How Did You Get Started in your Treasury Career?

It was a total accident. I was interning in the US in a large corporate actually in the marketing department programming intranets. And I met the treasurer of that company for the US at a party and I was telling him what I'm doing as an intern and then they said oh, I have a CFO conference coming up for all the American CFOs of the company. I want to have an intranet as well. This was back in 99, so where everything started and then I had the chance to interview the whole Treasury Department, every function, what it is doing and I thought that sounds interesting. So I asked him if I could come back and write my thesis on the treasury topic. And this was basically an analysis on cash pooling possibilities in south america back in 99, 2000 and well I wrote that paper, it's still valid good news. And I got hired then straight away in a Treasury job in Germany.

So you started as a Treasury analyst and then work your way up through the times or.

Exactly. I was starting in actually an in house treasury as an in house treasury consultant being like a role like an internal sales and advisory people guy dealing with foreign exchange, internal deposits, internal financing. So I learned tertiary from scratch straight away out of university without having at.

The plan straight into it, yeah.

Not even having a finance stream in my majors.

Yeah.

So that's quite funny some might say you fall into these things. I didn't really know what I wanted to do in school, college, university, all that kind of stuff. Just basically ended up working in a bank, learned back office processes, sat with some of the traders, you know for a week, bit of a second type thing and just loved it from there. Like the fact that it's fast paced stuff has to get done sort of during the day. Can't wait. I like the energy that it brings and yeah, just never looked back since.

And that was banking Treasury. You then made the move to corporate.

Yeah, big change. So I was in Citi for about 12, 13 years having a look around the banking environment wasn't kind of great at the time. So I thought I'd dealt with a lot of corporates so I'd seen how kind of they work treasury on the other side it was kind of really interesting. And the opportunity came up at Gazprom and thought I could bring some of the banking disciplines to treasury within the corporate treasury and I think it's kind of worked out well from there.

Well, I first came into treasury not the traditional route, it wasn't through the accounting route, it was because I was in banking and having gone into banking, the area that drew me was the dealing room. So I then decided that's where I was going to be and went into back office in order to then eventually get into the dealing, because that was a route into the dealing room. Once in the dealing room, I then sort of worked my way up the ladder from dealer, senior dealer, to eventually treasurer and from there moved to the corporate world as a corporate treasurer.

And your corporate treasurer now?

I'm Director of Treasury.

Right.

Or the proper title is Director of Plan Treasury Services. And I'm working for Plan International, which is a 75 year old NGO.

Wow.

Billion dollar corporation.

A number of members of the team. Big team.

There's four of us in the team.

Right.

Very international.

Yeah. We were three. We were four originally. Then we got a TMS at a time when the office was looking for cuts. So we lost a person around about that time. It was natural wastage. He decided to join the Metropolitan Police. And I can see the. I can see the connection. Not at all. But then this year or last year, I actually managed to argue that to be strategic, which was the aim, to actually take us off sort of spreadsheet work and quadruple entry into everything, to actually save us time by having a TMS and being more strategic. I won the argument last year and managed to get something else in.

So how did I first get into finance? That was actually quite funny because during my university days I had a holiday job working in a factory that was making septic tanks out of glass fiber. And I very quickly got fed up of pulling the glass fiber splinters out of my hand every evening. So I went to hand him my notice and they said, why don't you go and work in the accounts department? That's how I got into finance. So I actually found it very interesting.

And then the move into treasury itself.

The move into treasury came after I then became an accountant when I left university and did various things. And then one day somebody said, would you like to go and work in our European Treasury Centre in Dublin? And that's how I got into treasury and I never looked back.

And over those years you've obviously seen treasury change tremendously. What was it like when you first started within Treasury?

It's changed, but it hasn't because the basic things are the same. For me, treasury is very simple. It's about, do you have enough money to pay the bills? No. Different to your personal stuff. Obviously the numbers are a bit bigger and it's a bit more complicated and that's never going to change. I have seen huge changes in that. When I moved into the treasury center in Dublin, we were managing all the different European currencies, the deutsche mark, the French franc, and doing cross border loans in all of these and hedging them.

I started in Treasury 12 years ago. Prior to that I was in the banking session. So I spent eight years in the banking session, explored different variations like venture capital, leasing, financing. And I decided that corporate treasury seems to be much more fun, much more interesting and much more creative and doing things that matter to companies. So yeah.

And how did you discover Treasury? Did you just.

Well, I had an opportunity. There was an old colleague in a company, she was an M and a director and there was an opening and I was lucky at that time because I was looking for a job and she said, are you interested? Like there's looking for someone in the assistant, as an assistant treasurer. And I said okay, let's try. So I was very lucky because at the time I had a very good grip treasurer. She was my mentor and she inspired me a lot really.

So I first got into treasury through my interest in financial markets and I was working at the time with Nestle, the food company in the pensions investment team. And that triggered my interest in financial markets. And once that road came to an end, I was looking to move into another role within the company that would give me the opportunity to work in a financial environment where, I mean at the interface between the company and financial markets. So that's what first got me into a Treasury role.

And they, and you'd heard about treasury internally and they said, oh, come into Treasury.

That's right, that's right. I heard about treasury internally and I spent the day up in their Treasury Department just to get a feel for what's happening and what treasury does. And I thought that was quite interesting and interesting. And that's when I decided to move into Treasury a few months later.

Well, it was actually by accident. I ended up in a Treasury Department almost 11 years ago. I started in a Danish based company in the Treasury Department as Treasury Manager. The reason for picking treasury was because I found the job description exciting and challenging compared to being a financial analyst and controller, which was what I did before it sounded more challenging, if you can use that word. And it was, you can say another way of looking at finance, which is still close to my heart.

We wanted to get into corporate finance and funding, which is what I did. Moved into sort of mergers and acquisitions, you know, setting up joint ventures, then started looking at debt financing, project financing, then moved more into other debt products, capital markets, bank loans, etc. And then assumed responsibility for treasury operations. So I kind of got into treasury by accident, but obviously been a treasurer for a long time now and really enjoy it.