How AI & Automation are Revolutionizing Treasury with James Kelly

Foreign.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to treasurers about how they built their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. And I want to give a shout out to our sponsors flywire. If you've ever wondered if there is a way as a Treasury professional to ease your international transaction flows, then these are the people to talk to. There's a link in the show notes to my interview with my good mate Greg Levin, their Senior VP of Sales. Greg explains who Flywire are and how they can help you and your treasury team with any of your cross border payment headaches. The link to the interview is in the show notes, so check it out and I also want to share some more exciting news. We have partnered with Euro Finance for their 33rd International Treasury Management Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. It takes place from October 2nd to 4th, 2024. Looking forward to it. I've gone to the Euro Finance conferences now for the well over the past 20 years. If you're an international treasury professional then it's the place to be. Not only because I'm going to be there, but you'll get to meet as well as hopefully myself, over 2,200 senior treasury professionals from over 60 countries. You'll meet me we can talk about on my upcoming special feature podcast about the current state of the global treasury recruitment market, live and in person from Copenhagen. And I'm looking forward to meeting many treasury folk from clients such as Bose, eBay, Lego, FedEx. It's just going to be amazing. I hope you'll be there. Great opportunity to exchange experiences, meet leading financial and technology providers as well. It's going to be a great show. Now our LinkedIn audience. I've already offered a 10 discount too, so you can get access to that. But you, yes you as a podcast. This time I have an even bigger surprise for you. Yes, included in today's episode and some of our future episodes there is a secret extra discount code that will save you even more than the 10. Just have to listen out for it and you can save even more. Listen out for the code. Have a pen ready or you can just, I don't know, bookmark it. Listen back to the podcast. Why wouldn't you want to listen to it twice? But anyway, if you listen out for it and you can save even more to find out what it is and save you listen to today's episode and I can't wait to see you in Copenhagen and as I say each and every week, let's get on with the show.

In this week's show I'm joined by James Kelly, the SVP treasury and Enterprise Risk Management at FTSE 100 learning company Pearson. During his time at Pearson, James's team have established a reputation as leading innovators winning awards at the ACT's deal of the Year awards for Pearson's debut social bond issuance as well as establishing comprehensive in house bank structure employing high levels of automation to drive efficiency. Pearson also uses TIS Cashforce which is a leading AI enabled Cashforce deal asking solution which James will explain a little.

Bit more about lots of words.

I'm trying to say this all at once but we're going to go back to the beginning of James's career, how he first discovered finance treasury and then bring up today and then we're going to talk about some of the passions that he shares as well for AI and technology a bit later in the show. James, over to you. Enough of my voice over to you, sir.

Sure, thank you, Mike. So I started out as a bit of a finance geek. I did economics in French at Unique, went did a couple of stints at investment banks in my summer holidays as internships and then was looking for a job in September 2001 which wasn't a great time to be looking for jobs. I started thinking what else could I do? And applied for a whole range of things, one of which was Auto Spain. So I joined re reasonable firm called Morph Stevens, did three years with them, took on some interesting tasks. So I had clients like Caterham Cars, Formula one team, one or two others. And then I moved to KPMG and did sort of 18 months at KPMG as an auditor there where I had clients like Action Aid and Children in need, which was quite fun from the charity sector and a variety of others, say a paper manufacturer, various other people. And I then got a call would I be interested in joining Kingfisher PLC as a group accountant. They were looking for someone who could speak French and at that point I'd had four years where I hadn't used my French, left Unique having thought okay, French is going to be a big part of my life. And so jumped at that opportunity. Thought I just got to the stage where I was like, I'm going into clients for three weeks at a time, getting to know them a little bit and then you move on and you go to the next one. And I quite like to get my teeth into something and really be able to add a bit more long term value. So that came at a really good time. Joined and just at the point that I joined my then boss, got an internal promotion, moved to investor relations and so it was me and the person I was taking oath from had to run the half year from a group perspective. So that was quite fun. Threw me in at the deep end, meant that I got lots of exposure to lots of things. And so the normal kind of rotation cycle of you'll get to do balance sheet and you'll do that for six, eight months and then you'll do a bit of P and L and then you'll do the next thing. That got crunched quite significantly and you know, within about six months I tried almost everything and within about a year I was working on the cash flow, which was considered the, the most technically challenging of the tasks. And through that I was asked to help the treasury team with a few things, particularly transition to ifrs. And I was helping them with some work on derivatives and things, largely because I was seen as this sort of slightly geeky guy who could probably get my head around what was going on and teach people how to do sort of balance sheet reconciliations and that kind of stuff. So I did that and around that point the then treasury accountant decided to move on and I was asked if I'd like to move across. And so having been thinking I'd quite like to specialize in something, I'd actually been thinking tax probably, I thought, why not? I don't have any particular ties to anything. And I was incredibly lucky. I had two really top treasurers in the team in Linda Hayward and Nick Favier. And actually that team is amazing. You've got Granier who's at Walgreens, Gary Burton who's gone on and done some really great things. So it was a really excellent team, really thoughtful, competent people, really looked out for each other, but were also really clear about what they could and couldn't do. It was a really great grounding and I think one of the things that I, in fact two things I took from that. The first was just how incredibly generous Linda was with her time and helping upskill me. And they joke that 6 year old asks 75 questions a day. And I was very much in that camp. It's like treasury is completely new to me. I'm trying to get through year end. I had two brand new green people when I started, both pretty much out of uni at that point. My first instinct was to try and go it alone and then get them to do little bits. And I Tried that for about half a week and realized that's never going to work. I've got three people in my team. I'm going to have to make sure that everyone's carrying something, otherwise I'm going to fall over. So that was a really good lesson. And it doesn't matter, you know, who you think you are. The reality is you need to work with others to get things done. And I think Nick was brilliant, just never closing anything down. Everything was. Everything's always possible. It's just you've got to find a way of getting there. And I think the fact that he'd made group treasurer really young was. Was really inspirational for me, actually, because at that point, and to be honest, it's a little bit the same now, if I go to. You go to treasury events, that there aren't too many group treasurers in their early 30s. And so it was one of those things that there was me, 27, thinking right here, it's going to be a long old road to get to that kind of level.

I will say I'll jump in there.

And we will put a link in.

The show notes to previous podcasts. I did with Linda. Yeah, so we had Linda on the podcast, Wonderful Lady. She was also mentioned recently. Andy Henley at Tesco, he took over. And actually, funny enough, I placed Granya with Linda back in the day. So, yeah, it was a great place to be at Kingfisher. So, yeah, great team and great people. And then what happened next? Or talk us through because you made some moves.

So I moved to. Moved to sky and I moved primarily to get more front office exposure. So the front office team at Kingfisher were pretty well set. It didn't really feel like there was going to be an opportunity to move across and I wanted. I knew that if I wanted to move up, then I needed both front and back office experience. So sky was a kind of midpoint in that at the point that I joined Mike Hazell, who was deputy treasurer, Alison Dolan was treasurer. And the model effectively was that Mike did the dealing and myself and Mark Palmer, who's my colleague, the two of us did everything else, including the analysis and the prep, et cetera. So that gave me more exposure to doing the risk management side. Thinking about, in that case, we were working with a shared service center who were doing cash management and things, but just making sure that we were on top of things, etc. I stayed at sky for about a year. I think I had amazing experience. I got really heavily involved in a couple of M and A pieces. It's a really intense place to work that year. Honestly, in. In my kind of mental timeline feels like it's about four, because I met so many people, I had so many experiences and some of them funny, meeting Ross Kemp in the toilets, some of them more serious. But actually I've. I look back on that time incredibly fondly and Alison is now on our board of directors, so I. I sometimes see her audit committee meetings and things. So it's funny how things work out. It was around. But yeah. So I. And around that time my. My first child was born, Willow. And it quite quickly became clear two things. One was. So Mike moved on, was replaced by Simon Morley, who's amazing and was incredibly thoughtful and generous with his advice and guidance. But that. But Simon's experience was on the front office side. They decided they were going to bring in a designated treasury manager. Mark and I would become back office. Now, given that the number one reason that I moved to that role was to get front office experience that wasn't.

That blocked it. So it was time to remove.

And it was. It was a long commute and everything else, so it felt like it was the right time to. To try and find another role. And I had a couple of offers, but the most interesting was with Rent a killer in. In Crawley. And I remember like sweating on that decision because I had an offer come in and then I had this Rent A Kill thing, which looked like it was probably going to happen, but I was a bit earlier stage in that process and trying to decide do I go for the. The known or do I gamble? And I'm incredibly glad that I gambled. I joined as deputy treasurer to Nigel Roberts, who I think we had a really good working relationship. He's incredibly structured, very good at prioritizing and has a really clear idea of strategy and communication.

And can you explain for our internationalists, Rentakil? You and I know them, they're household names in the uk, but if you're in the us, you might not know them.

So. And actually, amusingly, Renticle are quite large in the us, but they go under a variety of different brand names. So Rentakil are effectively pest control and hygiene. So effectively you may see the initial brand sometimes then in washrooms. So if you go into a public restroom, often there are Rentokil hand dryers or soap dispensers, things. Some of that's been sold since I left, but a lot of that's there. But they're very large and in pest control. And so in the us they're Terminex and various other brands. So Western pest control and various other things. Yeah, so I was there five years. It's a pretty decentralized business, very innovative in terms of the way that people work together. There's a real culture of how do we make things better? So it's Sky. At the point that I was there, the Dave Brailsford sky cycling team was just being set up with the marginals gains theory. And you were starting to see some of that same type of philosophy come through at Rentokil, where one team would come up with an idea that would increase efficiency for route planning. For example, ultimately you've got people who are out in vans who go to a site, perform a service and then move on to the next place. So you want as little time traveling as possible. And actually one of the things that we found was that FaceTime is incredibly important. If you go around and do a great job, but no one knows who you are, you're unlikely to be re repositioned next time the, the RFP comes around or whatever. So actually, in order to make sure that you get those renewals, you need to make sure that you've got good relationships with people. But there's a real kind of culture of, okay, they've had this idea, I'm going to take that and how do I make it a little bit better? Which was really interesting. And I was lucky enough that my financial modeling skills are quite good. And being the keeper of the rating agency purse strings, I was often asked, can we afford such an M and A deal? And so we built an M and A model. I built the sort of equity M and A model and that was designed to say, if we do 10 deals of 20 million a year, how long does it take before we start seeing meaningful progress on the share price? How long does it take before the cash flows from those M and A deals start to pay for the next year's M and A deals? And how fast does the ramp up happen? So if you want to get to a point where you can do a billion dollar M and A deal, how do you, in say five years time, how do you get there and how fast does the ramp up happen to be? So that was really great experience. I got to work closely with the head of M and a, the CFO, CEO, etc. Got really great FaceTime. And again, I tried to make sure that I was in the right place at the right time. And so anything that came up I was very volunteering for. So I know that, for example, one of the last things I was doing was assessing the management LTIPs and monitoring how was the share price going versus the different targets and how likely were different payout levels. Likely to be so quite good fun. Not massively challenging, but also one of those things that it meant you got FaceTime every day.

I was going to say they want to talk to you, you're a man in demand, which is great.

Exactly, exactly. So it's one of these things. Just trying to make sure that I really got involved in things. And we did some really fun stuff. I think we did three or four financings on the bond side. We did a couple of bank deals, started to put in a new tms. So lots of kind of process changes, lots of financing, et cetera, lots of M and A. So lots of interesting treasury technical pieces. And I stayed there for about five years and I reached the stage where I felt I, I wanted to work in a slightly different environment somewhere that was a little bit more centralized. And also given the experience I'd had in dcm, I wanted to major on that a little bit. Yeah. And so I moved to Associated British Ports, which at that point was the. The third biggest issuer of US private placements in the UK. So they own, I think it's 21 ports around the UK. It includes Southampton, which is the biggest cruise terminal, Immingham and Hull up in the northeast. There's effectively four across. Yeah. Port Talbot all over the place. And interesting model. It's infrastructure, pretty highly levered, so six and three quarter times EBITDA. And the model basically is you add 15 million of EBITDA every year, that generates another 120 million of debt, capacity or whatever go out, raise the USPP, pay that to shareholders. Nice, relatively easy model. Unfortunately, I joined just at the point where that EBITDA came under a bit of pressure and that was because new taxes came in on coal imports. Coal imports had been between 20 and 25% of EBITDA. And effectively the first three months that I was there, I hadn't realized. But they were the honeymoon period because what had happened was everyone had got their coal imports in during that period. From an ABP perspective, it was slightly unfortunate because that marked what was really going on. So there'd actually been a colossal drop off in demand, that drop off in demand and then the kind of bringing forward of orders actually, broadly speaking, came to what normal looked like. And so you looked at the trend and it looked like everything was normal. And then suddenly in the April, the new tax came in and the numbers Just dropped away almost to nothing. And so suddenly you go back and you speak to customers and you go, what's been going on? And they say, look, we've been stockpiling this for the last three months and you' really. It hadn't been apparent, but then subsequently it became clear that the underlying use of coal had been declining for a little while. And in preparation for this. And so I, rather than being busy on debt issuance, as I thought I was going to be, I was busy on ratings and working capital, so trying to make sure that the rating was shored up. There was a little bit of buffer in the capital structure to make sure that the company didn't lock up. But it was one of those things that it was going to be a bit tighter than we would have wanted. The dividend was cut, but clearly that meant that the shareholders were somewhat anxious. And so I did a bit of work, particularly around receivables, to make sure that we were able to generate some leverage that could then be paid to shareholders. So it was interesting. And I was there just a year. Again, really interesting formative experience. I did quite a lot on the insurance side there as well, so got some really good experience there. And then this role at Pearson came up and it was a. We're pretty heavily decentralized. We want to build a centralized model. We're looking for someone with multinational experience. And, you know. Yeah, what was Pearson.

What was Pearson like when you joined as a company? What was the situation there? That was seven and a half years ago.

Yeah. So there is still a little bit of a legacy from. We'd had a previous chief exec, Marjorie Scardino, who had effectively delivered relentless performance, you know, 20% growth year on year, for goodness knows how long. And we got to a point where, you know, and so it meant that a lot of the businesses were very highly cash generative, very high margin. And when you're in that situation, sometimes there's only one way to go. And so her successor, John Fallon, had a rather harder job to try and follow that. And he was unfortunate enough to come in at a point where Amazon was really reshaping the world of retail, in particular the world of kind of book selling and student life and everything else. And we had some pretty ambitious growth plans and unfortunately, we had a number of profits warnings within the first few years that I was with Pearson, as we tried to continue to meet expectations in a market that was changing quite significantly, rapidly. And John had a pretty tough job because he had to try and take what had Been a largely print business with a variety of businesses, including Financial Times and the economists that were hugely loved within the, within the organization. And so when they were sold, understandably, there were a number of people who really felt strongly and let down that these businesses were leaving. And so I think at the point that I joined, there was a lot of optimism and a lot of hope and a lot of perseverance and ambition to try and make sure that things worked. But I think also a degree of anxiety that it's a difficult balancing act to transform and meet expectations and have a clear idea of where you're going and where you've been and a clear narrative. And I think that was a difficult piece to pull off. The first couple of years from my perspective, was quite a kind of tidy up exercise. I joined and we had over $2 billion of cash on balance sheet and over $3 billion of debt. And we just needed to respect that. Our net debt was probably going to be about a billion or maybe a bit less for the foreseeable future While we went through transformation. We had a couple of large, very ambitious efficiency programs that we run, ran. I got pretty heavily involved in the first one, which was how I took on insurance. Having looked after insurance elsewhere. I had a colleague who was looking after compliance who took this on and said, I don't really know where to start. So we agreed between the two of us that I take on that part of his cost saving task. And it was really interesting, quite challenging at times.

Made you a better.

You had absolutely unbelievable transformation effort. Just really interesting because you've got this transformation going on in the business. You've also got from a finance perspective. We were trying to transform all our processes, move to standard ERP processes, et cetera. And I was going into this thinking I need to make sure that I really think about how best to design processes and practices in a world where accountability, for example, for the balance sheet is going to be very diverse. You can't just go to somebody and say, tell me what's going to happen in the US because it's actually, it's five different teams in five different locations and they'll all know a little bit of the puzzle. And so trying to pull all that together and make sure that you've got a kind of coherent story and a manageable process was really interesting. And that's part of the reason why we put cash force in initially so that we could start to build more of the, the forecast ourselves and then go out to the different teams and get them to interrogate it rather than have hundreds of stakeholders who we were trying to get feedback from and try and collate it.

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Back on with the show. Many days you've got this passion for. From process, from cash forecasting, but all things. And I noticed and anyone that does connect to you, we'll put you linked in details later, but we're not quite there yet. But you love AI and automation and processes and some. We were talking just before the show. I recently did one, a session for the Manufacturers alliance association in America. Some of them were talking about how they were doing the scraping and I did a presentation and they were loving it. And you and I talked about there's some people that. Other people that run for the hills, but I think it's a lack of understanding. Sometimes treasuries are late adopt with you. How come you're so passionate about it? Where does that come from? Burst of all, if you like.

So I, I think it's one of these things. I think the first thing is I'm massively practical. So I, I don't have a philosophical love of AI makes sense. It's a. I love it because from a selfish perspective, it's a massive help. It's when I use things and I, I think what's transformed is the ability to be able to do things yourself. So with things like rpa, you've had the opportunity to automate bits of processes. Again, if you automate bits in your tms, you can make strides forward. But generally speaking, you'll need some kind of consultant in whether it's to build the automation in the tms, whether it's to build the rpa. And getting hold of capital to bring people in can be difficult. And one of the key challenges is that treasury is so varied that you've got 50 processes or something, not five, and so saying, okay, I'm going to spend my budget this year in order to try and automate this process. And then you're brilliant. I've automated one of my 50 processes. The other 49 are still crap. One is just absolutely brilliant. It doesn't really make sense and say you need to have the tools to be able to go after a variety of different bits. I think to date, what's happened is that the tmss have been pretty good at automating processes, where there's a high degree of standardization. Broadly speaking, we all execute FX deals in much the same way now. Interest rates, swaps, there's a kind of. There's a market convention, they've all got to be registered with a repository. But there's a very standard process. Once you get onto things like P and L reporting or to some extent, hedge accounting, I know you can do it in the tms, but again, it's quite heavily customized. Often, you know, you get into territory where it's quite a high degree of customization for each individual firm. That's not very easy to do in the current business model because A, there probably aren't enough consultants out there for everybody to constantly have someone building things, and B, you never have enough budget. So where things are really starting to unlock is by combining different tools, by using a large language model with Python or a large language model with Power Automate, or in a variety of different contexts, you can really unlock a lot of value. And it's happening at pace, which means that you can now start to go at things that mean that you're able to get to a position of ease. And I think the position of the treasurer hasn't necessarily been one of ease over the last few years. Most of us still struggle to get full visibility of cash balances, let alone build the coherent forecast that covers everywhere. The reality is that there's a lot of satisficing decisions that we have to make. Well, focus on the key markets because that's what we've got Time for we can't focus on everything all at once. And that means that inevitably you've got some blind spots that you're not able to keep an eye on. And the nice thing about some of this tech is that you're able to really make a difference. So you use the web scraping example. We've now got all our, all our banks websites linked to a web scraping tool. So we now pick up whenever their credit ratings change. That automatically sends a message through to us to say, by the way, this has happened. So previously we had a model where we check once a month, we check what the movements were and effectively we'd look at what was it before, what is it now? Okay, it's moved. Do we do anything with it that's not necessarily very timely if you have a Silicon Valley bank type problem. And so again, you can set things up to monitor and those other things. And so I find that really interesting.

James, if you're. And I was. I've been scribbling notes here as well. And this is all very well for you because you love these processes and you've got a gift for it as well. But if you are a treasurer, and again, some of them were this, this discussion of the day, who's nervous about that? They feel they might be adding to their already overworked stretch schedule. How would you ease their thoughts? How would you calm them?

I think I would always start with something small. I think the things that are talked about in the market are, generally speaking, not necessarily very helpful to the average treasurer. Yes, something like cash forecasting is. I describe it as like the Everest of tasks. Because the reality is that you're looking for exceptions. When you're looking at your cash forecast, you're not really thinking about is my balance going to be 3% higher or 3% lower? What you're actually looking for is the, what's the massive payment that's going out that you weren't expecting? Or like, where's the unexpected receipt? So you're looking for outliers. So that's a really hard use case. And just as in the same way you wouldn't start running by going, tell you what, we'll go and do a marathon. You'd always start by. Start with something small. And so like relatively easy things to do are just looking at, for example, documentation or looking at can you build a quick report that sends information to you about three different things or whatever. It's quite easy to pull data from Excel files, other things. So I did an example quite recently, for example where I've got a Python built Gantt chart. And so I have a, I have an Excel spreadsheet that's got the 10 tasks that need to happen, the start and the end date. And I just update the Excel spreadsheet that gives me an automated dashboard that looks quite sexy. The reality is it took me 25 minutes to build the script. It's relatively easy and again, to be honest, you can do that with a large language model. Just say, give me the Python script to build the Gantt chart out of this Excel, upload the Excel and it, it will do it for you. So there's some really simple stuff. I think you have to be a little bit careful about data privacy. So I always work in terms of kind of general themes. If I'm going to share some data, then I might share column headings. I won't share what's in the actual data underneath. Fair enough, that's good. That then means that, you know, system is able to work out what does it look like. And you can always say it's got these headings and there's 500 lines or whatever and it will then generate a script. You can then use that for whatever you're looking for. What I find is really useful is that this technology is really good for augmenting data. So often one of the things I find is difficult is that you'll have one data set that has most of the information that you need. So for example, if I've got my bank balance, this, and then I've got another data set over here that's got my credit ratings per bank and then I've got another data set over here, perhaps that's got my foreign exchange positions. You can use the technology really quickly to crunch all of that together. It doesn't really require any technical skill. Again, it's one of those things you GPT or use Claude, AI or Gemini or any of those tools. Explain that. This is what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to bring this column in related to this particular item that's in the first thing by bank account. I want to sort for what's the credit rating of the relevant bank and it will do that for you. And that's quite a, that can be quite a fiddly thing to do when you've got different data sets.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Particularly we're getting to a point where you can feed all of those things together. And so one of the things that I've been looking quite hard at is how we build, how we provide Tools that allow you to connect all of these different pieces.

You and I talked about this as well, that treasurers have a natural, correct concern, if you like, about data privacy. You touched on it there. But what you're talking about, as you say, is publicly available models, not giving them private information, but it's giving them public information. And as you say, it's putting together the pipework, it's doing the plumbing for you. It's so much quicker.

The challenge that we have is that generally speaking, we're kept on the outside because of these data privacy concerns. And fundamentally we're in a situation where, generally speaking, the tool that we have is a Treasury management system and if there isn't something built for that, then we're typically looking at Excel or Outlook, neither of which are particularly designed for project management, like large scale data analysis, data reporting, all of those other things. You've now got these amazing tools out there in, in the wild. And my. The reason why I'm passionate about sharing this is that I think that there are great opportunities. I can't explore them all personally, my team can't explore them all personally. So I'm really keen that other treasurers get out there and try stuff and go, hey, hey, I tried this and I've got this great idea. And I think that as a Treasury community, we can really make big strike strides forward because actually we're in a situation where we're not reliant on. Oh, thank you very much, sir. It's on the implementation list. We'll develop something over the next 12 months or whatever. This is something where we can do something now. And in my 15 years in treasury, that's a pretty rare experience. You look, you need. The barriers to entry on most technology are quite high. Everyone's got a phone in their pocket right now. I can go on to Hume AI and I can have a conversation with it and it will inter. It understands through facial gestures and tone of voice, et cetera, how I'm feeling and give me advice on things that I could do to relax or whatever it happens to be. I can go on presentation AI and it will produce a PowerPoint presentation for me if I give it a prompt. Yeah, there's all these amazing tools out there particularly. It's really interesting. Even in the treasury space, there are some mega geeks out there who created some weird, wonderful things. There's a cash management GPT which is actually quite good. I tested it out thinking, oh, this, this isn't going to be able to answer the difficult stuff. So I Was like, what are the rules and regulations for opening an account in Nepal? And was pleasantly surprised that it actually got most of those. Wow. So actually there are all these things out there that can act as research help apart from anything else. And so I use things like Claude a lot just for. I've got a paper to write. Here are my 10 ideas. Again, I won't include anything sensitive, but I'll say this is about.

Give us some guidelines.

Yeah.

And. And we. Sorry. We had Dan Ferguson on the show a while ago and he talked about being insurance for many years and using their own internal chat GPT to get an answer for his CFO for something that would have taken him hours. Now it's seconds. We had Dana scraping our FX exposures.

It.

It's basically enabling you guys and it enables me. I had three original articles today that I needed to update and bring up and it wasn't AI. People have said, oh, AI generated. No, it wasn't. It was generated by me. But I need. It needed a freshen up, it needed a reflection. I said, look, can you look at this? What have I missed? And actually there was a 10.1 which I never liked. I said, condense that to 5 and make it more interesting or tell me where I should focus my efforts. Well, out it came a really good five point summary.

That's what I want. And the reality is that AI is a huge area. It's a little bit like describing athletics or something like that or sport. It covers everything from competitive marbles up to ultramarathons. And there's a kind of what you've got is you've got a situation where large language models have made a lot of these different types of technologies more accessible for people haven't necessarily changed the underlying technology. If you listen to data scientists, they're still going underlying. It's still an ARIMA model or the correlation covariance is still being calculated or whatever it happens to be. But it means that you and I can interact in a way that we don't have to be coding experts.

Yes.

And that's the key change is democratize this stuff. Rather than learning a language for three years being like, I now know Python inside out, you can have a pretty good go day one. And I think what's really interesting is that there's tremendous potential in these things that we just haven't as treasurers had access to because of the fact that A tools haven't been built for us and B, they've been in other disciplines. And so you. The barrier to Entry in terms of the amount that you have to learn in order to use the technology, et cetera has been too high, can come.

Down as you say. And I see the evolution latest chatgpt4.0, you know, come out and now it actually finally, even though my developer had built it so it tried to remember my tone of voice, it kept on saying really cute phrases like, no, this is not me. Look back at this. But now, because it's iterating based on my previous, we're going to feed in more of that it sounds and it's giving me more. It's not writing it for me, it's helping me get faster and produce work quicker as well. So we were trying to be respectful of your time but also people's time as well. So we're going to put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. I think there's some great takeaways for people. What are the takeaways you'd like? You've heard the podcast a few times, so it's guys starting their careers or people a bit further through their quiz. What are the takeaways you'd give them?

James from today's show I think three things probably. I think in terms of people starting out, try stuff, be adventurous. I think one of the great things about people coming into treasury is they've got the opportunity to bring different perspectives and different ideas and that's really fresh. So ask questions, make life difficult. Ask why are we doing this? Because that's how we get better. I think the second piece is if you are trying to progress in your career and trying to take steps forward, don't be afraid to try something different. If what you're, if what you're trying isn't working, it's almost certainly not you. But sometimes it's the situation that you're in. So think about how do I take a side step, sideways step, try something different, try a different tactic in order to get to where you want to get to. And then I think the third thing is in terms of makes somebody different and what makes you exceptional, that gets you to the top. It's an openness to working with others, trying new things and really being thoughtful about. It's really important to make sure that you get the basics. You need to be a technical expert, you need to be a really strong communicator, you need to be thoughtful, you need to be someone who people want to work with and he open to ideas, give people a chance and see where things get to.

So as you say, be adventurous. There you go. And don't be afraid to get out of your comfort zone. Brilliant. And, yeah, openness. And keep going. So amazing, sir, thank you very much. We'll put your details in the show notes. So it'll expand your LinkedIn network overnight, who knows? Lovely to have a session with you. Thank you very much, sir.

Thank you, Mike.

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 deliver 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 like. 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. 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.

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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@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.

Merry, thanks.