Developing Regions in Treasury with Marc Verkuil

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. This week's show I've joined by Mark V. The founder of his own recently established interim treasury management and consulting firm called Amstel Treasury Management. Mark established, Discovered Finance, then Treasury. Over to you, sir.

First of all, thanks for, for having me on your podcast. Very much appreciate it. Going back to the start of my career, which is indeed a very dim past, it was in fact quite a coincidence after I got out of the army. We still had a draft army at the time in the Netherlands, and this was in the late 1980s. I had a few months to spare before the start of the new college year, so I went to look for temporary jobs and ended up working half days at the Dutch Central Bank. And my job with, I believe it was two or three others, was reading through all the most important international financial newspapers very early in the morning and literally using scissors and glue to put together a summary paper of all the major financial news stories for the executive committee members of the central bank and then go up to the top floors and hand deliver copies of these many papers. So when my first employer was. My first permanent employer was looking for someone who had, in parenthesis, experience with the Dutch Central bank, which turned out to be completing certain required forms that were used for statistical purposes like trade balances, balance of payments and so forth, they found me working at the central bank. And even though this was in a totally different capacity, and I had worked there for less than a week at that time and had never heard of any of these forums, I still ended up being hired with this company. And later that year I decided to continue working in treasury and take up night courses in college. And from then on I continued working.

In treasury and with those that early stages, it's quite funny actually, you just mentioned about the copying, pasting and real and pasting. You know, sometimes I've talked, I talked to a guest just last week and we were talking about telexes and people like what? And my youngest son, he sort of asked me one time, he said, dad was. When it said on the phone fax, I went, yeah, we used to take a piece of paper, shove into a machine, he came out with a piece of paper the other end, he went, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, it was, it was a.

While ago, you know, we used like matrix printers. Right? You remember Exactly.

Yeah.

Confirmation had to be in fourfold and the yellow slip going into accounting, the white one mailed to the counterparty, the pink one for your own files, et cetera. Indeed. Telex. I started using telexes in the beginning as well. And big data in those days was everything exceeding a hundred rows or something. Yeah.

Well, that actually brings us into what do you would you say, how would you characterize treasury then? What was it like when you first got into the profession and how have you seen it grow from there? If you like, talk us through the companies you were with and the roles you did.

So I think the industry has developed significantly, obviously, but that's undoubtedly true for, for most areas of responsibility in a company and in industries in overall. I mean, the business environment has been changing and will clearly continue to change, impacting the treasury function as well. Of course, I'm not sure if it's true what a lot of people seem to think, which is that the world and business have become more volatile and more uncertain compared to 30 years ago, longer ago. I mean, 30 years ago we had more than 10 additional currencies to deal with in Europe, some of which could be quite volatile at times, including dozens more different interest rates in. In Belgium alone there were two currencies which we occasionally traded against each other like back Beth trades and. And we had much less information and received most of this much slower and later than today, leading to less informed decision making. And for financial analysis you had to resort to calculators like the, the whatever is it the DI, remember? And a little later we used Lotus 1, 2, 3 as Excel wasn't around yet. Overall, I think of maybe four trends that have over the last 30 years or so shaped the business environment, impacted companies and how they do business and we'll continue to do so going forward. I think first of all, what I'll call the transparency trends. And there's more and more transparency, more controls, more regulations, just reporting your balance sheet and P and L is no longer sufficient. Most listed companies need to report on all of their risk factors and provide for quite an extensive management discussion and analysis section supporting their financials each quarter. Accounting rules are constantly being changed to provide for more transparency. And just think of disclosing various of balance sheet funding programs nowadays. Also think of disclosing your company's corporate governance framework and how it complies with this through for instance the Saba and Sokoli act or other local or regional laws and regulations. Think of the need to publish social responsibility reports or disclosing the environmental efforts of the company or of the increased number of occupational health and safety regulations. Think of tax authorities increasingly requiring country by country reporting nowadays with the general public and the media looking for more visibility in how companies deal with the fair share principle. I mean executive management responsibility is no longer limited to optimizing shareholders returns. Management has to consider pretty much every stakeholder in its decision nowadays, including its employees, the general public, NGOs, et cetera. Doing the right thing is becoming the new mantra which directly impacts treasury as well. This is the case for large corporates today already. I think it will likely be the case for smaller or mid sized ones going forward as well with yourself.

Just, just give us if you would a sort of bit of a, maybe a talk there about larger corporates because you've had experience all the way through from some smaller corporates at the beginning of your career with cash management there to then now. So could you just give us, you know, a bit of the chronology of your companies and the roles and how you went through those just briefly?

Yeah, very briefly. I mean I started out working for this first company I mentioned that was looking for someone with central bank experience. It was a privately owned company acting in different industries, business to business, global enterprise, interestingly because it was a privately held company, family owned business obviously decision making and also transparency was centralized in one person or a small group of family members which made it quite an interesting company to work for. Second company was a Dutch food company, sugar company actually, which is the only Dutch company I really worked for in my career because after that I only worked for US corporates in the biotech sector, in the medical instruments sector, in the. Also in the electronic instrumentation sector. Mostly US corporations, all of them listed companies after that first one with a lot of international presence. One of the, one of the last companies I worked for was a large ardui commodity commodities firm, trading and processing firm, one of the AC ABCD companies. And that company was something completely different in terms of treasury management. That's a brief overview of what I've done over the last, I guess 30 years or so.

Yeah, no, it's great. And with those last few roles, if you like bringing us because you moved around, moved around the world. That's one of the great things with treasury. It does an international career. Can you talk us through how you. Some of those moves location wise and what they taught you in treasury terms?

Definitely. I've worked and lived in different parts of the world in the East. I Did two tours in the us one tour in Dubai, lived and worked in different European countries. Quite a bit of moving around with and mostly with and sometimes without the family. So it is quite an enriching experience, I must say, moving around and living in those different areas of the world. Obviously almost exclusively in developed areas of the world. So that makes it a little bit comparable to where we are here in northwestern Europe. Definitely a very enriching experience for me and my family, both professionally and personally. So quite interesting to go through that. One of the items that I've seen developing over the years is that maybe a trend that I see developing as well, at least in certain industry sectors, is that treasury professionals may increasingly have to become more industry or industry specific specialists. And I've seen that and I experienced that myself in the different sectors I work in, in the commodities sector specifically, which is so different in a lot of ways as most other companies and most other industries I've worked in, like this fast moving consumer goods or the biotech and healthcare sectors, that it took me at least a year to get a good understanding of how treasury management has to function optimally in such an industry.