How Three Treasury Leaders Navigated Career Pivots and Global Moves

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. So, in this week's episode, I'm thrilled to be able to tell you it's a Treasury Career Corner live event that we held in London in November 2025 with three amazing treasurers. Brendan Boucher, Group Treasurer at Compass Group plc, Catherine Porter, Head of Treasury Arup, and Adam Richford, group treasurer at Smith and Nephew. Three great treasurers. They talk about their treasury careers, how they achieve career success, challenges they face, how they got past them as well, and the future of the treasury profession. So enjoy today's episode and let's get on with the show. Not going to do the energy, enthusiasm, but I am a little bit. Good evening, London. Big round of. Come on. Good evening. Right, you're awake. Thank goodness. A couple of the house rules for those of you that haven't been here, and even more so for those that have been here. Please put your phones away. Why? Because this is an evening for yourselves. Bit of energy, enthusiasm, you've got three incredible treasures you get to listen to. You've made the effort to come here on a pretty cold night. Those of you that were here this time last year, did someone hear? Someone on a similar night got snowed in and we're like, really? We can see there's no snow out there, so switch off your phones, give it to yourselves. Why do we run this thing? I'm Mike Richards. I run the treasury recruitment company alongside the amazing Katie. Big round of applause for Katie, please. We never do this very much. Yeah, you won't be thanking us soon because she's going to come around with the questions later. So you've got to give some questions to this amazing panel. We do these events, the three of us, four of us, to help you and your treasury careers. We also do the podcast, we do the salary survey, but most of all, we help you, give you knowledge to help you move around the room, get your new job. We just done an amazing round table with these guys and get more knowledge, but we couldn't do it without the amazing support of Herbert Smith. Now can we see Kristen and Stacy? Where are you now? Come on, get it out there. These are our hosts. You need to be very nice to them. Pretty nice to. Also, Chatham, where are you? Come on. And Kariba and Trade Web, you have to go and say hello to those guys. They pay for this thing, they're paying for the drinks at the end of the night and otherwise they will throw you out the bar. But joking aside, without their support, we couldn't put these things on. But you've seen this, there's a standard slide. What I'm going to talk to my amazing guests about are how they started in treasury, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next just to do on the podcast. Then we're going to get some Q and A and then you're going to get some great takeaways from the panelists. Want to give that some good time this evening because they've got some great takeaways. But first of all, we'll pass across to Puppy. Brendan, over to you, sir.

Where do you want me to start, Mike? Is this working?

By switching on the microphone.

That will help that better.

That's better. They can hear you right now.

What brief intro as to how we got here then.

Yeah, talk through you. Well, who you are now and how did you get there?

Yeah, Brendan Badge. I'm the group treasurer of Compass Group. You might not know the name, but you'll have definitely eaten our food, either in your office, your school sports venue or a hospital, God forbid. But that's what we do. Global contract catering. I've been the treasurer there for eight years. This is my fourth group treasurer role in four different industries in three different countries. So happy to talk about, you know, transferable skills, but it's been amazing opportunity to do that. I lucked into treasury as I expect many people in this room. You know, it wasn't a plan, it wasn't a career choice, but I haven't looked back. I haven't wanted to go into a broader finance role. I've had opportunities to do that over my career, but I really like the treasury space. I like what I do and the variety has come from being able to work in some amazing businesses.

Catherine, over to you.

Okay, thanks, Mike. So, Catherine Porter. I'm currently the Head of Treasury arup. I joined ARUP only in June this year, so it's still a very new job. Resonating a little bit, what's just been said. I really relate well to what I do, I really enjoy what I do, but I also, I think might, might go into it. How do I get into Treasury? I did have a damascy moment when I decided it was for me and that'll probably come out in the course of the conversation. Previously was a Chartered accountant. So like many people in the room came that route and I've worked in a number of different industries, I've worked abroad a bit and had varying roles and yeah, currently is the head of treasury roll and I'm really excited about what I'm currently doing.

Fantastic.

Adam, over to you, sir.

Great. Hi everybody. Adam Richford, I'm the group treasurer at Smith and Nephew, which is a med tech company. Been there for about 18 months. So similar to other people on the panel today, less time than that. And then likewise, as you would probably expect for somebody of my age, being in various Group treasury jobs for the last couple of decades in different companies up and down the credit spectrum in different sectors and different industries along the way. I'm still looking forward to the conversation today.

Fantastic. Now all three guests, if you do want to hear their individual stories, have actually already been on the podcast treasurycareercorner.com but when you and I talked on the podcast, Brendan, we talked about how you lucked your way into Treasury. Do you want to talk about that from GlaxoSmithKline?

Yeah, I mean, I'm a chartered accountant by background. My first job in out of public practice was at glaxowelcome. Actually at the time I was doing a hardcore financial accounting role in the UK business. It's still a good step out of public practice. I knew nothing about Group Treasury. I was, you know, it's a busy full time job dealing with the UK business. But I got a phone call from actually the guy whose job I replaced in Group Treasury. He'd got a job as CFO of the business in Ireland, but they wouldn't let him go until he'd helped recruit somebody to replace him. And I'd been supplying him with cash flow forecasts. That was one of my requirements in my job. So he called me up, said, would you be interested in this? Well, I don't know anything about it. He said, come and have lunch. So I sat down with him and I remember going back from it thinking, I really want to do this. It helped that it was two notches promotion rather than just one. I was ready for a move. So I went through the process and I didn't get the job, they gave it to somebody else. Having got excited about it, I was really disappointed about it and the things I liked about it or I thought I liked about it. Rather than being backward looking accounting job, this was forward looking. Rather than being just in the UK as an international role, rather than being in a subsidiary, this is in the Head office and all of these things I still like and value about the job that I do. But fortunately for me, the guy they offered the job turned it down. He went to do a CFO role in South Africa. So I'm happy to say I was second best, but that was my route in, and I took the opportunity from there.

And then how long were you with gsk, where it became GSK over your time, and then you made the overseas move? I wanted to explore that briefly as well.

Yeah, I mean, I did, in total, 10 years at GSK, about half of which in Treasury. Glaxo welcome before the merger. So I went through the merger with SmithClimb Beacham, and then there was a group treasurer, four assistant treasurers. I was one of the assistant treasurers, but the other three were all from the legacy smithclown Beecham side. So for me, it felt like I was changing jobs even though I was within the same company. I did that for a few years. And I said, look, I'm kind of ready to step up. I'm just looking for a group treasury role out there. And I got a few calls, had a few interviews. I went through one phone call. I remember it very well. The guy went through the spec and said, that sounds great. He said, there's a catch. I said, okay, what is it? He said, it's an Austrian company. I said, oh, I get it. I don't speak German. He said, no, that's not the catch. The catch is you'd have to be based in Vienna. I said, well, that's good news, not bad news. And that's how it came about. And that job was on and off, on and off and on and off because of merger talk for the local business. I was excited, then disappointed. Maybe it's happening, maybe it isn't happening. But anyway, it finally went through and went all feet in. I mean, it's a perfect job, perfect, specific, big company step up. So I thought I'd go for it.

Very challenging, because as you talked about when you arrived there, and this is what will then step across to Catherine about how she started treasury and this. But it was a very settled team where you had to then lead and manage much more seasoned treasury professionals. How did you do that?

Well, you know, tough. I hadn't really thought much about making this transition, but if you think about it, I changed job role from assistant to treasurer, changed industry, I changed language and I changed culture all at the same time. So, you know, maybe it's not surprising. It was quite challenging initially. And as you say I inherited three teams, corporate finance, which is vanilla to me. You know, funding, bank relationship management, FX risk and all this sort of stuff, no problem. Wider enterprise risk management as the sort of some nuances there. Commodities obviously at the oil and gas company and insurance only nothing insurance. 15 people in the insurance team in house broker and so on. And people had been around for I think doing those roles 15, 20, 35 years. So it was quite tough to start with. Did I do it perfectly? Probably not. If you went back to ask those people.

But how did you get them on site?

I think 100%. The one thing to do is to not to try and micromanage these people. Whether you see the world the way they do, they've been doing the role for a long time. They clearly have some expertise and some skills. So don't try and micromanage them. I think that's really key to not upsetting people. But similarly it's not all perfect. So you've got to be able to tread the balance between making your mark in a sensitive way and for me the way to do that was to ask broadly around the organization and other stakeholders in the business what's working well, what's not working well, what needs to change? Is it the process, is it the personnel, is it the inter, interpersonal relationships? What is it? And that was the way I started it.

Catherine, over to you how your start into treasury and then some early stages.

So I mentioned I was a chartered accountant like a lot of other people and I was working in Hamburg for Arthur Anderson and then I jumped into industry in Hamburg and then I worked in Rotterdam and it was all kind of broad finance and lots of processing, lots of people and shuffling paper and this sort of thing and came back to the uk, did a couple more jobs and then the Damascene moment was got married and I stopped to have my first child, two boys and it's going back quite a bit. And I left the company that I was currently working in, MWB and it was a property services business and I was kind of sort of the group FC role, you know, lots of kind of month end sort of thing, activities, quite a lot of cash management and I left to go on maternity leave and I had this moment where I thought I cannot go back to that sort of job. When I've finished with maternity leave, I've got to do something else.