Embracing Change in the Treasury Industry with Stephen Medhurst

Foreign.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I speak to treasurers about how they built their careers, where they are now and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next this week's show tonight will be joined by Stephen Medhurst, director of treasury omnicomp. Based in the uk, Omnicom are actually a global leader in marketing, communications and advertising services. 5000 clients in over 100 countries. Originally formed in 86 with combination of three other advertising groups which Steve will explain a bit later in our chat. But since then they've just grown and grown and grown and they're one of the top performers in the Fortune 500. Steve's actually based in London. Steve originally joined now NatWest before university, then went another banking role, but then he discovered the world of treasury, which he'll explain a bit more. And then in 98 he joined Omnicom. That's enough for me. As I say every week in the show, Steve, perhaps talk us through how you first discovered, well, finance and then treasury and how you then created your treasury career.

Okay, thanks, Mike. Good to be on a call with you. Let's start at the beginning, shall we? In terms of how I got into treasury because it wasn't a direct line, it was a bit of a circuitous route, but started post university by joining National Westminster bank, which was National Westminster bank in those days before it got bought up and became part of the RBS group. I'd actually done a history degree so I sort of studied humanities arts. I'd done a modern history degree and in those days universities used to have large mill grounds, so a lot of large companies from finance, retail, manufacturing, marketing all came knocking at the door and I felt I needed to get a good training program under my belt and, and in those days the banks used to have very good training programs. So I decided to join National Westminster bank, actually joining their retail division. So I was working in various parts of the southeast of England for three and a half years. Very interesting training, which when I look back was invaluable at the time. It was a little bit frustrating. Hence after three, three and a bit years, decided to move on and actually moved into a role with a large Japanese bank dealing with Japanese corporate customers who are expanding their operations in the uk. So that was more of an international banking, money markets, foreign exchange, trade, finance and working with them. She had a very good time there, good experience, great learning, interesting cultural differences, which I found very interesting and enjoyable. But Decided after that to take a year out and do a full time mba. So actually went and studied for a full time MBA in City University and from there actually came out and joined ICI which in those days was one of the large FTSE 100 companies. Very well respected actually for various reasons didn't go into a finance role initially, but went into what they used to call their organization and employee development group because they had some very interesting programs and processes. I was involved in looking at management development. We were looking at implementing a competence based approach for global recruitment and executive development. So was working on that for two or three years, which was fascinating, a bit of a diversion, but absolutely fascinating working across the organization. But for some of those who are old enough, they may recall that at the time ICI was a big company, but in the early 90s it was under pressure because the enterprise value seemed to be much higher than the share value. So there was talk about unbundling, demerging. There was a large strategy group put together to look at the future of the group. Ultimately that led to a decision to demerge the Pharmaceuticals and Biosciences division from the Core Chemicals division. And as part of that thinking, there were opportunities in Treasury. So I moved back into treasury or back into treasury given my finance background and spent several years in the ICI Treasury. Now in those days it was a phenomenal place. Very much a corporate treasury looking at corporate exposures, but essentially I would suggest something Champions League player in the treasury world. In fact, I saw something come across my desk the other day that said the act was formed in 1979. One of the founding members was the ex CFO from ICI. But ICI in those days had a very busy and active treasury, had large exposures essentially. A lot of the commodities were priced in dollars, a lot of manufacturing was in the UK or Europe and sales were global. So a lot of foreign exchange exposure. Very actively managed the debt program staged in the cycle. We had substantial cash, we're managing investments. So very active and interesting treasury to be in. And then actually the demerger happened, which was a great experience. Although at the time didn't feel like it some days because it was absolutely hectic. We ended up having to do all sorts of things in terms of refinancing the group. When we spun off pharmaceuticals business, which became Seneca, a lot of the debt stayed in the old ici. We had to refinance that debt on a short term basis because it was part of a divestment program all over the world. So we were looking to get the proceeds from the divestment. So we did some very innovative things in terms of how we financed that debt on a short to medium term while that divestment program went through the very, very interesting. And when you look back on your career, you know, those sort of opportunities don't come along that often, but it was a tremendous learning experience.

I was going to say, before we move on to Omnicom with ici, how is it, you know, those are the early days, as you say, of treasury, you know, you talked about being a member and things like that. Are those principles still the same, you know, when you were still in, you know, 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, or 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 would 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 change in a lot of respects, just the way you do, it's become a lot smarter.

Then, as you say, you then made the move and joined Omnicom at the time, with, with that move, how did that come about? What was it like? Were you straight in as Senior VP of Treasury or what happened?

Yeah, interesting. I worked for ICI for almost 10 years and at that stage the chemicals business was shrinking, so it wasn't a great environment to work in. We were always chasing our tails on various things. It was becoming more and more difficult. So I started to look around and actually someone came up with an opportunity at omnicomb. Now, in all honesty, I'd never heard of Omnicom, so I did a little bit of Research, very interesting company, still very new at that stage, still only being put together as you mentioned in your instruction in 1986, but large, growthful, very different sector. It seemed like a very interesting opportunity. Went and had a chat and the more I met with people and the more I spoke to them, thought it was certainly worth taking the risk of moving from ICI to Omnicom, which was in so many ways a very different organization.

What was it like there? What was the size of Omnicom then as opposed to now? How has it sort of grown?

In the treasury function it was about six or seven people, so it wasn't that large. And that treasury function in London covered Europe. Really didn't have that much interaction outside of emea. And even in EMEA it was really mostly the core European countries, so really didn't cover that much of Middle east or Africa at that stage. But six or seven people were a U.S. company. So the head office and the corporate treasurer sit in the US and he had set up the Treasury treasury center about three years before. So very shortly after the company was formed. He wanted a Treasury function and very different in terms of very much more an in house banking model of Treasury. So very much focused or trained at looking at our agencies and how we interacted with our agencies and essentially a core focus on cash management and liquidity management. But hugely different to ici, still in its very early stages, not very sophisticated, very manual processes, you know, still trying to impose itself within the group, which is a very decentralized group, so trying to provide support across all the business divisions in a number of countries. So it was really still in the early days, although, you know, it had been set up by a lady called Caroline Shuffrey, who done a phenomenal job in setting it up and establishing it. It really needed to build, which is why I joined part of that building to make it more effective through the group. It was a bit like the Wild west, if I'm very honest with you, Mike. It was coming from a very structured, process oriented environment to someone like Omnicom. I have to say after the first sort of few weeks I did go home and speak to my wife and said, I'm not sure what I've done here. Looking back now, it was the right thing to do.

Yeah, and that's. Well, just, just for the listeners out there, that's 21 years ago, you know, you've hung on in there sort of thing. And when you say it was sort of a bit Wild west, what then followed? What were the sort of structures that that came in and how did it.

Grow sort of thing from there starting point in our business and our business is very much a short term cash driven business. So at the heart of what the treasury does is cash and liquidity management. So we needed to put in place proper cash management structures, pooling type structures where we could get access to the funds that provide a conduit for all the cash to be able to be managed at a central basis. So we started very early in putting in place cash management structures certainly across the major markets. We actually, after a year or so since I joined, we decided that we'd actually split Europe into the Eurozone because don't Forget back in 98 that was pre the Euro. So we decided we'd actually set up a Dublin office to manage the Eurozone and the London office would cover everything else outside the Eurozone. So part of my role was to help establish the Dublin office and to work with them to put these structures in place across all of the key Eurozone countries. While at the same time we were looking at those countries outside the Eurozone. Increasingly we were pushing out gradually into places like the Middle east. And then we started to look at Asia as well. So at the heart of what we were doing and are still doing now in different ways, was to put in place global cash management structures.

And with that, and so looking at, as the team grew and you took more, how did Omnicom change? You know, how was it that then the business was growing rapidly? You know, you look back over the time, what was happening?

Yeah, Omnicom's had a very interesting journey. And 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 group's grown, the group's 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 and 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. We've had to look at controlling banking and bank accounts. We've had to look at how we get full visibility of the cash on a daily basis. And bearing in mind even now we still have 2,600 bank accounts, which is a lot, but we probably closed in the last 20 odd years at least two and a half thousand. So we probably closed at least half the accounts we had when we started this exercise.

And when you say that I talked to Dan Ferguson and you and I talked about this last week, that Royal sun alliance and he was actually says on the podcast he was embarrassed at the number of different bank accounts he had. But as he said, he said you might be stranded in the middle of an African country and then you reach out to your insurer, say I need help, I need to go to the local bank. And that's why you need those local relationships. And when you and I spoke again recently, we talked about this and the fact that you have to have this many bank accounts for a few different reasons, one of which being not only access to cash, but also access to services. You might have one overarching global bank for yourselves, but they can't provide services in different countries. Now that means that perhaps you can explain for some of the listeners who are thinking, oh, we have to do that, or yeah, we're going to try and rationalize to spend six banks globally and stuff. Perhaps if you could talk to that, if you like, and explain to people why you guys can't do that, if you like.

Yeah, very interesting question again. And we have a lot of banks in our relationship group and we at the moment we're running an old fashioned relationship model which says those who participate in the revolving credit facility are therefore relationship banks. So There are currently 34 banks in our relationship group. So we do have a lot of banks. But even then we still had to go outside that group for a number of reasons. Now typically, if you think about how our agencies are set up, these are, let's say, generally small to medium sized enterprises in their own right. And they need a service on the ground, wherever that ground is around the world. So while we have a global relationship with a bank, we're looking for a bank who can provide a service locally. Most of the business they do is business to business but they're still looking for certain transaction types, certain payment methodologies that some of the big international banks can't provide in certain markets. Now, typically when we look at a banking landscape, there are reasons why we'd go outside of the banking group and those would be because of payroll or payroll related. So in certain jurisdictions, for example, Brazil, the big international banks that we're trying to deal with really couldn't provide a payroll service in Brazil. So we've left it with one of the big local banks. Similarly in Russia, going back a few years, although that's changing now, you know, the payroll providers just weren't in the market and it was very expensive on the basis a lot of Russian employees would take cash out of the atm. And unless you had a large ATM network, it was costing a fortune for employees to go and take cash out of their ATM machine. So in that sense, you had to plug into a local bank. So payroll will be one reason we look at local banks taxes in certain jurisdictions around the world. And again, that's changing. And in the last few months it's changed a bit. But certainly India and China would be two markets where you needed local bank accounts for various tax payments. India's only changed this year. China, there are still one or two issues depending on where you operate and who you're dealing with. And the other reason in our world would be clients, because a lot of our clients are the big financial institutions, banks, et cetera. So while we may in a certain country have one of our other global banks there, if we've got a client relationship, we will permit accounts to be open with that client, provided that any cash is moved the pooling bank. And therefore we have access to the cash on a daily basis. So there are a number of reasons why it's just not feasible or practical to use one of your large global providers. And even when we've got as many banks as we have, and a lot of those banks are international banks who've got strength in a lot of the markets we operate in. Even where we have a bank who's got perceived strength in some of those markets, they just can't provide the level of service our agencies expect or should get, quite frankly. So we do have to go outside of that group.

Steve, for the listeners, again, when we had this practical discussion, you touched on it there about India. And one of the things I certainly didn't realize was the number of districts and you could only go to your district and there are a phenomenal amount out there and having sort of a diverse structure out there, if you like. Can you just maybe explain that for the people? Because again, there'll be some of. A lot of our listeners are from the US and perhaps less exposure far across. You know, they're used to more local arrangements and things within the US network. But maybe explain that as well, if.

You would, because India is one of those markets which just has its own challenges or differences and things have changed in India. Now I need to check my facts here, but I think there are 37 states in India and going back to last year, they all had their own tax regimes. So there were different state taxes on certain goods and services and those taxes were payable in the local state. And bearing in mind some of the states were fairly remote. You had to have a bank account with a bank who could make those tax payments to the local designated bank. Though the state collected that cash. There were some very difficult issues with that. Now last year they introduced a national goods and sales tax which took away a lot of those state differences. And in fact, in the last 12 months there's been a lot of work. So the international banks can actually make those payments to those designated state tax banks. So it's still not completely there, but certainly if you go back more than a year, it was a very, very difficult place to operate. And in our business, although most of our offices are located in three of the major cities, we had a very large field sales force of over 10,000 staff in India who were operating across the whole of the country. It was a very sort of interesting problem we had to do because we had to make these tax payments in almost all of those 37 states. And although they weren't large amounts, it was just a vexatious problem we had to find solutions for. At the time it meant opening up a number of accounts just to pay those state taxes.

You're such a global brand. Can you just explain to our listeners, if you would, that although you're from the uk, what regions do you actually cover? Everything outside of the U.S. basically, yes.

As part of the growth of Omnicom, but also the treasury, essentially we've got a US based treasury and an international Treasury. So we have offices in London and Dublin. And the London and Dublin covers literally everything outside of North America. Now our definition of North America isn't the Donald Trump definition because it includes Mexico, the US and Canada, but we're essentially covering everywhere outside of that. So other parts of Latin or South America, emea, Asia Pacific regions. So quite a large sort of global reach in terms of our operations here.

And how many in the team in London in particular and London stroke, Dublin. And then again we talked about this, about the sort of structure of the team because it's quite a flat show which obviously presents its own challenges in terms of coaching staff and keeping them staying on for a period of time. So maybe talk that through if you will.

Yeah. Currently the global treasury, as I say the treasurer sits in the US. There's a team of about 20 people in the US there are a team of 20 people in London and 10 in Dublin. So across London, Dublin we have 30 people. The way that's structured, I say at the heart of the treasury centers there's a focus on cash management. So we have two or three people working on cash management. And cash management is not just the daily positioning reconciliations, it's all at the back end, all the intercompany reconciliations. Because an in house bank, all our systems generate intercompany balance movement. So it's all the checking of that. So we have a number of people working on that. Outside of that, the various treasury centers tend to have specializations. So for example, London is the global center for our foreign exchange activity. All the global foreign exchange that we do on behalf of the group or the agencies in the group is done in London. And London's also the center for grantly call it asset management, but it's investing our surplus cash. So like a lot of American organizations we sit on a bit of a surplus cash balance. So we're investing that in the moment. That's been about $1.5 billion that's being invested. The Dublin team, in addition to cash management are actually do a lot of administration around global leasing programs. So in our world we lease everything, basically buildings, furniture, technology. We don't purchase assets, we lease assets. So Dublin administers a lot of our global leasing programs. It's also our data center for all the global bank account reporting that we do. So we have daily end of day balance reporting on all 2600 bank accounts around the world. And it's increasingly becoming a center of expertise on some of the tax related matters, particularly transfer pricing, which has become over the last few years a much bigger deal for an organization like ours. And then the US treasury focuses on managing the balance sheet, debt and equity mix. They also coordinate a global program where we manage, monitor and manage working capital for the group. When you look at our balance sheet on the asset side, we have cash, trade, receivables, goodwill, which is offset on the liability side by trade payables, debt and equity basically so working capital is a very big function within treasury. And over the last few years we've bought in global insurance programs. So the global insurance programs are now managed primarily out of the US that we provide support out of London for some of those global insurance programs as well. So in London we have essentially five different teams, you know, a finance team, cash management team, foreign exchange team, what we call a regional team to look at issues like, you know, the Indian issue we referred to. And then we have a sort of administration team as well in Dublin it's essentially three teams, a cash management team, a leasing team, a reporting team and.

In terms of the London based teams, you and I have spoken about the structure of those and the level of people coming in and you've got the progression there in the, in the team. But it's the wrong way to say it's limited. But there was only so far you can go because of the nature of the work that you guys actually do at Omnicom. You know, perhaps explain to the listeners how do you cope with that? How do you coach the people? And I know you provide study, support and try to get those people up through the ranks and for people coming up with a relatively fresh start in treasury who then move on to a certain level and then a lot of your guys have gone far and wide, which obviously a very positive thing. You know, perhaps you can talk to the listeners about your ethos as a manager, coach or maybe as a leader within the team, as if you would.

In the London team we have currently of that 27 junior analysts. So these are entry level jobs. So we recruit a lot of people at the entry level who come in either straight from university or with a little bit of work experience. So there's a large number of those entry level graduate jobs and we'll come on to how that's going to change in terms of how we look at further automation, application of intelligence and learn artificial intelligence, some of the processes and everything. But we do have a large number of those junior entry level positions. So we bring bright guys in, you know, we train them, we give them a lot of responsibility. You know, there's a very good management structure, very supportive management structure. So we don't want anyone to fail but we allow them scope to come in to take responsibility to grow in the job as much as we possibly can. We encourage them definitely to do professional qualifications. So that seven, currently five are doing professional qualifications, a mixture of ACT and sema. So we're very supportive of that. But fundamentally these are junior level jobs. So when these guys come in, it takes a good few months to get them up to speed and trained. You know, after a year or so, you know, they're. They're very good at the job, and a lot of them have potential to grow the job, but the job's the job, quite frankly. So, you know, we're paying for the role, not the job holder. So there comes a stage after hopefully at least three to four years where unless something else changes in the organization, they basically come in. Hopefully. We've given them fantastic training and they've got great experience, but inevitably we're going to lose those people. They're going to move on as they should. So historically, we've been a training ground for a lot of young, smart kids, and we've had a good lot of them, and it's always a shame to lose them. But on the other hand, there comes a stage where, you know, you know, from their careers perspective that they need to make the next step. And we can't always offer that next step because there aren't the roles available to do that. And things do change occasionally. There's not that much movement at the more senior level. So those, you know, vacancies aren't being created. So it's best for them and for us in many ways to move those guys through. So we've had a lot of people come through the Omnicom treasury, both in London and Dublin, and moved on. So we've got quite a big alumni around the world at the moment, which is no bad thing. But that's just a feature of the current organization. We're always looking to see if we can do things better or smarter. And fundamentally, one of the problems is that there's still too much manual operations, which means we need those junior analysts to come in. So we've really got to look to automate more across all of our processes, which would reduce those number of jobs. But in the meantime, that's what it is. It's great when they join us, and it's always with mixed feelings when they come in and say they have accepted a job elsewhere because you don't want to lose them. But fundamentally you want to wish them well and hopefully they'll continue to grow and build careers.

Steve, you talk about being smarter and things like that, and again, we've talked about the fact that you guys are implementing new technologies and trying to move forward, but it's not just all about technology and improving processes, is it? Perhaps you could talk about how you guys bring in technology to help. But again, when you and I met, Steve and I met recently, we talked about this and we pre talked over our show today. We were saying that a lot of other shows we've talked about technology and technology replaces processes, not people and that you still need the people to make the technology work began. How do you guys bring that technology to bear, as it were, but also do it with the boots on the ground? How's it worked with you guys?

We've always been reasonably lucky within Treasury. In our world we're a holding company structure where every entity has profit targets among other things, and that includes Treasury. So we've always been a little bit sort of self sustaining. And over the years when the original treasurer set up the treasury function, he bought in technology experts. We've always had a full time technology person working within the treasury group. Over the years we've invested an awful lot in various technologies. Whether that's for the basic treasury activity, the cash management activity, the foreign exchange, whether it was some of the risk management stuff, the revaluations mark to market. A lot of that's off the shelf. Some of it we've built particularly around things like leasing programs. We built technology, we've built an Internet front end for agencies to request foreign exchange transactions, which Treasury. So we've always invested a substantial amount in the technology and we've always had support within the treasury group or expertise within the treasury group, I guess where we are now in terms of how we develop that, what's tended to happen, we've tended to build an infrastructure that has a lot of standalone applications for various things which are very difficult because you're trying to manage across the piece. Even things like basic reporting. We're having to sit reporting tools or business intelligence tools on top of various databases and we're having to try and map various databases across. So one of the key themes now is to try and integrate those technologies into fewer platforms rather than have the current infrastructure we've got. So there's going to be a lot of work on simplifying the infrastructure we have and the architecture. We have a lot of work on setting business intelligence systems on top. So this afternoon even I'm getting trained for a couple of hours on the latest version of our business intelligence tool we use, which is cognos, because we need to work out how we're going to deploy that more efficiently. So there's a lot of work to be done there. But technology is going to hopefully substantially change a lot of our day to day operations. You know, I'm always intrigued when I sit in peer groups and people talk about how they're applying artificial intelligence to certain things. And that may be as simple as just, you know, positioning and moving cash around the world. It may be, you know, in terms of investment strategies, they're way ahead of us and we've got a bit of a catch up to do there, but we're in a good position to do it because we've got the building blocks and the foundation stones in place. We just need to do some work and really push hard to simplify that structure and to get consistency across, across all of our various applications we're using and to then to start using these business intelligence tools in a much smarter way.

But Steve, you're looking back over your number of years within treasury and, you know, you've looked at your progression and everything else and there are other people, you know, perhaps coming up through, you know, maybe members of the team or, you know, more junior members of staff, and they look at it and say, do you know what? I'd like to have a similar background to Steve. Are there any tips that you would, you know, to summarize and finish off today's show that you think, do you know what, sitting back, this is what you should do as a Treasury professional.

Let's start with something that's probably not a tip, because I would have to say, you know 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 over the last four or five years in particular, 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 and the ability to grasp those opportunities to learn, to be inquisitive, determination to do the best are critical. And I know you could argue that that may be the same in any role, but I think particularly in treasury, because you're interacting with so many different people. In my role, you know, I'm interacting, I might 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.

So, you know, as you say, you talk about embracing all that, you know, any other, you know, final tips, you.

Look back, I would certainly encourage people to take the professional qualifications, but I think you need to make very careful choices about career steps as well, especially now. In my day, the world was a lot simpler place. So, you know, when I graduated, you know, 10 to 15% of people were graduates, so there were jobs. A lot of my peer group, you know, joined large companies. Some of them stayed, some of them left, but there were always other jobs. I think that's increasingly tougher nowadays. And some of the old certainties around large companies, that's all changed and mostly for the better. So you have to be thoughtful about your career choices, who you're going to join and why you're joining them. Increasingly now, again, when I, when I joined, I mean, it was still, I was that last generation who theoretically had a job for life. They were paternalistic companies, companies who had pension schemes and other programs. So I would speak to people as we do in our team, because I wear a number of hats and sometimes some of the team will come up and they'll talk about it. And hopefully, luckily, I've been in a position where, although I might be the manager, I can also talk to them about their careers, even if that means they might be moving on at some stage. So I think you'd have to be very careful about career choices as well, who to join and why you're joining that company and what you're trying to get out of it. Because the organization landscape changes so frequently. There's rising stars, shooting stars, which create opportunities. There's a lot of large, very fast growing companies, very interesting places to work. But whether they're good places for a longer term depends on a number of factors. But I think fundamentally you need to enjoy what you're doing and you need to enjoy the fact that roles are going to change. You're going to have to be flexible, you're going to have to be adaptive, you're going to have to, you know, need to learn new things, new skills. You're going to be thrown in front of a lot of different people. Regardless of what sort of treasury you work in, you're dealing with, you know, senior executives. You're dealing with, you know, external providers, particularly banks. Inevitably, you'll be dealing internally to some extent. So, you know, that flexibility, that desire, that inquisitiveness, I guess, are absolutely critical. But in doing that, you know, and I still do, you know, I wouldn't say every day, but when I'm sitting on the train home, you know, I still think that's interesting. I learned something today, you know, and there's still things I'm learning all the time. In fact, as the world speeds up in so many ways, you know, there's a lot to learn. Very interesting place to work in treasury generally, as always.

Amazing final words there from Stephen Medhurst. Xenia vp, treasury at Omnicom. And if you want to connect with Steve, we'll put his LinkedIn details in the show. Notes, as always, summarize what we've spoken about. Enjoy what you do. Keep learning every day. And if you don't enjoy it or you're not learning, that's all right because you can still call us here at the treasury recruitment company more than happy to help and offer our advice. So give us a call anytime.

Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, Mike.

Many thanks, Steve.