Embracing Change in the Treasury Industry with Stephen Medhurst

Early stage Treasuries, if you like, you know, less of the technology, less of all the other stuff. So maybe more manual and things, but the actual principles were the same. And there Was it still about the relationships and everything else or.

That's a very interesting question, I guess fundamentally, yes. In terms of principles, in terms of how you manage risk and exposure would be very similar, although not as sophisticated, anywhere near as sophisticated as we are now. A lot of Treasuries are now. This was very much a corporate treasury, so it was externally facing. So a lot of what the treasury was doing then would still be current. Treasuries will be doing very similar things, as you say. The key difference would be the technology or the process has become a lot more automated, There's a lot more intelligence being applied to it, so it's far less manual. When we looked at things like long term interest swaps, for example, we used to do a calculation on Lotus Notes to actually work out the net present value and the pricing of all these things. In that sense, the world's moved on hugely. But in terms of, in essence, what you're trying to achieve, I would say very little has changed in a lot of respects, just the way you do it has become a lot Smarter. In that 21 years, the company has tripled in size, certainly in terms of revenue, and it's grown through a combination of acquisitive and organic growth. So the groups grow, the groups become a lot more structured. In our world, we were very, very decentralized, distributed organization. We have something like 1500 legal entities around the world. So a lot of small to medium enterprises which all add up to a consolidated omnicom balance sheet. So it's a bit like herding cats. So part of our role was to try and establish the disciplines across all of the networks and networks in our language, as business divisions. And you also have to remember in the omnicom world, which is not dissimilar to our peer groups, WPPs, the Interpublics, the Publicis, etc. A lot of those business divisions actually compete with each other. So they'd been used to running on a very autonomous basis. There were issues of confidentiality about information and having sight of what other businesses in the group were doing over the years, we've had to establish those structures, we've had to establish process around those things and create order out of some of the chaos that was going on. Where I sit now, I've been very fortunate. I've enjoyed a lot of what I've done. I'VE been very lucky to work for different companies, but to learn an awful lot and to keep learning. And I guess one of the things in any career is there has to be an element of luck. I was particularly lucky to join ICI at the time I did. And was particularly lucky to join Omnicom at the time I did. I've also been very lucky over the years in working for some very, very smart people and working with some very, very smart people. But when you talk about tips, one of the things I'd say is that within treasury, and I say treasury is a big, broad field and all Treasuries are different, but there is always something new just around the corner and the ability to learn, to understand, to grasp, to get on top of different things. So I mentioned things like tax. I didn't join treasury to become a tax expert, but, you know, over the last four or five years in particular, you know, I probably spent 15% of my time working with a tax group on tax structuring on tax issues. So there's always something new, there's always something different to learn in my role, you know, I'm interacting and I just look at things like emails, you know, where they're coming from. They're coming from all over the world, coming from, you know, internal, they're coming from different levels of management. There's all sorts of different issues. So having to respond, think about and respond to, you know, such a wide range of issues on a daily basis without knowing, you know, what's going to happen next. Because undoubtedly my role today certainly is different from, you know, a couple of years ago. It will be different in a couple of years time. How exactly, I'm not sure. But actually embrace that sort of change, that opportunity, really it gives to grow and develop. Even at my age, Mike, there's still opportunities to grow and develop.