From Finance to Treasury: A Journey of Growth and Innovation with Jori McCuskey

Foreign.

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. And a special thanks to Flywire, our fantastic sponsors. If you've ever wondered whether there was a way to ease your international transaction hassles, they're the guys to talk to. If you follow the link in our show notes, you can see me talking to my mate Greg Levin, their Senior VP of Sales. I get to ask Greg about who are Flywire and how they can help you and your treasury team with your cross border payment headaches. Just follow the link to the interview in today's show notes. And now let's get on with the show. In this week's show I am joined by Jory McCuskey, the Director of treasury at Magnite. Magnite are the world's largest independent sell side advertising company. So publishers use their technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats. So ct, ctv, you've got online video, display and audio which I'm going to get you ready to George to take me through a little bit later. But the world's leading agencies and brands trust their platform because you can then use brand safe inventory, ad inventory, executing billions actually of advertising transactions every month. In April 2021, Magnite acquired SpotX to further enhance their CTV business and better help their clients in the rapidly expanding market. You've got offices right the way across. We've got la, New York, Denver, London, Sydney, right the way, North America, emea, latam and Asia. But I'm going to go right back to the beginning of his career. If you would sir, can you take us through how you first got started in finance, then discovered the world of Treasury? I know we've talked about this before, as I said to listeners and apologies for this, I've got a horrible cold. That's why I'm struggling to breathe. But we're going to let the jewelry get on and take us through this. So over to you sir.

Yeah, thank you so much Mike for the opportunity to come speak in podcasts. I've been a fan for a long time and this is a great chance to give back to members of the Treasure community.

Thank you sir.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I started out actually thinking about going into computer science. I was admitted in a business school at University of Texas Austin and wanted to do a minor in cs, maybe dual major. When I found out there Was a major called Management Information Systems which was focusing on kind of enterprise technology. And that was a big thing the dot com era. But I was looking ahead and there were a lot of at that time it was the dot com bus and just lots of layoffs and the jobs were few and far between. I also liked econ and so switched my major over to finance and really never looked back. So I went from at a program called the FAP and University of Texas Focus on Banking Investments and took that interest with me. After graduating I started my career in actually in consulting. I was living in Austin, Texas at the time and worked in a firm called Advocate Consulting where it was combined those sort of data and system skills with finance and accounting and legal matters all into one. It's from the specialist area of consulting where we got to work on some pretty complex stuff. We were usually helping to support plaintiff's counsel, I'm sorry, defense counsel. Whenever you know you get these large corporate lawsuits that involve big numbers for damages typically end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, that kind of thing. And so we had to do, we worked with, we helped basically the defense counsel understand the ramifications, the quantum of damages that were potentially at risk and so that's their clients and served as kind of experts in the matters at hand. I was still interested in finance though and so started working on the CSA part one. And as I got through the first level, I really just didn't see an opportunity to get the experience requirement fulfilled within the firm that I was at. And so I started to look at other opportunities that were in Austin at the time and had some connections from the firm I was at to the finance and the treasury teams at Dell. And so thus began my foray into the treasury world. And so my first role at Dell was actually at the joint venture that Dell set up that was a customer financing subsidiary where it was set up to basically help anybody who wanted to buy Dell products go and finance their gear, whether it be consumers, that private label credit card small medium businesses do leases and loans, large enterprise customers could finance big data center and equipment build outs. And so that the company had the subsidiary, the JV had a separate treasury department that was focused on that. And so they had a pretty big balance sheet, billions of financing receivables they had to finance. And so I got hands on into securitization where we had credit facilities that we'd borrow against to fund reinvestment into new receivables. And we also covered our own cash management, interest rate Risk management since a lot of our obligations our borrowings were floating rate we would fix them to. To fixing rate our fixed rate in order to immunize the portfolios against risk.

But I was going to say quite a technical role for your first role in treasury would you say? Is that the right way to describe it?

Yeah, it was very technical from a. Not that you've ended with technology perspective because the role we had to work with large amounts of data and having been in the consulting role I was in where we did a lot of SQL analysis and taking huge data sets and distilling them down into simple numbers that lawyers can understand. Having that experience actually positioned me really well for the role because they did the same kind of thing with a different. From a different perspective and with different goals in mind. Yeah. And also having worked in the litigation pretty work great at in disputes and investigations and kind of claims at navigate familiar with really careful reading of legal contracts which is super helpful when going in seeing a first credit agreement and so those kind of two. And the fact that it had some background in finance too is just super helpful in kind of opening the door into this role. And got also got some experience working with a cash management platform rollout. We changed my banking partner and financial services firm. It's a tricky ordeal. You've got big lockbox operations and so it has to be part of that. But so what happened next was Dell decided being the commercial enterprise is that it was much more profitable for itself to buy the JV out. And so it bought out its partner and the financial services subsidiary became a fully owned subsidiary of Dell. The parent and our two treasurer teams became one and the treasurer at the time who I was who was working for Brett Nicholson became it's a broader role within Dell and so we. Dell was just really known for having a great rotational program among in finance and other areas as well. And the Treasure team too prided itself on giving people opportunities to rotate get deep experience in kind of specialist areas. This position them for moving up later on down the road and become future. And so when our teams combined it was like it was such a great opportunity for all the all members of the in both teams because we could. We had more opportunities to rotate around. And so the from there it took a bunch of different roles from liquidity planning, us forecasting. They're going through a big tax reorganization at the time which had implications for US liquidity and constantly doing M&A. So US liquidity planning was a front center at that time. And then they at some Point we have a need actually in Europe because there's a. We want to develop a Treasury shared service center there. And can you take what you did with the US forecasting process, global liquidity management, can you replicate that into in Europe? And it's time they just had two people actually it was three based in central Europe and one was in London. And so I did that for a couple months and I said by the way, now that you're over there, can you take on all these other things and help us basically build out this shared services center? And it was a much broader role than I actually been led on to, but a great opportunity. So my role is just be. To be the conduit for a lot of these areas of treasury that were being done in different regions, primarily US and take those on, make them better, find and build out the team and train them to take on those responsibilities, make sure it's a smooth transition and then eventually come back to the US and so did that for a couple years. And additionally they said hey, we've also got this global treasury management system project. Can you take the lead? There were some rotate some rotations and people had left in the US who were running the project and can you take ownership of this and get it over the finish line? And so we did and we set up. It was Dell, big company, right, 60 billion at a time in revenue and we had hundreds of bank accounts, lots of different, extremely multi tiered credit banking group with lots of different banks to work with across the globe. We embarked on this project to improve visibility to cash, do a lot of automate a lot of things that did, you know, be able to set up payment initiation from majority of our accounts globally and I think set the groundwork for decentralizing a lot of payment operations and centralizing them through that one system. And so that was.

I want to jump in there and just talk through because I think you've really explained it that well in a nice way about the fact that you were in the US and then you made this move, which is quite unusual and I've heard it from a number of treasurers though that really elevates your career. So you were in Texas, but you also, when you came to, you were in Slovakia. That's a heck of a move. And then you came back to Texas. Can you just talk us through what that was like for you at that stage in your career and being that far away across any European centre in terms of treasury and obviously treasury staffing and things like that? Because it was fascinating. You Know, relatively early in your career as well.

Yeah, it was the right time, right place and at, at, for me it personally it was just a dream come true. I, I'd worked my way through college and I always had two or three jobs. You know, I was, you know, getting through school and so always wanted to study abroad and, and so this was personally it was like, oh gosh, I'd love to do that. I'd love to go help, help, do anything. I'll just, you name it, I'll. I'm on, I'm on a ship or a flight tomorrow rather. But there was, I think it was just really interesting professionally too because they're, they just the scale of the operation. We had about 2,800 people back then on the site and they had done shared services in a number of different functions and, but never treasury. And they've found this was just a great geographic location to do that because you could support Asia in the morning and the US and North America, South America in the afternoon, cover Europe in the day. It was like great for kind of managing global projects given the time zone was so strategic. And also just lots of young people fresh out of school, love looking for opportunity, highly educated, you could invest in them, grow them over the years and as they mature in their career, they move up in the kind of maturity levels. You've got this Runway right where you can really develop a great long term presence in a country like Slovakia. So I was super excited about being a part of that and also getting that experience of working with a different culture and different kind of mindset being my. When you live in a different location, your perspective of where you are geographically and what's going on really changes. And with that identity as well, you become aware of things. And I think on the scale of both the mindedness I rank a little bit high and I just, I soaked it up. I loved it. I had such a great time being over there and meeting people. I did and being able to travel and work with a different, on a business side, worked in different areas of business that were all growing in different ways across the region.

And then continue your career with Dell because then you were SIM and tech. So you then returned how come or why the return to the US or was it just that time or what happened?

Yes, it was. I was the goal for the role was for me to go over there for a short time. Originally it was just going to be a year and then we were able to extend it because the role expanded to two years and then to almost three years. But then at some point my job had been completed and we grew the team from what was three when I started there to I can't remember the numbers but I think it was like around 12, maybe 13. And a lot of the things I'd taken on, I'd already transition and there just wasn't a need for me to be there anymore unless I wanted to go stay there permanently. That was a different story. So I was looking for a little more capital markets experience at the same time. And being in a remote treasury center, you get very limited exposure to that and very limited exposure to the more yeah, head office aspects. And so from a career perspective I thought that that was probably the better direction to go if I want to pursue a career in a U.S. multinational. And so thankfully there was a role that was open and I was able to actually transition to it partially while I was actually in Europe still. And so it made a real seamless transition. And from there we so kind of next role was helping out with capital return. Dell had a lot of free cash flow, so it was buying back a bunch of shares and did a number of things and being a junior trader for the FX team which we had, there were four people, give or take, one on each region, one director. And then I was supporting the team with trading and analytics and things like that. But shortly after I got back, Dell had bigger plans. They decided to actually they like to value their Michael Dell value its shares and partnered up with Silver Lake and decided to take the company private. The Treasure team basically reorganized. Roles were redefined, the role structure was redefined into reality. Everybody was. There was a big deal team that was put, put in place. It was all hands on deck and I was part of the deal team that helped to go through the post or just to understand the capital structure that Dell would be saddled with as part of the LBO transaction and understanding kind of putting some frameworks together, understanding impacts to leverage, cost of debt where there's flexibility, where there's not negotiating coven building out some analytics for that and reporting we need to and actually being part of the deal team that helped negotiate a lot of the covenants as we went through the closing process. So that was a very interesting process. It was my first foray into kind of understanding what secured debt looked like and how the company can go from being well into investment grade to crossover high end of the low investment grade in that area. And also the importance of having a very capable banking group. Right. Because we had very large financing needs in order to make this transaction take place and there were a number of strong relationships that Dell had built over the years that enabled that transaction to take place and got set in the center of that whole process. Super interesting. But once it was done I think things sort of stabilized for time and I was able to take a more of a manager role in managing one of the FX programs for our Asia business. And we kept our FX program largely intact. And despite being private private equity tending generally not to favor FX or spending money on hedging, they still were open to keeping that program going. Given the impact that FX can have on a private capital structure and financials is better to have it than not. So I managed the FX program for Asia and then full circle actually my next role after that was coming back to supporting the Dell financial services business as the team lead for the. I would say it's almost like a separate treasury org within treasury that supports just the DFS business. We were focusing on controlling borrowing cost and capital structure. So the Canadian and U.S. businesses across all the different kind of product areas lead loans, credit card receivables, that kind of thing and it came full circle and I think it was one of the one of the more interesting roles for this for me from, from my perspective at Dell because you did get to work directly with the subsidiary CFO and figure out the best way to finance the business and directly see the impacts of what you do on the businesses ability to price products effectively which is a function of your borrowing cost, your leverage, your cost of capital, whatever cost of capital and have a big impact on a growing business that's instrumental for overall Dell to function it needs to be able to finance its customers purchases and its gear in order to continue driving revenue growth.

And so what happened next because you didn't know this, I don't want to. We would want to make sure that we get the most out of your time and everything else. But how then talk us through the move to simtech and how did your role because you were you taking on. This is one of the things that when people look and they look at your LinkedIn profile and they'll see the steps you've made and you've got very technical, strong background but talk us through what happened next sort of thing.

Yeah sure. So in that that dolphin as a services role I got a little, I don't hungry I guess pro se or anxious because I looked around and Dell had gone private, the treasury had been reorganized, all the sort of directors and the bottles positions had been stabilized and we're going to BE so for a number of years and so I kind of got a little anxious and saying I should probably look to find BE maybe open to working at a smaller company similar to the size of DFS where I can play a bigger role, see more things, be involved in the business more directly supported treasurer and access to exposure to senior leadership and the board and those kinds of things. An opportunity opened up at Syntec in the Bay Area and it was right up my alley. It was like it was a capital markets role that covered foreign exchange and interest rates, forecasting, special projects, a number of different things. And what was interesting about them is that they are so Symantec name doesn't exist anymore. It's now operating under the name of Gen Digital and for a time it was Norton Lifelock. Back then it was Symantec and Symantec had the Norton antivirus big brand consumer cybersecurity. They're one of the biggest pure players.

Yeah, yeah, you were previous customers. We touched on Dell obviously but it's a big services and everything else but as you say I've grown up with it but yeah, I think you describe it well. But what was treasury structured like there and things.

Yeah, they had. Dells was like what I think around 45 people, maybe somewhere in the 40 to 50 range. Symantec was about 11 people and you know, I think maybe a third to maybe a half or probably more like a third were were in Ireland and the rest were in Mountain View. And the structure of the team was there were two direct reports to the treasurer, one focused on capital markets and things that it's described and the other was my peer who's focused on operations and she was based in Dublin and so we partnered up and got a lot of really great things done. And there was also another member of the team who was focused on risk management and investments. And so we. So anyway, so the role looks really interesting because here you got this company that's acquisitive. They also needed some help to return a bunch of capital. They just spun off one of their third of the business company called Veritas which is still private. And part of the team that was part of the semantic treasury team spun out and left and went to the Veritas team. So they were backselling for a couple different roles. And so for me it's a great opportunity just to see a smaller business, see a different type of business. It was software and they're moving into SaaS solutions going from discrete software purchase to one that's more a subscription model. You'd see like Adobe and that they've been the poster child for that kind.

Of transition and treasury wise. And I'm key to focus in on that because you had a couple of roles there. And how was treasury at the time? So this was for the listeners 2015-2018. What was the, what were the challenges? Because you would, you've always done very much a lot of financing, which is. Yeah, that's just your sweet spot in many ways. But talk us through that for the listeners, if you would.

Sure, sure. First. So yes, mantech, when I first got there, the first priority was returning a bunch of capital to shareholders. They spun off this company that used to be a pretty, pretty instrumental part of the business. We did it, do a bunch of buybacks, do a special dividend. And I think their margins were in the 30s. They generated a pretty healthy amount of cash. So they had, and not only that, but they also had a pretty substantial amount of offshore cash. So needed some, wanted to do some things with it and with all that cash kind of built up over time. And so one of the roles, one of the things that they needed a lot of help with is, was one to see what the cash looked like, to figure out the best way to get a lot of that cash in sort of central places, either offshore or onshore. And three, support the financings that came through. We had our first one was a big for us, our big acquisition called Bluecoat where Symantec was looking to get into enterprise secured cybersecurity in the cloud. And Bluecoat was a specialist in that area. And so we worked on getting the financing package for that put together and acquiring with cash wherever it was. And to support that we had to figure out what pockets of cash were liquid, how that cash would build up over time and how do we repatriate in the right way. And so there was a lot of kind of planning that went into putting the financing together and then subsequently how to support financing and repay debt. So we could as a. I think for technology companies, some companies have, if you've got assets that are substantially long live you put stancing that's also long lives. But technology companies, because they the risk of obsolescence is so high and you constantly have to innovate, it's not usually very good to put a lot of long term debt on. Usually you want to flex your balance sheet up and pay back debt as quick as you can or to keep some amount outstanding going through that transition of flexing your balance sheet up. Acquiring these companies, integrating Them and then deleveraging so that you could have the capacity and not be saddled with the cost, the next acquisition came up. So during that financing we set up a lot of new stuff and to support just what we needed to be able to support that kind of business. And they prepared us for the next financing, which is one where we acquired a company called LifeLock, which is. They were focused on this kind of two super products. Norton, which was. Had a high renewal rate, right. High rpu and people seemed very happy kind of renewing their products year after year. And LifeLock, which is similar, but it was focused on digital identity protection and kind of your digital life. And the idea was if you bundle those two products together and if you have the same subscription renewal rates, you can have this kind of super bundle of products that can have tremendous cash flow generation and had a ton of value for a customer or perceived value. Right. It's insurance products actually. So during that process though, our treasurer at the time there was a sudden departure and I stepped up and helped close the transaction and was promoted to Director Treasury. And we. After the transaction was done, it took me about 10 months or so for the financing team, restarted the science team to stabilize and for a new head of treasury to be brought in. So throughout this time, it's very kind of typical in tech where you have high management turnover. You know, we had two CFOs, we had two CEOs, management team from the Bluecoat team came over and effectively backdoored their way into to be the management team at Symantec. So navigating that transition, we had a lot of work cut out for us. Yeah. So that. So fascinating place to be, I think is one of, one of the places where I think I had really the opportunity to see a lot of things that I just hadn't been exposed to before and to really help the company, the management team achieve the other goals. Building a largest pure play cyber security company out there.

And yeah, great experience. And then you moved on and you were in consulting and things. Talk us through that. Because I want to get. I don't want to run too much over time with we got the magnite shorty, but take us through if you would.

Yeah, sure. So I made a couple moves and at some point was looking to see what. Where. What I wanted to do with my career. I think I was early enough in my career where I could look at a potential change and had. I think I was getting more and more specialized in treasury. The longer I'd been in treasury and So I took an opportunity in Oregon to work for a company called FDI Consulting which did similar types of consulting that services that my first company at a school navigate consultant did. And so I thought, oh, I've always had a little bit of an entrepreneurial attitude towards solving problems, finding solutions, being innovative within Treasury. And so I thought that there could be an opportunity where I could take the kind of experiences working with corporates, understanding what I know about corporate finance and also data systems, leverage that in some way to build a practice within the FDI consulting. And so I, I went on a foray, right? I came in as a junior role where I could just learn and observe and not have pressure to sell services and just kind of just get to know the business and how their clients think and what their priorities are. And so a lot of the projects I worked on there were for corporations that were going through like they were getting investigated by for some reason or they had a large substantial restatement and needed to work through some fx, you know, aspects. Some of them were totally unrelated to treasury, more accounting focused. We worked on with a company that was pre ipo, it was working on, had some issues with revenue recognition and so working through some of their fixing some of the issues in their system and identifying what those things are as they're preparing for ipo, worked a lot with accountant accounting teams and the external reporting teams there. So got some kind of real appreciation for the close process and also some of the backend systems that are supporting other areas of the business just on.

That because as you say, you'd had quite a lot of capital raising and a lot of experience in that area. And this was new, not new to you the experience there, but it's quite different. Broader experience, would you say?

Yeah, I'd say I think this kind of helped me appreciate the things that the pressures and the complexity of processes that other peers and other parts of finance and company have to deal with is how I'd probably characterize it. Having worked with a lot of the accounting teams, both internal and external, the support in some of these projects was eye opening and kind of armed me with just that appreciation for the process that goes on and also the complexity and systems that support how business records and reports. So I feel like it gave me at least a good working knowledge of how of a key area of the financial organ finance organization of a big company too. So I certainly still lean back on those experiences and I think that it's also pretty data heavy and data intensive. So I was, I think it was One of those areas where I seem to like behind the scenes, add a lot of value and kind of grow eventually get to the point where I can sell business. But I think that kind of gets me to the next transition which is at a certain point I think the in the practice area I was in they most of the sales. So the company I was into FTI was they like to sell the really big projects, the ones that. The biggest ones out there where you have a multi year engagement and it would be one of those that it's. It's a headliner. Right. And so to what I thought was going to be an opportunity to really grow a business ended up not actually being that way because if you're. The only way I would get experience in selling consulting services to those types of clients, whether it be the board or the management teams, was to be at the partner level. And in order to get to the partner level I would have to go and usually get some audit experience or at least have a cpa. And both of those things were not really paths that I could take at the. At that firm. Like they typically hired ex auditors, ex data scientists and some other companies. So it's this like limbo world where I'd be brought in as a subject matter expert to bigger projects. But so I was missing how do I get to the next level and how do I progress my career explored looking at transitioning to the corporate finance team which is they had really strong restructuring and corporate finance team there. But at the time it was like during COVID projects were getting cut and a lot of the sort of finest transformation projects were being delayed and deferred. So it was really just heavy on the bankruptcy side of things. And so that that wasn't as compelling as me because the bankruptcies are very structured, they're very cut and paced, follow very predictable paths and they're all pretty, pretty similar in that you've got some debt you've got to deal with, you've got some stakeholders you got to take care of, you got processed judicial system and everything kind of revolves around a forecast of cash. So I started looking for opportunities in the treasury again and throw Magnite opened up and it was say I described.

It as of the show but can you explain who Magnite are when or where when you join them and now where they evolve to thing because you joined them way back in. Yeah, you explain it 2021?

Yeah, sure I joined, I joined during COVID and it was mid 2021. Magnite is one of the Global leaders of digital advertising and connected television streaming is what we call it nowadays.

Yeah.

And they at the time had just gone through a large acquisition previous year to go into the highest growth area for kind of digital advertising, which is connected televisions and streaming. And they just acquired a company called SpotX a couple months before I joined. But the difference was when they acquired SpotX they also took on a bunch of debt to do it. And they, the team looked around and realized, hey, we, we just don't have anybody in house that can help stick support the capital structure and all the kind of requirements and it goes on. And external advisors are really costly and you know, you want to have somebody in house who can advise the team on pros and cons with different decisions come up. And so they were high growth. They had just pretty basic operations, mostly just cash management. And it had been that way for years and grew from tens of millions of revenue to I think right now we're in the kind of 5 to 600 million range and we're seeing our international revenue grow. I think we're in mid-20s now. So we're. As they grow the up the maturity cycle, they have more and more complexity. And so their core businesses, they working on the, they work on this primarily on the sell side, which is where you have publishers and major streamers out there. Think of the Hulus and Disney's and publishers for own content who have space to spaces to advertise, to bring advertisers in and they want to monetize that space and they want to do it in an efficient way. And so they work with a partner like us that helps them programmatically sell that inventory to buyers, which are the. Think of the big ad agencies or brands that want to basically put advertisements in places. And so we help to facilitate all that in an economic way that helps them make their sales forces more productive and basically generate revenue. That's monetization of their inventory is what generates revenue.

And it's really interesting, it's a really interesting business because of all the different connections and obviously it feeds into a lot of the stuff you've had before. But when you came in as treasurer, tell us just from a Treasury perspective, what was it like and what have you made it to now?

Yeah, so when I came in, I was working at a smaller company gives you perspective and breadth and compared to working at a much larger company where you've got scale and you've got experience and you've got process. And the first thing that was apparent to me is that there's a lot of, there's a lot of high value stuff that can be gone after and it's, there's just a shortage of time. And so there, the focus is really like how do I go after those high value wins? That one, can demonstrate my value team and be a benefit to the company and two, set us up for scaling and automation. And in a way that's, that makes sense for the company that it is right and wants to be. And when I came there, there's just a lot of stuff that could be done that hadn't been done. But I think they're getting. Anytime you get like a new, fresh blood into an organization, right, you bring new ideas, new experiences, question things. Some things work really well, some things can be improved, some things just aren't done at all, hadn't been considered. And we embarked on a process of just figuring out what, how we wanted to set things up and what we wanted to go after first. And so we've really done that for the last couple years. It's everything from. And I think one, one thing that's really interesting about this company too is they really pride themselves on trying to be thoughtful about how they do things so that there's scale and there's automation in mind and so that you have, you don't build up as much kind of fat with a lot of manual processes that you just soak up people's time and attention, create risk.

And when you say that how do they do that? Is that just an ethos of the company or is it, how does that work?

It's culture. It's the cultural. I think, I think there's low turnover at least in the finance team, very low turnover in the finance teams. They've been around, they've had experience and they. There's this balance of making improvements incrementally that add value, but not doing work for the sake of work. Not. There's not a whole lot of churn. And I've seen, I've worked for some science orgs where the, there is a lot of that a lot of kind of repeat demands for the same kind of thing, just different increments and that really soaks up a lot of time. So I think the industry team is very thoughtful on trying to balance the need for kind of real time information versus trying to be flexible and allowing people to focus on the highest value things at hand. And so I think it's driven from the top down and it's really good about that. It's such a great culture. To work for where they're very collaborative and supportive and want to see everybody.

Succeed and they have the ethos from the beginning and it permeates through and things like that. And just thinking about treasury per se and you've been there for a number of years now and things like that. You and I were just talking before the show about how you're pushing treasury out into the business in a wider sense with yourself. Where do you see treasury developing to? What are the things that you're noticing is that you're an experienced treasury now. You've got all these different amazing experiences. Where do you see it developing and growing to?

I think there's no one size fits all. I think every organization will handle the things that treasury focuses on differently. And sometimes it's decentralized, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's bifurcated. I've seen some treasury orgs where capital markets is actually under the end of 18 or risk management's under like legal or accounting. I'm talking about insurance risk management. But you could also see treasury cash management and treasury operations go to a shared services model or you have an entirely strategic focused treasury that's based on analysis, insights and driving the highest value. And so it depends on how companies priorities are and how they're set up and what kind of resources are at hand. I will say that I think that there's going to be this continuous push to automate things and make investments in systems that help do things. But somebody's got to run those systems. And so I think at least what I've seen, and maybe I'm biased because where my background's focus is is a lot of the challenges and problems that you find in treasury are, you know, data related and people who are resourceful and can work across teams and systems are tremendously valued in a grand organization where you have to get information from so many different sources and compile it, put it all together and make sense of it. I think having. I think there's probably some sort of parallel to the introduction of spreadsheets back in the 80s. People who had, who could run a spreadsheet. Right. They're, they were, they're highly geniuses at the time.

Yeah. And so when you're bringing in these systems and AI, what are you saying that they, that people need to be thinking about because you've got that mindset yourself. What are you thinking?

I, I think that from a skillset perspective it, if you're somebody who's just starting out in finance, not just treasury finance in General getting some exposure to integrations and systems and data and is one of those things that will be. It'll have dividends throughout your career, whether you decide to go into treasury, go out of treasury, go do other things, even go into non finance types of roles to corporates. Yeah, yeah. So it's one of those things. It's very portable and if you don't know what you want to do, focus on that and figure the rest out later.

And again. And I want to be respectful of people's time. We'll put your LinkedIn details in the show. Notes for people out there. What sort of takeaway tips are you going to give to people? What are they. Should they be thinking about, you think, with their careers?

Yeah. So I think one number one takeaway I think is always have that growth mindset and there's always value in learning more about what others and team are doing and taking that experience and building on putting it like a pyramid. Right. Building blocks form the foundation. And so the greater kind of variety of experiences you can get early on in your career. Right. The more opportunities it can open up down the road for you to apply that kind of diverse skill set to whatever the challenges is at hand. So it's one of those things where if you focus on the. On growing yourself and growing the value you can provide the people you're serving. Right. It will naturally create opportunity in the right conditions.

Just building on that sort of getting those bits of the toolkit. Would that be the right way to describe it?

Yeah.

Amazing. Yeah, I enjoyed that. And as I said in the apologies for everyone listening to me, your jewelry sounded great. It was with me, with my cold. I'm like, yeah, here you go. But no, he's very kind and that's why I didn't interrupt too much because there was a. Yeah, a lot of sneezing, but no, great to talk to you. Looking forward to catching up with you soon. When you're next over this side. And yeah, thank you very much, Sarah. Been. Been really interesting and good fun. Thanks for tuning into another great episode. You really enjoy it. Thank you very much. You make it worthwhile us recording them with these amazing treasury professionals right the way across the world from the us, across the uk, across Europe and there's lots more exciting guests to come and lots more live events. We love delivering this content. We get asked now, is this what you do? Do you just do content? You just do. No, the reason we do the content is to get to know you guys, to give you back the tips for success. If you. But we're here to help you hire someone. If you need to recruit, call us. Because at our heart, we are a Treasury recruitment company. That's how we pay the bills, that's how we pay for the podcast and that's what we're passionate about. We hear from you at events and things. Can we also help you find your next great role? Can we help you hire? The answer is yes, that's exactly what we do. Yes, we do our treasury salary survey@treasurysalary.com that helps us know exactly how to benchmark not only your salary, but also when you're looking to hire. We know exactly what the market is paying, wherever you might be, whether it's the us, UK or Europe. We want to make sure that we are the best informed, that we're not just finger in the air. We always know. If you want to hire the best in treasury, don't hesitate to contact us. Go onto the website treasuryrecruitment.com or in the US, you can contact Joe Grabowski Europe, contact the lovely Katie for more senior roles and roles across the uk, reach out and contact me or drop any of us an email. Joe treasuryrecruitment.com Katie at treasuryrecruitment.com or Mike@treasuryrecruitment.com Let us help you make the hiring process as amazingly seamless and easy as our podcasts are to listen to. Thanks for your amazing support and looking forward to seeing you at either an event or a conference very soon. Or just give me a call. Let's help you find the next role or recruit the next treasury professional. All right, until next week, many thanks.