From Credit Control to Treasury Leadership: Building Skills the Non-Traditional Way

So I think if you're junior focus. If you're 20 years old, 21 years old, out of university or even just out of school, get qualification done, rattle through it, you're at the perfect time in your life to do it because by the time you get to, I mean, I'm 35, I couldn't imagine starting it now people do and they're fantastic for doing it. I think those early part of your career, the big focus on getting qualified and moving forward so that you accelerate into senior roles, be them accountancy, treasury, commercial, whatever it is, with the right mindset by those foundation qualifications.

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 treasurers about how they build 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 I'm joined by Tom Fuller, the financial controller and head of treasury at Form 3. Form 3 was established in 2016 by four banking and technology leaders with a single purpose to transform outdated, complex and costly payments infrastructure to a modern cloud native. Real time payments as a service. Yeah, I've got that right. Thank goodness. They do this by offering a fully managed payment technology platform for financial institutions. As a service, their vision is to be the world's most trusted provider of payment technology by designing, building and running the technology that powers the future payments. Now I'm going to get into that a little bit later on on the show with Tom was fantastic when he explained it all to me early when we had our pre call but I'm going to go back through Tom's corporate career and it's still corporate treasury career, but it's really interesting how you've then got into Form 3 and everything else. Tom, I'll hand over the reins to you. And we were just talking before the show. You first started in accounts payable but engineering and everything. So give us a start over to you, sir.

Sure. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, so I mean my, my career did not start in the traditional kind of graduate scheme, doing accountancy and then, and then moving to industry. Yeah, I started on a two week contract with 2e Travel at Luton Airport on cold calling, working in credit control, just working down a list of various different customer chasing and debtors and then that kind of, that moved on and it went from two weeks to, oh, why don't we stay for six months, we like what you're doing. And I worked my way around the shared Service center as it was then. And eventually was coaxed into starting a SEMA qualification.

Yeah.

Which I completed at TUI whilst working in their LRM finance team.

So I had just for our us, this is SEMA by the way, Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. So it's a management accounting qualification that you. But you study on the job, don't you?

Yes, that's right. And it's the challenge really, I think a lot of people in an industry face where they're juggling day to day work, trying to progress in the career, doing interviews for different jobs and ultimately making sure they pass their exams to get to that next level of experience and quality. So I think ultimately I got through all of that and was doing a management accounting job in airline finance. Spending a lot of time building knowledge around how aircrafts are cared for, the MOTs they go through, which are called C checks.

Yeah.

And then progressed into. Into treasury because we had to feeding cash flow forecasts into Group treasury on a regular basis as part of our month end process. And I just found it interesting to understand the way a big tour operator such as TUI hedged out its foreign currency exposures and managed its, its fuel requirements.

Can you explain. Explain again for the audience I know too. I used to recruit for two years, you know, and, and who are two E at that or who were they at that stage? Because obviously they've evolved in recent years and then a part of that. How did you discover Treasury? You said you were talking to treasury or feeding in both of those, if you would.

Yeah. So I mean TUI Travel there are. They started out as a major German operator really and grew substantially in the UK in the kind of mid 2000s ultimately and had really developed into not just a short haul business such as EasyJet, but actually looking longer haul and managing package holidays for lots of customers. And they're in the millions in terms of the footprint of customers that they would serve. And they would be operating as far as Asia and also into America with a lot of the kind of the Disney tourism, et cetera. So they had a wide footprint and a lot of operation stretching across Europe and they were obviously a keen employer locally when I was, when I was growing up. So that was kind of a natural foothold into the world of work when I started. And the treasury function, tui there is a group treasury that's headed at Crawley, which is just Gatwick Airport and then we had a subsidiary function in. In. In Luton and ultimately it was, it was a fantastic way to gain some real hands on experience on how a big firm operates in hedging out really large currency exposures when they had such a UK market dominance and such a big requirement in terms of managing currencies day to day, but also planning for a winter season or a summer season. So we had to make sure that we knew by cost element how much money are you going to spend for six months at a particular planning rate and then go, fine, how are we going to hedge that out to make sure that we blend into an achieved rate for that season that we can make sure keeps the margin of the business at a particular threshold. So very, very intricate and ultimately very, very complex for a lot of different stakeholders through the business to make sure they were ultimately managed. The group's bottom line.

And very challenging in that in travel business about margins, the margins are everything. Sometimes they're more than the actual business itself, aren't they? You can see the treasury is really the center of things.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yield management is the bread and butter of how they run a successful travel operation. I mean, they can be operating to far flung locations where they haven't necessarily got all the seats filled and they're flying a loss. But obviously they've kind of entered into that market, they've got a partner, maybe they've got a venture deal going with a hotel and therefore they need to show operation. But ultimately sometimes there are some loss leaders, enable them to enter certain markets at certain times.

So build up from that.

Yeah, fine balancing act for those types of businesses.

And then you made the move to one of good friends at Anglian Water Group, and at the time, Jane Pilcher and everything else. So talk us through AWG, if you would, and, yeah, explain who they are. Obviously some of the listeners may have heard from a number of years ago, but your next move, what happened next?

So, I'd completed the accountancy qualification, I was in treasury, but I really wanted to experience a different type of business. And there was a new analyst position that opened up in a utility, a water utility called Anglian Water. And it was an exciting step into a heavily regulated space. Very, very different from FTSE 100 managing to quarterly reporting and ultimately dealing with off what heavily in massive planning cycles. Yeah, they call asset management periods and felt like a bit of a step into an unknown. But also a Treasury Department that was completely different in terms of the risks it was managing. Obviously it's a UK utility, so it's not got lots of FX to worry about. But as we all know with the water industry, there are a Lot of kind of debt transactions that built up over time and a lot of risk management has to take place in looking at where interest rates are now, where they're going to be in the future and how they lock in interest rate risk to make sure that they're not over overspending for the debt that the companies are carrying at any one time. So that whole kind of debt management piece was a completely different window for me to step into and understand. And it took me into the world of IFRS 9 hedge accounting for interest rate swaps, cross currency swaps, and really looking at how a business that was privatized in around 1989, how that had progressed to build all the assets and services that it needed to for a growing region such as East Anglia, and make sure that it's getting the appropriate finance in place whilst working with the regulator. So it was an established team of around 15 to 20 people and there was a very formal front office, middle office and back office, not necessarily subsidiary Treasuries but Treasury function. We did treasury management system implementations, we did a lot of front office dealing with actually transacting with the banks over the phones initially and then as automated and electronic dealing came in place as well with Bloomberg terminals. And it was just showing the next level of treasury and how ultimately large group treasury functions work.

Before we go on to your next role at Apex, I wanted to sort of just touch in there because you talked about technology. I know that's a strength of yourself and you've really developed that what have been maybe, you know, we're looking back in, you know, too late to late 2020, around there sort of thing and you were doing a lot of the technology stuff. What were the challenges you faced and you know, how did he get through them sort of thing at that period. So, you know, we're pre AI, so it's only part of this, only five, six years ago. But technology is a strength of yours?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think any company that has been around a long time has a lot of legacy, legacy systems that they're having to cope with. And ultimately the way that effectively cash management is reported by businesses is a, is a key, clear focus for any developing treasury because they want to make sure they're at the forefront of what they're looking to report up to the group treasurer, to the board and make sure they're making the right real time decisions on how much currency they're holding, how much actual cash there is on the bank account, where it's invested and what the return is. So a clear thing for us when we were working through our Anglian Water was how do we make sure that we are getting in place a one stop shop, all of our banking information. And we partnered with Bottom Line Technologies to introduce a Swift bureau where we were consolidating all of our bank accounts in one place, getting regular reporting via Swift. So we'd have MT940s, MT942s coming in daily and during the day as well. So our front office dealing team could make intraday decisions on what they wanted to do with balances as they change throughout the day. And that's because sometimes we would have customer deposits coming in throughout the day. We might have a direct debit run come in first thing in the morning and we wanted to have that real time information ready in order to make an investment with a money fund or place some cash on deposit with a bank. So having those systems ready and willing to be able to take in data informed decisions were crucial.

So you made a natural career step then from a regulated water utility to Apex Group, which is like, just shows the, you know, the flexibility of treasury professionals like yourself. That's one of the key things. I had a call with a client just last night in the US and he was just saying, yeah, it doesn't really matter whether you're treasury, you can do treasury wherever it needs to be for yourself. You know, talk us through that next step because, you know, say it tongue in cheek. You completely shifted. Talk through the next moves.

Yeah, I mean Apex, the move to Apex was an interesting one because I was asked to join the team there where there wasn't a Treasury, a formal treasury team in situ already there was a lot of work that was going to have to take place to assess what cash management looked like day to day for that business because it's highly acquisitive.

What is Apex by the way? Just give us an idea of them at that time.

Yeah. So Apex is a fund administration business from its kind of inception. It's grown substantially into a massive technology group now and deals with all of the administrative tasks funds may not want to deal with in house and they would outsource maybe some of the reporting, the depository duties, but also out to what are we going to do when we look at stablecoins in the future and how is that going to be managed through good governance, etc. Yeah, and Apex is heavily involved with over 3 trillion assets under management. So it's a huge, huge business now. But when I was, when I joined it in 2021, it was still building up a large portfolio of companies that it was acquiring over, over kind of a three year period. So I was brought in to look at how we consolidate all of the information that we're getting in from those businesses around. As I say cash management, making sure the bank accounts are all consolidated and then putting in place a management system. We chose Kariba, which was a fantastic tool to be able to upload cash flow forecasts, track against budget, also make sure we're actualizing as we go forward. So you have a rolling cash flow forecast with hedging view of the business. And as I say we were over 150 entities. So there was a huge amount of data coming into the group treasury team day to day. And again I come back to that real time process and being able to make decisions as new information comes to light was critical. So I worked, I worked there for about two and a half years. We did a lot of work in terms of closing acquisitions too and some of those acquisitions are in Brazil where obviously you've got the currency impact as well, but also the time or that you, you close off with clear counterparties in time for the closing of that market in particular whilst operating in the, in the uk, in the London office.

So I think, so I just want to jump in the. And I think you, you because you don't oversell because you're not like that, you're, you know, very modest about it. The fact was the $3 billion worth of M&A activity over in 2022, you hedge accounting for 2.2 billion. These are some big numbers that you know, learning from, you know, working on transactions. What's that like?

Stressful. You have a lot of pressure to execute and deliver in a timeline with lawyers, count parties that are selling their business and then going well, okay, we've done this, we've made this decision to buy this business. How do we make sure that we manage the debt that's been raised off the bank to finance it? Some of these businesses were FTSE 250 businesses that were purchased. So San Group was one of them where a huge amount of money had been transacted and we needed to hedge out to make sure that we can manage that interest rate risk. Myself and the group treasurer there were working heavily with a consortium of banks to ensure that we had interest rate swaps and interest rate options ready to execute, to hedge out and ensure that we were sure from a cash flow perspective we had cash flow hedges in place. What our ultimately our interest cost was going to Be the year because as you know, planning year after year and making sure that we have a coherent pro forma for the underlying P and L for the business is critical. When you've done all the acquisitions, the oneup costs have all been done but ultimately how profitable is that business once it's all controlled in kind of the efficiencies are hit, how profitable is it going to be in the future? And that's critical for any shareholders.

The move to Form 3 and what I want to do here is talk about your move there but also can you explain or simplify it? But some as simple as me what form three. I know we had our call a couple of weeks ago and it's fascinating but also my head was still spinning a little bit but try and bring it down to my level if you would. Over to you. So form three here we form three.

Is a very young company in the sense that it started 2016 as you alluded to and it's been growing significantly by partnering with some key infrastructure providers but also some tier one banks. About looking at what is the legacy payment infrastructure starting off in the uk, what does it look like and how is it actually going to be future proofed going forward? And the critical question is is 1970s tech and is still being used heavily by corporates all over the country in order to manage kind of payroll payments and direct debits?

Again raw us we've got a lot of us leading. Can you explain what BAX is? So just so.

So it's a three day payment cycle effectively you submit payments to pay.uk which are controlling that BACS environment. They would be normally batch files that are submitted across and then over a three day cycle that payment is ultimately released. Yeah, it's a lot cheaper to run because it's a lot slower in the UK we've also got chaps that's used for very high high end transactions where you absolutely need to make sure that money is getting to the counterparty same day and it can't be late and it's got to be able to be easily traced as well. And then you've got Farta payments and Fafta payments is the piece where the founders ultimately said we can do this better in a more constructive way in a cloud native infrastructure with multi cloud technology so that you have multiple servers supporting it to make it heavily resilient. And it was focused on how do retail customers move payments from account A to account B in the shortest time with the most resiliency.

Love it.

And the platform is Effectively set in place to speak to the central infrastructure in the uk, in the us, in Europe and be able to say these messages communicating settlement of funds from counterparty A to counterparty B or are going to happen at this point, once those messages are received and reconciled and those counterparts are notified effectively within a platform, at the end of the day those banks can do the formal cash settlement, the bank of England or the bank elsewhere. So it's in the clearing that Form 3 sits as the platform provider to kind of come back to that same phrase of one stop shop to be able to say whatever payment rail you're trying to Transact through Form 3 can assist in confirmation there does not sit in the money flow. We are separate to that. So we're almost just the reconciler of the messages as they're moved across, across the network.

You're the channels, your channel provider. It's brilliant. And you explained that well to me the other day, so I thought that it was worthy of re mentioning. But you went in there into the head of treasury role, talk us through what was treasury like there? That, you know, they're an advanced company so, you know, was it, you know, all sorted, just take over everything and turn the handle.

So form three was advanced. It has gone through Series C fundraising in 2021 and it's built out a significant amount of its platform through that funding. What the treasury function needed when I stepped in was making sure that we were making use of the investment vehicles that I know are available in the market to make sure that if we're sat on cash, we're not just leaving on the bank account or if we are, we've spoken to the bank account and ensured that we've got the right interest rate agreement there. We're using the right number of bank accounts for our currency exposures and we're making sure that day to day we are intervening to keep those balances where they need to be so that our working capital is solved for and we're not over keeping cash on funds when actually we need to make sure we're not running overdrafts. And that day to day cash management piece was first and foremost what I needed to do. And it's now grown substantially into how do we look at processes in the team to take this company into the next level of a mature finance function?

And you're in a fast growing fintech environment, you know, like literally and then, but then you're managing debt relationships and on the other. And you got liquidity, you got all those balances coming at you big themes and everything else. How do you reconcile that in your head again for the listeners? Because they might also be going, yeah, I face those problems.

Yeah, I think the coming into a fintech environment and a startup headspace, it's very challenging because you're going through and saying have I got the best financing deal in place currently? Is it what we need in terms of the currency we've been supplied, what are the rates like versus what we could now get in the marketplace? Who are the stakeholders behind us in supporting the business? Are they in it for the long term or not? And it's how do you ensure that you're managing all those relationships, keeping the investors up to date with the latest market trends, how the business is performing and how it's growing? Because critically we are obviously scaling significantly. We have lots of customers in the pipeline. We need to be able to be communicating that growth trajectory, not least in revenue, but also the volumes that the business is dealing with. And we process circa 300 million transactions a month. So it's a significant amount now that we are working with and our platform is heavily resilient for because of the partnerships we've had with the investors but ultimately the tier one customers that we.

Brought along the way and you've got, so you've got your balancing, as you say, those operational needs. You just talked to the room and then strategic stuff coming along and then to add it to that, you've taken on more responsibility more recently and you've become the financial controller. Can you explain, you know, the step up in that? What's the sort of the toughest part of that or, you know, how's it been for yourself?

It's been fascinating because it's, it's not the treasury that I know because it's stepping into financial control and understanding ultimately how you take those steps towards a CFO position and what are the strains and pressures of someone in that role? Well, it's looking at statutory accounting, it's looking at how the shared service center actually operates, how do you deal on the commercial side with the business who are facing off against customers and what does the strategic direction look like going forward? And those are all things that as I kind of broaden my horizons, so to speak, on business matters in general, they are interesting because it's not something I've always had exposure to. We've been closing off the year end audit, going through, making sure that we obviously do all of the good stuff that you would learn about if you were at PwC for instance, and starting out in that guise. It's something that I'm now really getting my teeth into because I'm speaking to the partner about the considerations they're making when they're reviewing our accounts at the end of the year. So it's been, it's been a steep learning curve, no doubt about, and heavily challenging, but coupled with it has been really good because I've got a great team of people that I've been working with that have really pushed and assisted me on the way to deliver over the last six months in the run.

And you're right at the front edge of a lot of this emerging technology and everything else, which is obviously great for yourself, you know, is that the key challenges that you see at the moment, you know, again, this is the part of the show where we sort of talk through a lot of your career. Where do you see, what do you see coming for you? You know, you're standing at a conference and you explain what you do and then, you know, what are the things on your mind? How are you seeing it?

My mind always points to payment because I think there's so much of the world and you only have to look in the US market, how, how payments are dealt with there. I mean, if you go into a bar in the US and you're paying with a card, they'll take the card away, walk, maybe swipe it and come back with the receipt, you're signing for it, adding the tip, et cetera. And then you might actually see the entry on the bank statement for two, three days. Then you go to Africa and you think the infrastructure just isn't there for real time payments at all in that part of the world. Is that going to revolve over the next 10, 20 years? You know, Brazil, the same. Some of these far flung places such as Australia, when you're sweeping cash from those jurisdictions, it can take 36 hours sometimes for cash to actually materialize. Bank accounts London and I've seen that when I worked at Apex, that, that kind of, that time management on cash, when you're dealing with the global network of payments, has to be taken into account these days. Yeah, I can see that changing dramatically. And that's why form three is at the forefront of it, because it's about accelerating it, getting people to think about cash movement as impacting their own personal working capital, which I think people don't really kind of think about. If you go to. I always remember Jane Pilcher who told me about this, actually think about supermarket. They're always positive working capital because they're collecting cash every single day from customers.

Yeah.

They've got credit terms with their suppliers. So they might not have to pay for the eggs for two weeks. Yeah. Or two months or whatever. You know, they're still collecting the cash for them. And it's kind of that, that process around making movement of money quicker so that it's in people's hands to be able to spend elsewhere will hopefully accelerate the economies of these countries that haven't really cottoned on yet. That is a big, a big issue for their development. And I think the case in point is in the US where Form three can be an accelerator to move to Fed now, Fed Instant for a lot of these big counterparties and banks and that then we see our growth in the future.

Our podcast is sponsored by icd. ICD are an independent platform trusted by thousands of treasury professionals worldwide to manage short term investments. One global treasurer recently told me it was one of the smartest technology decisions they've made. No license fees, rapid setup and tangible returns. If you're looking for a smarter, simpler way to manage your liquidity, then head to find out more at our partners page treasuryrecruitment.com forward/partners and find out much more. Let's get back to the episode. And as in you mentioned about the U.S. you know, we, we've obviously got a U.S. business or LLC and we do a lot of our business out there as well. And we just, we work with bank of America. We can tell that, you know, that's a fundamental. But we also, we've just signed up with Mercury bank and the speed at which they're moving it, just like, it's like I talked to you guys on the podcast each week, the way that they turned it round and then actually we can validate you. We need your kyc. But the KYC was all done online and then we did a couple of verification checks and then I did it with my passport and I'm like, okay, this took me three weeks before when I originally set up my bank account out there. Now it was done in an evening. I'm like, okay. But it was all verified and I was really impressed by them. It was like, okay, this is catching up very quickly sort of thing.

Absolutely. Digital banks are a game changer globally. And yeah, the speed in which all of the compliance is achieved is fantastic. Really in the way that they can assess your identity by taking photographs of yourself, your passport and then match it all off. We see that with counterparties like Revolut, just from a purple perspective. It's a bit of a game changer uk, but it's going to happen globally.

I don't know if I should have given a shout out to Mercury. I'll have to recheck or see if I get an affiliate code. That would be really good, actually, you know, as a very happy customer so far, guys, you know, there they are, enough shout outs for that. Let's go back to Treasury. Biggest challenges, would you say, at the moment, or other things that you've been going through and you think, right, that's you, obviously, as you've just touched on all the evolution of stuff, other things that coming along.

Yeah. I think AI is a massive opportunity for treasury, but I do think it's a challenge because you have to make sure that it's being used in the most useful way to enhance decision making at the top of a group or company. Obviously, treasury systems have focused on cash matching, bank statement versus tagging rules in systems for a number of years. I can only see that accelerating as more passing rules are put in place to be able to look through narratives on statements. But ultimately, if bank payments are not articulated properly in kind of the information that's included in the remittances, it's very challenging to get really accurate data. It all comes back to. You have to make sure that the inputs are ready to be read by the appropriate system. I think AI will be able to make informed decisions as it goes along and keep learning. But there has to be that kind of that fallback of someone to be able to go through and say, actually, did we spend all of that on payroll this month or are there some. Some taxes that have clipped in here that. Yes, miscoded. And I think the problem is if you just let it accelerate off suddenly and you don't look at a, I don't know, a cash flow statement for quarter, and you come back and look at it as a CFO in a company and the way, you know, accounts payable has moved, has been tagged incorrectly. Suddenly your whole ledger can be quite out of kilter quite quickly and then you're going to have to go through and spend a lot of time unpicking it. So I just think the acceleration to how AI is used in accountancy needs to be considered. But I do think it's going to be a game changer just in the way accountants are used for the future of businesses.

And it's an interesting one, actually, because I was interviewed myself by someone the other day where I saw it and I talked to so many treasurers and they were asking me about where I've seen it with treasurers and I was saying to them, look, I see this as massive, exactly as you said, massive opportunity. The problem is in the middle bit, you know, as I put that, there's a lot of noise and actually I see they're, they're becoming more of a burden a little bit on treasurers, where you guys before you were being asked a few years ago to look at different technologies coming along. Blockchain, could you look at this, could you look at payments on Barbara, all this different stuff. And actually, you know, you're in teams and you've been told by, go look at this, go look at this. And actually it was already on top of a heavy workload, so a big burden there. But now I think the problem is, and I find it in recruitment, you know, every day I'm getting deluged with this noise of, you could use this AI system, you could do this. And actually, I don't know about you, I've started, turned down that volume a little bit because I'm thinking, do you know what? I've got to focus on the basics first and then see who wins. I've often said that a lot of treasurers are late adopters in a good way. Go out, see what happens. Yes, you can be the route master, but actually there could be a lot of time wasted on that as well. And you think insane.

Yeah, definitely. I think there's, you know, there's so many different ways in which you could, you could look at applying AI to existing systems. There are all different other systems on the market as well, but heavily marketed and it's just making sure that whatever you're deploying is fit for purpose for your treasury team as, as it stands, and also the, the changes and challenges of the future. So I think you have to be considerate in how you approach the, the new technologies come available and I don't.

Want to do the takeaways yet, we'll do those shortly. But if you are giving advice to treasurers listening today or treasury professionals, whatever level they might be, so it's not the wrap up sort of thing, but you know, other things that you think people should be thinking, you've got this great career and as I say, I've known you for many years and know the companies you work with, you know, any, you know, looking at that, you know, someone's listening to the show today going, oh, yeah, that's good advice. What, what other advice would you give to people before we get to them?

My big Thing I think a lot of treasury teams don't think about because they haven't really had to in the past, is what do the payments infrastructure look like for your business going forward? How is Swift going to change its standards? What impact does that have on the way you make payments to customers or vendors? How are you going to manage that transition? Because it's coming. There's going to be more compliance placed on businesses people as well to make sure that they're being clear about why they're sending funds to certain areas, certain jurisdictions. And how is your team set up to be able to deal with that? More kind of focused fraud and compliance?

Should responsibility for that sit squarely just with treasury or what must the sort of percentage would you say with general finance and things like that? Who, who take, who's in charge of it, would you say?

Well, the thing is historically it's always sat with treasury in terms of making sure that know your customer checks.

Yeah.

And obviously fraud, etc. I think it's shifting, isn't it, with, with AI coming along and how is that going to impact how banks trace for fraud transactions, et cetera? We will see how that's adopted. Obviously it's a very heavily regulated space. I think where I've worked in teams, especially around the key compliance issues, is that relationship with the legal department is critical to understand from the customer success team. How we are onboarding a particular customer and why we're going down that route with a particular customer is important too. So it definitely has to be a coordinated approach to make sure that it's not just sat with treasury to go through all the paperwork to make sure that we comply with regulations. And there's sanction lists, but there is that communication in the, in the business to ensure the right people are involved at the right times to make decisions on counterparties, vendor management and ultimately customer. Okay.

So we are getting towards it. So you've been very kind with your time. Today we're going to put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. This is the wrap up, as you know that I give each week. But I wanted to ask two things.

First.

Firstly, key skills mindset. If you're a more junior treasury professional, you know you've made that progression. So I wanted to ask you about that to answer that sort of area and you might have your own answer as well and then more, you know, for the more experienced treasurers, what do you think they should be doing? So not two, a two part question, not two questions. But what would you say if you're.

Junior, I think the big thing for me is get your qualifications done. I think you look at the accountancy, obviously is one, One headspace, but also the treasury qualifications that are available too. They are there to teach you the. The right route through and the right thought processes to think about business. And I. I really do feel like if you don't, if you stop halfway with a lot of these qualifications and only do parts of it does limit you professionally, but also just limits you in terms of how you think about where your career could get.

Yeah.

So I think if you're junior focus, if you're 20 years old, 21 years old, out of university or even just out of, out of school, get qualification done, rattle through it, you're at the perfect time in your life to do it, because by the time you get to, I mean, I'm 35, I couldn't imagine starting it now. People do and they're fantastic for doing it. I think those early part of your career, the big focus on getting qualified and moving forward so that you accelerate into senior roles, be them accountancy, treasury, commercial, whatever it is, with the right mindset by those foundation qualifications.

Yeah, you got that. That route map, if you like, which is fantastic. And then as you get a bit further on other things that you think that treasury professional or more senior finance professionals should be thinking about as well.

Yeah, I mean, certainly the managers that I deal with, the things that I always say to them in terms of trying to develop them going forward, is make sure you can see tasks as, this is what I need to do today and close, don't linger, don't let things kind of drip over several days to get things finished. Make sure that if you committed to a date to finish something, do it, because that is the way you get through your work and ultimately you perform. I see a lot of people where they might have a task they've got two weeks to complete, they know that they can, they can complete it probably within that first week, but they still let it drip over into the second week. My view is that if you're able to time manage properly, you can close that off in that week and then you've got the opportunity the following week to focus on something else. And that's what drives businesses forward. You don't have people sitting on their hands when waiting for the next task to come through. It's right, I've cleared that off my desk, let's move on to something else. Let's focus on the next step.

Brilliant closing words. I'm not going to say much more than that. Mr. Tom Amazing. It's just been great. You lovely value with everyone there. Thank you very much and looking forward to seeing you very soon, sir. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

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