How Global Treasury Teams Evolve: Lessons from Intel and Twilio

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. Let's get on with the show. In this week's show, I'm joined by Chris Blow, senior Director of treasury at Twilio. Twilio is a software company that strengthens businesses by unifying their data to build insightful paths to customers so they're smarter with every interaction and able to outmaneuver their competition. Across 180 countries, millions of developers and hundreds of thousands of businesses use Twilio to create magical experiences for their customers. Chris will explain who Twilio are. We going to go right back to the beginning. Chris is a regular listener to the show when he's out walking the dog. Chris, if you would take us back to the beginning, how you first started in finance, the treasury, obviously, I've known you for many years, so. Over to you, sir.

Hey, Mike, great to be here. Thanks for having me. And as you say, avid listener and walking the dog. It all goes back to being in college or university. I was studying mathematics at the time at University of Portsmouth and I got on the wind that in the business school there was this year in industry opportunity, right? So you do your first two years, you disappear for a year and then you come back. But it wasn't something that was being offered, you know, in the. The school of Mathematics. So I started applying, ended up opportunity, interview with intel, got offered the chance to go there. The roles were on the side at the time. It was like a blanket, hey, you're applying for an internship in finance, right? I ended up getting put in accounting, which was. It was a great experience, good kind of exposure to the real world. The company was fantastic in terms of the culture, the people, the community. Like they had a number of graduates. The accounting team was also really good team, very diverse. It was mere focus, but there was guys on the team from Israel, Egypt, Russia, and so it was a really interesting place to be. But I didn't like the accounting piece.

Essentially, and for me, we touched on it, that you're joining intel who are obviously computer chips and everything else, or what was intel at the time? This is back in 2009. So what were the. What was the company like then?

It was a market leader, right? It was. This was just after the iPhone. So I think at the time, like, intel wasn't taking abuse for missing the smartphone. It's been a bit more of an interesting story since then for me. I actually knew intel very well as a kid. My dad was a physics teacher and we used to spend a lot of time kind of playing around making our own PCs. So I was actually pretty well versed. So like when I got that opportunity, like, oh, this is cool, I actually understand this.

I know the company.

Yeah, it was in Swindon, which is a bit of a move for me at the time, but actually it turns out, great city for grads, nice old town, cheap cost of living. The company itself, time was, I would say, a market leader and not in the where we are today with disruptors of things like Nvidia and tsmc. Like, it was a very different environment at the time in kind of the late 2000s at Intel.

And that was your internship, if you like. So you'd, you would suddenly used to getting up proper time and then you were thrown back to university.

So I've never been very academic. My general feeling is that I think exams are pretty poor judgment on people's skill sets. But I was always worried about my final year. But then when I went back, frankly, it was walking the park. It went from doing 40, 45 hour weeks to then being asked to do 50% of that plus a couple of pieces of coursework. And so that was actually almost like a holiday in the end. I think when we look back and you talk to people with my final year at university was that was the real year that I got work done, whereas for me it felt like a bit of a year off, which is nice and it's always easy in hindsight. Right. You've probably seen this yourself. Like you always think you had it hard at the time and then you get into the working world, then you go into working well with young kids and all of a sudden you're thinking, wow, I had so much time in the past compared to what I have today. No, that was, I think it was a. For me in my career. Although early on I think it was a good level setter.

Right, so then talk about, so you, you rejoined Intel. How did you then get into treasury and things?

Yeah, just pot luck. As I said, I wasn't sold in the accounting piece, was sold on Intel. There was probably, I'm trying to think what the numbers were now. There was 100 in the kind of internship program and maybe 10, 15% of those came back in various roles. So finance or sales or accounting, whatever it was. And so there was a number of finance roles more on the revenue finance channel. Finance Accounting, tax and then this kind of treasury black box. And I knew a little bit because my housemate during my internship year, he did his internship in the treasury team. So I knew a little bit about it. But there was this opportunity there at the time they'd also decided they weren't going to take on an intern the following year in Treasury. They were basically creating a graduate role in Treasury. I think just because the, because some of the knowledge was quite niche. That kind of 12 month turnover was disruptive in a way. Consider it was a relatively small team in the region. So anyway, so there was a, this was this role and I said, yeah, sure, let's give that one a try. I still have a company I loved and I, I was lucky. Where a lot of the graduates that came back were my friends and people I spent a lot of time with. Yeah. And then it balloons from there. But I'd always been interested in markets and what's going on in the world, that side of things. So actually the kind of numbers background combined with the more kind of focus on what's happening in the world and linking the two together in hindsight was interesting. And where we spent the last 13, 14 kind of years of my career.

Yeah. And then. So talk us through what treasury was like at that stage, how it was structured to give everyone listening. You were then at intel for 10 years or so from then, but you were all the way through the uk, then the Netherlands, then the us. So just walk us through those and what treasury was and, and everything else for the listeners, as if you're a listener, if you like.

Sure. So I think at the time when I joined treasury was still very much more regional. So we had kind of US team covering America as a team in the UK covering emea. And then we had a team in Asia primarily in what was at the time Singapore, but then became China and India covering Asia. And what transitioned over time is rather than having regional centers, we ended up having kind of global functions rather than in the region doing its cash management investments. You'd have a global lead that would then run a matrix structure across the various regions. So I started out doing the kind of more treasury operations, cash management, I guess you call it middle office type function in the EMEA region which eventually as I said, we got more functional broken. So you have someone who is leading like global FX or interest rate hedging. Some are leading cash and investments globally. Treasury operations got centralized in centers of excellence in India and Colombia. Debt capital markets was primarily run out the US because it was Headquarters. So that's what really changed. But the scale also was, if I look at it today versus me at Twitter, the scale was just in a different world. Right. We also had credit and collections fell on the treasury as well as insurance and a few other pieces. A few other pieces. So we were probably.

How many people are in treasury in total? How many?

Yeah. 150, 200, I would say probably that 50 was credit and collection. So maybe if you carve that piece out and then.

So you started a Treasury analyst, what was that like for you? And you discovered treasury, what was it like again for the listeners with some learnings from that time?

I made a lot of mistakes. That's the good and bad part of treasury. Right. Is when you do something that's visible on the good side and the bad side. I was very lucky at the time. My first boss was from the US but was on assignment in the uk and he was a very forgiving guy, very patient guy. And I think intel was like a very safe space. I would say you were given opportunities. If you made mistakes, you were allowed to learn from those mistakes. It's different between making mistakes and making the same mistake. And so at the same time, because of we're a global treasury, we've moved people around. So we had a guy come over from India, we'd had a couple of people come in from the us, we pulled someone in from Russia. So actually that team was almost like a hot pot of kind of global experience within Treasury. And actually one of the things I really miss about intel is the ability to just the knowledge you had around you. So for me at the time, in my early 20s, you could just. There were no stupid questions and there was always some expert that would knew it in great detail, which was something which was fantastic at the time and.

Talk through then the development. I said, you were there for 10 years, so walk us through the progression. And then also the international moves.

Yeah, progression, super high level, went from middle office, kind of cash operations, things like working on in house bank and kind of corporate restructurings especially some of that was around Russia at the time with the first kind of annex of Crimea and a lot more on the system side. So we'd had an in house built tms, we went to Quantum or Sun God. So there was that piece and then a lot of kind of connectivity around Connecticut up to speed with SAP and integrating some of the legacy stuff and then some work around compliance and use of bots. So that was the kind of middle of his cps. But it's still very operational. And then in between that and the next role, which is more in the FX kind of hedging, risk management space, we had this. We'd had this initiative at intel where we were trying to consolidate our global cash pool. At the time, there was three or four in the world. And it was also at the time when those cash flows tend to sit in regions that were becoming politically unfavorable. Cayman Islands, this kind of thing. Right. And there was an initiative where we were going to consolidate our international cash into a region or into a country. And I was working on that with a colleague and it came down to either the Netherlands or Switzerland. And I didn't know at the time I was going to end up being shifted to where we ever ended up. So if I'd known that, maybe being an avid steer, I might have said Switzerland. But, yeah, so that kind of came. Came along. We. When we put the cash pool in the Netherlands, we had. There was conversations at the time around substance. Do you have the people who are investing the cash in the country? Do you have auxiliary functions, accounting, tax, whatever there? So that's essentially what happened. We added tax and accounting people. We needed treasury people to go. Everybody else said no, and they're like, okay, we better ask Chris. Like scraping the barrel. But at the time, for me, it was easy because I. I didn't have a mortgage, I didn't have kids. And the guys who were being asked, they did have young kids, they did have a mortgage. So there was more complexity. Frankly, it was a very short move. It was when I was trying to meet with banks and they were living kind of Swindon way. It's actually quicker for me to get from Amsterdam into Kerry Wharf than it is to get from Swindon. It wasn't too big a shift. And so that was the Netherlands piece. And the other kind of nice change on the Netherlands piece is we were hiring people in, but we were hiring people in from within the business, but from other parts of the business, from the credit team, from broader finance role. So they knew intel, but they didn't necessarily know Treasury.

Yeah.

So it's like a great opportunity for me to help guide those guys and integrate those guys into treasury and understand a little bit more what does it mean to form a team and that dynamic. At the time, my boss is actually based in Israel, so we had some legacy UK people who hadn't shifted to the Netherlands. We had a group in the Netherlands and we had a group in Israel. And so it was an interesting dynamic and it came with its own Set of challenges. And at the same time, I was then transitioning away from the kind of middle office of war front office role on the FX side, which again was a relatively easy transition. Like on the cash management side, I did a lot in the spot FX space. I understood a lot of the kind of entity structures and the flows. And it was a similar story on FX as it was on the broader business about consolidating, bringing into a centralized program, not having differences in the region, doing kind of less, but doing it better. So rather than hedging, I think at one point we're like 15 currencies, I think we end up close to five or six. And really looking at that and saying, okay, what's driving the risk and how do we shrink that program down and make it more efficient without putting forward risk for the business? Which was a big chunk of kind of what we did in the Netherlands, plus some compliance stuff like at the.

Time, and you mentioned they're sort of making moves. I know that when I had Chan from PayPal on the show earlier this year and we talked about him moving from the west coast of the US to Singapore, and then he came back again and I'd asked him, making international moves because you followed it from Swindon to the Netherlands and then to the US So how did that come about?

Yeah, so I think the Netherlands was always going to be somewhat of a dead end. And I knew that going in the sense that if you could have, probably could have stayed there forever. Although now with what's happening in German restructuring, it would have been. It would have been challenging, but it was certainly like it was creating a ceiling. And my ambition has always been to get to the US because I wanted to be at the headquarters because as much as we say people in the regions do drive strategic change and influence what's happening, it's a lot easier to do that at the headquarters. Right. Whether that's US headquarters or otherwise, there's always the plan going in. The challenge was like, could I leverage the Netherlands to get enough advocates? And we talk about a lot of this with kind of people coming up through Twilio and saying how important it is to have advocates. Right. There's going to be situations when people go into the room and talk about you and it can't just be your boss, right? It needs to be. It needs to be their peers. It needs to be their, their managers that understand have a relationship with you. And I was very lucky at intel because through kind of projects and through kind of the consolidation or the globalization of the functions, I spent a lot of time with those people and also I had bosses that were very good at giving me recognition and giving me visibility and giving me opportunity. And I that that luck slash intention is somewhat carried through the Twilio sense because if I look at today, I happened to work through the now CFO for 12, 18 months before she came. CFO, right. So sometimes you get lucky. I also, until a couple of the bosses I had also transverse levels relatively quickly. Yeah, that's helpful.

You make that luck in some ways as well. So you then became senior treasury manager out of California and then headed back or what happened after that period of time.

So California was fantastic at intel just because I was still doing when I first transitioned across the hedging role, essentially the same role I was doing in the Netherlands, but now just from the U.S. right. And so we had a kind of a matrix structure. So the team had India, China, Europe and then in the US but it was became very much more a job about educating the business unit. CFO's why we're hedging, what we were trying to do, why it mattered, what it meant for their part of the business. And originally I thought, you know, that's an on time exercise. But the thing is we had five or six business units would roll over every 18 months to 24 months. So basically every quarter you were re educating somebody. Right. And at the same time we were spending a little bit more time. We had a hedge committee that we presented to CFO and I'd done that in the past as coverage like over the phone, but now you're doing it person. So I think it was great in terms of getting exposure and learning how to talk to senior folks. Right. What you should say, what you shouldn't say. But I think that kind of comes back to what I said, like intel being a very safe space, like you're allowed to make mistakes. The feedback was very constructive and very timely. So that was the biggest part of being with intel in California was frankly was the exposure and the kind of one off projects. Because if we were doing some kind of M and A deal or some kind of strategic investment like that information wouldn't typically flow out to the regions. So there was a lot more kind of project type stuff going on and just the ability to essentially we had most of the kind of functional leads there as well as credit collections, retirement investments, insurance. So there was opportunity to talk to these guys, get involved in projects like leverage the kind of knowledge you had on the more core treasury function and then work with those guys on other initiatives, which was super interesting. And then in terms of what happened there, it's more of a personal dad advocate that said, yeah, my wife had been great the whole way through this. Like when we moved to the Netherlands and when we moved to the us like when we were first talking about going to the Netherlands, she joked, not even a joke. I guess she was deadly serious that we weren't going abroad. And there was this classic inflection point where one of her friends said you'd never do it. And that was the end of it. Like it was done deal as far as I was concerned. Once we got that moved to the Netherlands, the first thing that she said when we landed was, hey, we're not going to the US which is how things ended up. Yeah. But a lot more difficult to integrate in the US than in the Netherlands. It sounds weird. Like we always think of like the UK maybe is a special relationship with the US or like 51st state or whatever you want to call it. The culture is very different, like even California, just in terms of the ease of getting around the. Just the general environment. Like it's actually feels a lot more homely or familiar in the Netherlands than it does in the United States. I think we just had harder, more challenging degree in the United States. And then my oldest son, who's four now, who. But he was born, so there was a bunch of surgeries and he's doing great now. But there was a lot of stress at the time and part of that dynamic was I think we need more help and that's very hard. Like at the time it was covered as well. So yeah, we got to this point where it was not an automaton, but hey, I'd like to go home. And then for me, selfishly, I was trying to figure out, can I get the best of both worlds, right? Can I stay in the kind of west coast tech bubble, so to speak, but can I get my family where they want to be in the uk? And I was lucky in the sense that the guy who was running treasury or he was actually running investor relations and treasury was a one man band at the time I knew him, he was a guy, ex Intel. I worked for a number of years and he actually lived close by, ended up being always a close friend. And so we joke about it, right? Oh, wouldn't it be funny if this kind of worked out and then it did. And what was interesting in that dynamic for me is when I joined Twitter, it felt very familiar because a lot of the process or these Initial processes were based on my previous colleagues experiences at Intel. Also when he was talking about putting new policies in places at Twilio like we would chat about it.

Explain for the audience if you would. So you made the move to join Twitter. Who are they? I gave a little bit of the header of the show.

Yeah. So as you say, there's a lot of spill here, but we're a customer engagement platform and the way to think about that really is we're trying to help business bring together data, communications and with some kind of layer of intelligence to help them interact and understand their customers. And so what does that mean? What's an example of that? If you think of say Uber for example, where like you may interact with Uber like for an app, but there's some facilitation that happens in the background in terms if you try to call the driver through the app, it then connects to their cell phone. Right. So some of the plumbing, there's examples in terms of how we might manage with dominoes, in terms of how you interact with them through the app, how you might interact with them through the kind of help center, how you might also get coupons or kind of customer feedback from them. So it's very much every aspect of communications and they're now trying to add the data layer and an AI. And I think where Twilio is really well positioned is the misconception on AI is the bit that matters is the models. And although they're very important, the bit that matters is the data. And frankly like who owns the data or who has access to the data. And so if you look at companies like Google, Amazon that do a great job of basically taking your data and then using that data to provide you personalized experience, Twilio essentially wants to do that for everybody. And I think this kind of AI wave is just the kind of catalyst that Twilio needs to supernect a market at scale. I think we've been making some good progress there. Tough couple of years in the tech industry. Lots of restructuring, people getting a little bit ahead of their skis in the kind of COVID boom. But I think right size and more focused on the kind of near term future.

Now tell us about treasury there sort of thing. So how is treasury structured? Again obviously it's to try and give some value for the audience about the dos and don'ts of treasury if you like.

Yeah, much more simple in terms of structure. As I said it used to be so Twitter IPO in 16 basically from 16 through to beginning when treasury was like 50% of one person.

Yeah.

And the other 50% was IR and there was a lot going on. It was much more a case of let's keep the business running. Yeah. We'd had various equity offerings, we'd had a debt offering, we had a convert. And so when I joined they had just hired a manager and so there was two of us. And then at the beginning of 22 we had a third person. And then at the beginning of 24 we added a fourth person. But we've been very intentional, Right. I think when we hired in 20, it was an internal hire. I was like the classic worst case scenario, right? You walk into a new organization, you're like, okay, let's get a valet of the land. And then within a week I was like, I'd like some more headcount. At which the answer was no. But if you can find somebody internally that's interested in the rolling, go ahead. First, I just saw this great girl. Her name's Margaret or Mag. She sits in Ireland, background in accounting, accounts payable, just really process driven, really hardworking, but also knew everybody. She'd been at the company now for six, seven years. She worked with all the people internationally. So she instantly gave us that connection to those stakeholders that we didn't have in the past. And she's been great ever since. She continues to drive basically treasury operations for the company. She's working on things like dashboarding, reporting, some really cool stuff. And then Jen, who had been hired just before I joined, who's based out on the east coast, she's been the one man banned treasury shop. In her previous role she was accounting and identified that basically there was this whole treasury function that she care about. And so she was super in depth on payments. She also worked with a lot of currencies on the FX risk management side and generally really great in a crisis. Right. And so they're actually not even great in a crisis. She's the kind of person that sees it coming a month, a couple of months before anybody else.

Hello, it's Mike here from the treasury recruitment company. You've just been hearing my voice here talking to another amazing guest, but I just thought I'd jump in. I hope we're linked on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com forward/mr. Treasury, Mr. Treasury to you and I. That means that then I can share our latest video blogs. I do them each and every week where I talk about how to get your next pay rise, how to improve your career, how to find your next role if you're looking to recruit. I'm here to help. Connect to me on LinkedIn. I'll be looking forward to it. Just say Mike, heard your message on the podcast, thought we connect. Let's get on with the show. You've heard the podcast that I asked people about where they see the challenges for treasury and things like that. You're the Treasury Director there. What are you using as the. The key challenges for treasury at the moment?

I think the broader challenge is. Is resource.

Right.

I think it's the same for all functions. Right. It's not just a Treasury problem, it's a general kind of gna. Right. Do more with less. And so it's really, I think, a technology play. Right. And also where do you want your expertise to be? So classic example would say, like at intel we invested all around cash. Right. We had a team of five or six globally doing that. Whereas at Twilio we use certainly manage accounts or asset managers. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it's definitely different in terms of resourcing, right?

Yeah.

Similarly, like leveraging tools on your. On the FX side, like leveraging certain TMS partners, like when I go and talk to peers and especially when I through kind of various benchmarking groups and things, there's a stark difference, I think, between especially maybe like the tech space or the younger, the newer tech space versus some of the more legacy tech. So let's say this just Siemens, IBM, intel, hp, Dell, you want to call them, in the use of technology and resourcing. So that was an eye opener for me because we essentially do almost everything we were doing at intel, we do at Twilio, but the scale is slightly different, but it's still a relatively. It's a relatively heavy lift. But again, it's pros and cons. Right. Because you also got a lot more visibility now, right. In company. In the previous role, intel, maybe once a quarter I'd be presenting to the CFO in the role at Twilio. Presenting reggae to the cfo, talking to the board relatively regularly. Does C Suite know who you are? So your ability to drive change is just amplified because of your access, essentially. Yeah.

And where do you see treasury going next? What the new things. Again, you've heard this. What other areas do you think the treasury needs to deal with?

Yeah, the phrase, it gets thrown around a lot is this strategic treasurer.

Right.

Which I, I agree, but I do think there's almost like a fundamental right to be earned. And I was talking about this just yesterday, actually. Yeah, It's Really, I think you obviously got to have your house in order and you've got to have job one like just down, right. It's. Nobody comes to treasury in those instances unless that goes wrong. I think we talked about this in the past. Like the challenge in treasury is that you typically get a lot more visibility when things are going wrong and there's a lot more pressure on you to perform. And if you don't perform like there are repercussions not only to the business but also to you as a function. So I think you've got to have that, you've just got to have that down and it's always going to be forefront in your mind. But being this kind of catalyst across the business, right. So we, the treasury has the benefit of working with all kinds of stakeholders, whether that be corporate, FNA or finance side. Maybe it's more accounting, tax, whatever it might be. Like you can, we can connect the dots essentially. And we also have access to data that people don't think about in terms of. There's an accounting way of looking at things. There's also cash way of looking at things. Right. What's really happening in my business, we're even looking at initiatives now in treasury at Twilio. Like how can we be a strategic partner or a pipeline driver for sales and product. Like we have all these products that are utilized by financial services industry like treasury. We have all the contacts in financial services. Like we talk to these guys all the time. How do we then leverage those relationships to drive ARR or revenues for business? So I think that's the change. Rather than treasury being an operational function. I've heard some people describe it as shifting from a cost center to a profit center. I don't think that's quite the right way of saying it, but along those lines essentially cool.

And just we wrap up each show each week sort of thing. Takeaways. If you look back over your career or again, it's great you've heard the show before, you know how we finish it. We'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. But what are the takeaways you would say for?

I always, I think live my career by. If you don't ask, you don't get. Okay. Right. And the worst case someone can say is no. And that's worked out very well for me. I also think if you're going to do that, you have to have a mindset that you're going to say yes, people want to. People aren't going to be problems to you if you are going to help them. So I think that general mindset is helpful. I think for me, looking back on kind of career so far, I wish I could have learned a bit earlier and obviously we learned through our careers, but I think I had this wealth of kind of knowledge and through peers and things at intel that often gave me really great advice. But sometimes it took me a couple of years to really digest that and to implement it. And so when I look back now in certain situations, I made life hard for yourself there, Chris. Have you just done what X has said? But rather than saying, I know what I'm doing, I think it could have made life a little bit easier. The other one that I haven't done, which obviously people talk about and you get it on the podcast as well, is like breadth, right. In terms of finance breadth or business breadth, that's one thing I haven't really done. Like, I've had the opportunity where changing countries and I spent a lot of time working with different cultures and different parts of the business. I haven't gone and done an FPA role. I haven't gone and done an optional role. And I think if I look where I am in my career now, 15 years in, if I was to change something like somewhere in the middle there, should I have done that or could I have done that? And would that be easy to get or do five, 10 years into your career versus 15, 20 years into your career? I think undoubtedly it is. And so you don't realize early on in the career like the decisions you make a bit like when you're at school, right?

Yeah.

Like you start to narrow your. Narrow your funnel, which is fine. If you like your funnel, that's fine. And I do like my funnel. But at the same time, the world is an ever changing place. And so keeping your skill sets broad enough, even slate yourself as you go forward, I think.