's first kind of ambitions into renewables at the beginning of the century. We then Shell, when they're a bit quiet on renewables for a bit and then have come back significantly into wind and solar in the last few years. So these things come and go and there's always things in a big company such as Shell to keep the interest level up.

And you managed around that time different teams remotely and actually directly. What would you say your leadership style is and was Shell keen to sort of develop that, would you say?

Yeah, Shell, I have to say, a very process driven company in a lot of ways, but actually a lot of good process as well as sometimes not so good process. But I think they have concentrated quite a lot on leadership development and they had a number of different leadership programs which I went on and certainly improved my leadership skills over the time that I was there. And I think my approach to leadership is that it one of the things that Shel talks about when it talks about leadership is about building shared vision. An overarching phrase for just trying to say, making sure that we're all talking from the same hymn sheet. Right. So you as the leader are there to articulate the strategy, tell people where they're going, making sure that you've got the right resources in place and that the tasks are allocated out correctly within the team and developing and empowering that team to actually go and deliver against that strategy. So I'm very much about trying to get the right people in place, encouraging them to pick up new opportunities and skills and building the team together. So you've got people who are interchangeable and can all move forward and deliver.

The trashy you mentioned there when you first joined the group and things perhaps the tools weren't in place to be able to run on a necessary global basis. How did you see treasury as well as Shell as a great company evolved throughout your time there? Because you must have seen it go from very manual to more systems or what were the biggest things that you saw happen within the group?

Yeah, you're absolutely right, Mike. We used to write out paper deal tickets and we'd fax things to the bank and all that stuff. Seems incredibly ancient technology these days, so the technology changes has been absolutely massive. And the other thing that happened at the end of the 90s was I suppose the rise of the foreign exchange platforms and Shell was actually an investor in Currentex at one point and then got out and let the banks get on with it, but was trying to, I guess, seed the market to try and get that moving forward. I think we could see that the change in technology, the rise of the Internet, allowed much better communication and more efficient communication and better usage technology and access to markets if you could actually get the right tools in place. And that's what all those FX platforms have done. And now, of course, FX is moving on to algorithmic execution, which is away from any of the telephone calling out and getting a bid for cable or whatever. It's now all done pretty much online via Bloomberg or whatever it is. So things have changed very, very significantly in a lot of the treasury execution areas. The other big change has been on treasury systems. And again, I was involved in the first implementation of Quantum and shell in the 90s and that has gone through many upgrades and system implementations since then. But the improvement that we've got in systems and the data that we've got and the ability to parse that data and understand what's going on, real time cash forecasting, all of those things have just massively changed how treasury operates. The fundamentals of treasury is still the same. It's still about managing the group's cash, it's still about managing the group's financial exposures. But the tools that you use to do that have changed out of all recognition almost.

And in terms of the people using those tools, the staff around you and the team, when you're looking at candidates, what made them stand out for you? Because I know that sometimes one of the issues when we recruited for companies such as Shell was the size of the group and actually convincing candidates that they wouldn't feel like a tiny cog in a massive machine and everything else, and obviously making it much more about. Well, actually what you do does make a difference. But in terms of when you were recruiting as part of the team there, or as the team, the head of the team, what was it you were looking for and what would you do to attract them?

I think there's a few points there, Mike. You're absolutely right that Shell can. A company the size of Shell can seem quite hard to get your hands around it. That's the other side of the coin to the fact that there are lots of different opportunities in a company such as Shell. It's so big that when you get in, you realize that actually your bit of treasury is only a small bit of the bigger Treasury. It can feel quite narrow sometimes. But I think you've got to see both sides of that coin and say, well, ok, if I do my bit of this bigger machine really well, then generally I think the company's got a very good way of recognizing talent. And there are a huge number of opportunities that you can then go off in different directions. Whether you want to be a specialist in the front office, or whether you want to have a wide range of treasury experience, such as I had, or if you want to actually get out of treasury and go into broader finance roles, there are those kind of opportunities for you as well. So I think we did sell Shell in terms of development for people, both kind of in role and then next roles for them. And that was a key attractive for some people. In terms of what I specifically was looking for, one of the things that I always talk about or try to identify in interview is curiosity. By that, what I mean is not just cognitive ability or analytical abilities and saying, well, I can run the spreadsheets and churn the model and whatever. But actually the big question that you always ask yourself in treasury is what does this mean? What do the numbers mean for us? What's the effect of this? What is the fact of it? If markets move, what will happen to us? And if this happens, what does that look like for the company? Or conversely, if the company decides to go and do this, what does that do to Treasury? And it's really important that as an individual in treasury, you're in a specialist function and you need to be the expert in that function and understand how to do an FX deal, how to run cash management or how to manage pension risk or whatever. But you need to understand the business drivers.

And why are you bothering to do it.

Yeah, and why you're bothering to do it. Trading doesn't exist in kind of an isolation. It exists to service the business. And you need to understand what the business drivers are, what the business risks are, the business exposures are, and how the business generates cash and what might change that. And of course, I worked in natural resources and commodity businesses for my working career, so that's a highly volatile cash flow stream that the companies I worked in and delivering. And that has its own challenges. And those challenges are different whether you're in natural Resources or whether you're in resale or whether you're in technology companies or financial institutions or whatever. And you need to understand how those work.

And how would you assess that curiosity? You've got a candidate in front of you. And I've asked this a couple of times and people have said, oh, you know, assess the attitude and stuff like that. I was talking to someone the other day, they talked about how they would, how people would react when things weren't going so right, you know, when things were failing, I Spoke to Greg Kozer Vanquist and he said it was about resilience and everything else. But he said when things, when the chips were down, what was your default reaction? What did you do? But that was his way and he had various ways of measuring it. When you were looking at that sort of curiosity, how many cobbles are there in the streets of New York? Or one of those, or what sort of question, what was your assessment? Or what's the way that you sort of tried to understand it from people?

Yeah, I think so. I think actually Shell and BHP have got very similar approaches to structured interviewing processes. So yes, you talk about the CV and try to understand people's experiences and of course you pick up a lot of detail from that. You might ask a couple of technical questions just to understand how people's thinking is how much do they actually understand about the world around them, about what's happening in Brexit or in US interest rates or credit ratings or that of thing. But generally there's a bunch of behavioral questions that we ask in BHP, but also in Shell used to do the same, which is to say, you know, if you have, do you have an example you could give me of a time where you did this, where you had to give feedback to a difficult team member, for instance, or you had to do a new project and present that to the management team or you had to make a change to a, a business process. And so you are, you know, you're asking about not necessarily what people know but how they actually operate and how they understand things. And you're testing, I suppose that curiosity through. Well, how did you take on board external feedback or how did you look at best practice? How did you actually, how do you as an individual, for instance, make sure that you're up to date? What, what sources do you use? You know, how do you, do you, what do you read actually on a day to day basis that keeps, make sure that you're informed about what's happening in the, in the business as well as in the economy.

Yeah, I'm talking about their predisposition to take a certain action. And one of the things, actually we recently did some speaking over in Austria. A lot of the guys were saying, oh, you know, well, we come, I said you come to the conference to learn stuff. But how do you learn when you're not here, when you're not sitting here? And they were like, you know, but the key thing we talked about a lot of it was LinkedIn. You know, we said one of the great sources of information there's constant. You know, there's a lot of guff that's on there, but there's also a lot of valuable stuff. You know, as well as reading the, you know, the financial news and everything else, there's some good interaction and if you sign up to the right streams. And they were like, oh, yeah. And actually a lot of them were suddenly seeing as much more as a business tool rather than a recruitment tool, which some of them definitely, you know, this was over in Austria and they were a bit concerned about it sort of thing. And they, I think they sort of became a bit more LinkedIn friendly, as it were, after that session, because it could help them. So.

Of course, difficulty with all this social media now is how to sort the wheat from the chaff. Right. So there's a vast amount of information that's out there. And how do you actually not just end up wasting your time on Donald Trump's tweets or whatever it is, right, and actually understand what's relevant to you and to your company? And that's a critical skill.

That's also one of the reasons, as if I set in up and I didn't, I promise. But it was actually, that's why we created this, the treasury career corner, because a lot of people were asking Craig, my U.S. director, and I, well, how did that treasurer get to there? How did they make that? You know, and a lot of the junior guys and mid level as well, and, you know, and a lot of people just interested in people's career paths, which is why we came up with this idea of actually creating it. So that's where it came from. So, you know, that was a good bit. So after that number of years, with very successful years, and that's it, you could have stayed there, surely, temptation to remain, but then you decide to join bhp. How did that come about?

I mean, it wouldn't surprise you, Mike, and you know, this conversation as well, that I suppose I kind of looked at leaving Shell many times over that 26 years. That's not, you know, everybody needs to be out there, you know, assessing their value in the market and what the alternatives to the internal move that's perhaps on offer. So it wasn't that suddenly I decided after 26 years, I'm going to go. But it was, I suppose, a combination of factors of what the alternatives were inside Shell and then the opportunity that came up in bhp, and what came up in BHP was that BHP moved its treasury from Melbourne to London. And so there was the opportunity to really shape a new team to Set the strategy for that new team. And you know, Vandita had a very clear vision group treasurer of bhp, a very clear vision of what she thought world class treasury was. And I was very happy to join that team and develop a world class corporate finance function. And really I thought it gave me the opportunity to more management exposure, doing some of the technical treasury pieces that I had done previously in terms of debt issuance, but also very much getting more involved in business advisory in bhp. So it's been a great move of course a business which is similar to Shell in a lot of ways and natural resources, but obviously some new commodities in terms of iron ore and copper and coal. Getting to know a new network and understand a new team and how a company like BHP works.

And one of the standout moments we discussed over coffee was recently had a 5.2 billion share buyback which completed very successfully as well. So pretty chunky stuff.

Yeah. And so in fact I joined BHP in May 2016, which was really after quite a difficult period for commodity based companies. So a big downturn in prices in 2015 and early 16. A lot of what we were doing in the early days was actually fixing the balance sheet, paying down debt, trying to make sure that the company had the right policies in place, dividend policies and balance sheet policies in place to support the future. And of course commodity cycles turned as they always do and prices have come up in 1718 and we've now started to generate a lot of cash flows. And at the same time what happened was that BHP had invested in the oil shale business in the States a few years ago. That investment had not been as successful as they had hoped. The decision was made in August 17th of year. The that business was non core. In August 18th we announced that we had made the sale of that business to BP for just over $10 billion. And what we also announced in August 18th was that all of that money would be returned to shareholders. Because actually what we'd done over the previous two years was to fix the balance sheet. We didn't need to use those divestment proceeds to do any more balance sheet reconstruction. That money could all go back to shareholders. So we have taken that. It was 10.4% billion in total with the net proceeds. We paid 5.2 billion out in a share buyback in December and we'll pay another 5.2 billion out in a special dividend in January. So that as you can imagine has been really occupying my time significantly over the last six months. Really that dual listed structure which you mentioned Right at the start. So we're listed in Sydney and in London and a small listing in Johannesburg meant that we had a whole bunch of alternatives in, in terms of how we would distribute those proceeds across the shareholder base. And there is the opportunity in Australia to do what's called a discounted share buyback. So you actually can buy back the shares at discounts to market price. But for shareholders who have got a low tax base, then they, on an after tax basis get an improved return. So that generally is the best way for us to return money to shareholders. And so that whole 5.2 billion was done in this off market discounted buyback we did in the Australian listing. So it's a very complicated transaction taking over three months, getting tax authorities to sign off on that, financial advisors. The whole process about the tender took a lot of time and a lot of internal stakeholders to get set up. But actually the satisfaction you get from one of those big transactions going through smoothly is fantastic. It just means that you assessed all different moving parts upfront, you've got everybody aligned, you're taking the right decisions, you're getting them done in the right place. And that's just a brilliant feeling. And that's what you get in Treasury. And that's why I love Treasury. It's really one of those, you see the results of your own handiwork. It's not about reporting on what others have done, as in some other finance jobs, you actually are doing those transactions, whether it's debt issuance or buybacks, equity issuance or buybacks, or FX transactions, you get to see the fruits of your.

Labor and your commitment back to treasury itself as well. You've been, you know, an fct, so Fellow of the association of Corporate Treasurers. You're currently the President I am saluting. Now, obviously, you know what I was going to ask, you know, why have you given back? Obviously you studied the ACT many years ago, but why is that important to you?

I suppose I studied the ACT, the AMCT in 98 and then MCT exams in 2000. And I found them not only interesting but actually extremely useful for my job. And it really taught me the value of the technical qualifications that the act did. And to me, as I said previously, treasury is a very technical specialist technical area of finance, which requires proper professional training and qualifications. And it's extremely important, I think, that we've got people who work in treasury who've got those qualifications. So I've always been a very strong supporter of people doing those ACT exams. I've also over the time gone and done guest lectures at a couple of universities on treasury and I'm a really strong supporter of treasury education as a whole. So when the opportunity came up a few years ago to become part of the ACT Council, I thought, well, this is something for me to give something back to the profession to make sure that it's moving in the right direction.

Direction.

You become part of council and then if you're fortunate enough to be asked, then you then become part of that presidential process which has led to me becoming president from 1 May 2018. So it's a presidential term of a year. And really what that means is that I am chairman of the Council now. So running the council meetings, which is fantastic experience in itself, but giving I suppose non executives oversight to the executive team at the act, who are the ones who run the qualifications and the conferences and the training and all the membership association pieces that they do in the treasurer magazine and everything else, and trying to make sure that we're all moving in the right direction.

And what is that direction, do you say, for the future? Because obviously you've got these different offerings, if that's the right way. Because it's been highly successful with educating profession when coming up with that. And you know, certainly a number of the earlier shows I did, you know, I was saying to people, you know, what do you think of the act, the AFP. Com, you know, qualifications, the US and there are other ones coming up throughout Europe as well. And you know, we're very pro education, pro whichever. The association, to be honest, we don't side with any of them. But, you know, then you've got all the other things, you know, conferencing and things like that. You've got these men members. What are you wanting it to be?

Well, we've updated the mission of the ACT over the last couple of years and it now states that we are there to embed the highest standards of professionalism and integrity in the treasury world and act as its leading advocate. And I think that kind of covers the whole waterfront there it is about qualifications. Absolutely. Those are completely core to what what we offer. But we also, for those who don't want to do the formal qualifications, we provide training. We also provide obviously a massive amount of networking through our regional networks, our global conferences, the UK conference annually in May, and then we've got a conference in the Middle east, we've got a conference in Hong Kong, maybe one in Europe this year as well. So there's a lot of networking opportunities that we provide to our Members as well. And we also have policy and technical teams who advocate on any regulations or changes or things that are coming up in the treasury market with the bank of England or other regulators. So libel reform has been a big piece for us over the last few years. The fair and effective review of markets has been a big area that ACT has got involved with. So I think that all of that stuff is core, but it all comes back to a membership service. In the end, what do the members want? And what we're hearing from members is that they like the qualifications, they like the training, like the conferences, and they want to continue to have that support to allow them. Because oftentimes as a treasurer, you've got a small team in a small company and you haven't got lots of people to bounce ideas off. And you're wanting to get that additional help you can get from a professional network. And that's what we really want to try and help and provide, is to make sure that our members, wherever they're working, whether it's in corporates or financial services or consultancies or anything else, that they have got access to that treasury network and professionalism and understanding of best practice and cutting edge technology.

So, Ian, with yourself, where do you see potentially the future of the treasury profession? Obviously you're in a privileged position as the ACT president, but maybe as a treasurer. But using that, bringing that together with all your knowledge, what do you see coming down the line, looking at your future crystal ball, as it were?

Yeah, thanks, Mike. I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the whole world economy at the moment, but let's leave that to one side. That kind of comes and goes. We as treasurers are here to manage financial risks within that context. We've talked about systems a little bit in this podcast. The treasurers of the future will have more access to more data and we need to be better at data analytics as a whole. And I think this is something that we'll be looking for in people who are coming into treasury teams to be able to manage that massive data in a coherent and logical way and a way that actually will help decision making rather than just drowning in that sea of data. And what will also happen, I think, is that a lot of those treasury jobs, the kind of, kind of day to day treasury jobs, the standard treasury jobs may not exist really in the corporate head offices anymore. A lot of those may get offshored or taken to low cost locations, whether within the country or around the world, depending on where those companies are operating. And it means that as treasurers, you've got to be able to manage global teams and global interfaces and the data coming out of those teams, and still be able to manage all of your exposures and your cash and your borrowing at the same time. And so it's going to be much more, perhaps fragmented in terms of your teams and not people in the room who you can talk to and bounce ideas off. But actually, you'll have a much richer data set to actually do that with. So I think there's different challenges that we're all going to have, actually making sure that treasury in the future is actually going to work in a coherent way.

People listen to this podcast and they'll look at your LinkedIn profile, and that's what were things that spoke to Ian before. And he said, if you do want to connect with Ian, we'll put his LinkedIn profile just in the show notes, so you can connect to Ian if you want to have him as part of your network and things. But as you look through that, you'll see he's got detailed LinkedIn profile, which is great, which shows you some of the moves he's made. But if someone is looking and says, actually that's the sort of career path I'd like, what advice would you perhaps give them to sort of wrap up today shown?

I'm not sure that my career will exist again, if you see what I mean.

Yeah.

In the sense that I'm not sure that people would stay at a company for 26 years. But as I mentioned before, it's not to say that I was doing the same job for 26 years, I was doing a lot of different jobs and I think people will do a lot of different jobs and in fact, you know, working perhaps different careers over their lifetimes or their working lifetimes going forward. For me, though, and you'd expect me to say is perhaps is that getting your building blocks, your qualifications, your skills and your experience. So, for instance, your accounting qualifications or your professional treasury qualifications, I think is a critical element to that progression through different roles as you go forward, because that gives you that underpinning of good professional knowledge in this technical area. And it may well be that you move company to company, it may be that you stay in one company for another number of years and then move on. The other element that we talked about before, curiosity. Curiosity about what's going on in your company and how you can really grab new experiences. So in addition to being the professional expert, you need to have your eyes open to what those new experiences are in your company and seeing where those opportunities are. Because what Shel was good at was saying, actually, it's time that you now moved on to something different. Even though we know you're now you're good at what you're doing, but you need testing yourself and keep getting new experiences. And I was actually tapped on the shoulder for that job managing the UK pension fund in Shell, and I thought, pension fund, really? I mean, I was 40 or something and I thought it's a job you go and do when you're 55 or something. But it really was the most interesting job I've had in a lot of different ways, not least of which was because I started doing it in September 2008, right in the middle of the crash. And when you're manag managing financial assets as well as liabilities in the middle of a financial crash, that was an eye opener. And it really did push me in a lot of different ways and got me to think about financial risk in a lot of different ways. I could easily have said no to that pension fund job and said, well, actually, no, pension is not really for me, but actually it was a hugely beneficial experience and led me to do a lot of what I've done since then in better ways ways.

I think that's, that's usually reflective of a number of the pieces of advice that we've got. Certainly in recent weeks when I'm saying to people, what would you do? And I think it's just being not only curiosity, but being open to those ideas. Yeah. And that's one of the things we got with Mark, you know, in one of the previous ones from Johnson Controls, he was saying, just, you know, don't turn stuff down, you know, just be open to the idea that, you know, the first reaction might be, oh, not so sure, but actually get over that and say, well, well, where do we go next? And it certainly sounds like you did exactly that. So it's.

How can you make the most of that role that you get? Might not. You might think it's not the ideal role to start with, but you've got to, you know, there's always bits of jobs that you like more than others and you can steer that usually and make the most of any job that you get, as I said.

So we'll put Ian's details for his LinkedIn profile. You can that way. Just want to say thank you. Thank you, Ian. It's been another fantastic podcast today. I hope you guys are enjoying these great advice from an experienced treasury professional and the President of the Act So feel free to look at those guys if you're thinking about maybe furthering your qualifications and everything else. Thank you very much, Ian, for your time today.

Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. And you, Stephen, and we'll see you soon. Thanks, Mike.

Thanks very much.