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, 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? Well, 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 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? No, 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, this is 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 as you're 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 Damascine 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 it's the head of Treasuryroll 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 medtech 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 so 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. 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 as one of my requirements in my job. So he called me up and said, would you be interested in this? 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 a 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. 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 spec, 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 we'll then step across to Catherine about how she started at 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 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. Funding, bank relationship management, FX risk and all of this sort of stuff, no problem. Wider enterprise risk management as the sort of some nuances there. Commodities obviously as oil and gas company and insurance only, nothing insurance. Fifteen 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 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 interpersonal relationships? What is it? And that was the way I started it.

Catherine, over to you, how your start into treasury and then 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 damascy moment was got married and I stopped to have my first child, two boys and I was 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, 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. And there were a couple of things that really resonated with me. I'm quite methodical and so write stuff down until I becomes apparent what my thoughts are doing. Sort of use that as a way of marshaling my Thoughts. And one was that I felt that I never spoke to the outside world. I was constantly internal, internal, internal, which I think is a feature of those broad finance roles, lots of them. And the other one was that I didn't really grasp much about corporate finance. I was quite good at bookkeeping and understanding a lot. So these two bits were missing. And then I found the treasurers. I don't know what happened. Something. I went online and I found a website and thought, I'm gonna take more exams. Yes. And that was the moment. That was the moment I kind of.

Thought I discovered the act.

And I.

That's so important.

It just gave a new fresh perspective. And you've already touched on it, which was the forward looking aspect. It's completely different calculations and ideas compared to what you learn in your sort of chartered accountancy background. And it was so refreshing getting a job in Treasury. Having gone down that route and stopped for a maternity leave was a bit of a nightmare. It was a bit of a nightmare, but I really haven't looked back and I was a bit like you, Brendan. I was kind of determined about what I was doing. I really enjoyed the subject matter and I thought, I'm going to stick at this, I'm going to give it a go. So then the journey started.

Yeah, well, I come back to that journey as well. Because you've done some different industries as well, Adam. We'll go to yourself, obviously, your start. And then those early experiences, because I know the formative, should we say?

Yeah, thank you, Mike. So I guess, like a number of people, I started off as a chartered accountant, or recovering chartered account, as I now call it, at Ernst and Young. And after qualification I moved into the sort of corporate finance function and specifically ended up focusing on turnaround companies. And it turns out when you're in a turnaround situation, what the companies really care about is cash. And cash relates very closely to Treasury. And we ended up working with a number of treasury functions on their turnaround situations. And I spent quite a few years doing turnaround in different guises in ey, but also within corporate and also within private equity as well. And that's where I got bitten by the bug of treasury itself and then spent about a decade, GE Capital, looking after the real estate business in Europe back when GE had a capital business, when it had a real estate business. And we had a lot of fun buying a lot of things and then a lot of fun selling them again afterwards. And as a result of GE moving out of that business, I've now got a Lot of colleagues who are in lots of different companies as well.

And Adam, with you, as you talked about there, we'll come back to printer there. But starting teams at ge, obviously it was an attraction. We used to say in two years you'd be in a different job, four years would be a different country, otherwise don't join. Now, I know that was a challenge. Then you did the move with AstraZeneca. So with yourself getting those teams together again, some of the people in this room will be recruiting for teams, new people going, who are you? What are you? How did you do that?

Yeah, I mean, I think we were very lucky that we were very transactionally busy. So we had a lot of requirements to look at M and A deals that we were looking at. So we were moving from a real estate owned business where we were performing investments in those particular assets with Joanne as well. And then we moved in the global financial crisis into acquiring lots of debt portfolios. And again, when you move more onto a sort of asset liability management side of a capitally intensive business, bringing those treasury skills was quite unusual relative to the real estate skills because we would really understand the embedded value of the fixed rate that you were acquiring in that portfolio and the mark to market of that and the inherent risk associated with that. And so that made it quite important to make sure we had appropriate treasury skills across the group. And I can see some of the familiar ge, the room here. So you're very much a balance sheet focused business. But to build the team, I think we, you know, we looked for great talent and managed to secure some and that was great and made a big difference to being able to get the work done. Essentially.

What stands out to you about talent though, how do you identify it?

I think across all the different roles that I've been in, I think it's about finding people who are enthusiastic, curious, willing to try having a go at different things. Almost inevitably, everybody that you speak to has experience, but it's slightly different to the experience that you want for the particular role that you're hiring for. So you're trying to imagine how they will be curious to learn and how they will be malleable and develop as part of that role so that they can then contribute to it. But I think particularly people who are interested in growing their careers, people who are interested in developing themselves and developing the team members around them that are happy to have the very curious and careful mix that we have in treasury, where you're very happy to talk to lots of other people, you're very Analytical in terms of how you think about the risks that you're facing and that you're also reasonably articulate to be able to describe those as well seem to be some of the key criteria.

And then we'll come back to yourself. Brendan, you were in Vienna, you then decided to come back with AstraZeneca, is that right?

No, that's right.

Stepping.

We tried to come back, we decided to come back from Vienna and ended up in Dubai. That's right. That was chance as well. Yeah.

So. But you were again, talk us through those couple of moves and how you were establishing your teams there talent wise as well.

Yeah, it's really strange. I mean, my wife and I wanted to move back from Vienna, personal issues along the way. So plan was to come back to the UK and I turned down this one job with a company called petrofac, which you may have read of recently, is now in administration. But that's a different story because the CFO said, look, in order to be successful in this job, you need to base yourself where the challenges are, which is in the Middle East. So, okay, fine, let's go do it. And I think it's a sort of a, as part of a career journey to say or to have the mentality is what's the worst thing that can happen? I'm going to try this, see what happens. It's not the base case, but it's a good opportunity. Let's see what happens. And ended up being there for five years and thoroughly enjoying it. But then when I arrived at petrofect, there was no treasury function. So there's a clear mandate to change, to establish the same, to take some responsibilities from the businesses and centralize them and do treasury properly, so to speak. Where do you start? I was the one treasury resource. Yes. I was a group treasurer on paper, but I said Geo, I was also the Treasury T boy at the same time, you know, so you've got to start somewhere. You can't build an empire. So just working out what we need. What's the sort of the right attributes of the people we're bringing in to build a small team to do that. And I'm with Adam, some technical ability and experience. Yes, that's good. But whenever I'm hiring, I'm hiring for personality and the people that can just get stuff done because ultimately that's what makes you, well, makes us all successful in our careers. You can have say, I want to get here, I want to get there. The best way of doing it, in my opinion, is just to Be helpful, just get involved, get stuff done. That ability to get on with people, to work out what needs to be done and then actually deliver on it, I think is absolutely the key.

Okay, we'll come back to you and AstraZeneca. Catherine, you moved through different industries, but again, Treasury's been at your core. What's your checklist when you've gone in? Because I know you've done varying size, established treasuries and not so established treasuries. What's your checklist, if you like, what's day one?

Well, I think first of all, taking a new job, you've got to sniff out a project. Otherwise, if you can't see that, I think as a treasure, it's not so interesting. It's not going to be so exciting. But it looks like turning the handle thing, I think a lot of people in the room probably will be less excited. I think we resonate to new jobs well, when there's a real sense of a project, something that's got to be fixed or done or changed. And I think in the early days in new jobs, you need to have some patience to talk to people, particularly if people have been dead, as you've just said, Brendan, you know, been there a long time doing similar things and are very wed to what they do and potentially with very little time or perhaps not the background in making an analysis of what they're actually doing and what perhaps could be altered. So you need to be quite calm about asking questions and quite diligent with that, and then go away and do some thinking about what you've heard and what you've learned. I think jumping to conclusions is not the right thing. I think even if there's a fire drill going off, I think you need to quite calm in terms of finding out what's going on. Because then I think you said also it's a partly technical and inquisitiveness, but it's also being able to communicate well enough to then say to your superiors, I think this is what we need to do, what we need to tackle. And I'm sure there are a lot of people in the room who resonate with that kind of approach when you get into a new job. So you have a sixth sense about the things you might want to do, but then take some time to find out thoroughly, properly, you know, in a.

Diligent way, do in a sensitive way sort of thing.

Yeah.

And I know that, Adam, when you went and joined Shanks, for instance, you had to refresh the team or refresh the things. Can you talk us through that as well? And then the evolution there.

Yeah, of course, I tend to find myself drawn towards things that are in transformation. So inevitably, within a year of joining that company, we doubled the size of the company and we're focused on a post merger integration and all the acquisition financing associated with that. But in that case, that was the opportunity to take a Treasury function where the treasury function was retiring. It had no sophistication at all. And through the acquisition that we did, we acquired a TMS and then we extended that to the entire organization and built a team around that moved it from a decentralized treasury function to a more typical centralized treasury function, which gave us a lot of control and visibility to the cash performance of the business, which turned out it was very important to have given the performance of the business in that time period as well. But I think like others, you know, having been in different companies, it's very different each situation that you walk into. In some cases it's been turnaround situations, in some cases it's been high leverage private equity situations, in some cases it's been establishing a Treasury function from zero. And sometimes you walk into an established treasury function that needs some additional focus to move forward. So it's very different. And I think that's the really exciting thing about careers in treasury is that you get the opportunity to find lots of different situations that challenge you and that they're all different up and down the credit spectrum, up and down the team sizes, and to cross into different industries as well, which makes it particularly interesting to explore.

And any particular examples from that time where you really got stuck in. And that was because I know that you and I talked over that time where it wasn't pretty, if that's the right way, and you had to really roll your sleeves up.

Yeah, I mean, I think inevitably when you do a substantial transaction like we did, in that case, doubling the size of the company, so involving rights issues, placings, consideration, shares, prospectuses, share suspensions, etc. Quite an intense period of activity, competition, authority, approval, et cetera. So I think, you know, getting heavily involved in all the corporate finance activities was particularly important in that case. That was the most important thing that company was doing at that moment in time. And I think as treasurers, we often get drawn into those most important things that the company is looking at any particular point in time. And to be relevant to your CFO and to be relevant to your CEO, you probably want to be part of each of those conversations. So really important to make sure we understand the agenda at that top level, but then they also want to focus on all of those activities and they don't want to focus on building a Treasury function. So you have to do that at the same time. So that's the piece where you're then rolling your sleeves up, working out what the system's requirements are, what the people requirements are, how to make the processes more efficient so that there's more time available to focus on the strategic aspects of the business or to navigate through the inevitable ups and downs that you have at performance in any organization. Which for me led towards managing through a period of uncertainty at renewing and then eventually spending so much time talking to debt investors that it ended up being also responsible for investor relations as well, and therefore spending a lot more time talking to the equity capital markets about the performance of the business. So there's quite a natural sort of fit for those of us that talk to the debt investors to be able to then communicate to broader investors as well.

Brendan, do you had to establish a brand new team up in the northwest in AstraZeneca. What was that like for you as well? Talk us through that move and then we'll come back to Catherine. I know she's been through that as well.

Yeah, I relocated from Dubai directly to Cheshire. I'm from London, so it's like another new place to go. The treasury team in AstraZeneca used to be in London, relocated to the Northwest where the sort of financial controller tax team had always been. A few people moved or asked to move. I joined at the same time and effectively combined two separate functions, the treasury operations and corporate finance. And the two individuals doing those roles had done, I think, 35 and 40 years with AZ and predecessors respectively. So a lot of focus had got AZ just probably describes a little bit of a Rolls Royce in terms of process, high margin farmer business. Over decades, people have been thinking about standardization, lots of global shared services, common platforms to a certain extent and everything is quite different from where I'd been before. But from a Treasury perspective, you then got a bunch of people who are familiar with the business. The two senior people had gone, I was new, had to recruit the rest of the team locally. With all due respect to everybody, it's a bit more difficult to recruit treasury expertise in the Northwest than it is in Paddington was where we were before, so. But the two biggest challenges for me in that role were bringing the two teams together, bringing the new people together, and that was kind of certainly initial focus to get it working as one team and to get it working to my satisfaction, to my expectations. And we did a few things, not just saying it's all about team building, but I gave people the opportunity. I wanted to know from everybody. And we did a weekend away day, two days away over the weekend. I said, I want to hear from everybody what's good, what's bad and what's ugly and let's just go through it, give everyone a voice. I want to create a level playing field in terms of the way we work together, the way we interact. Because in my view, if you've got the right people, it doesn't really matter what the challenges are, if you've got the right attitude. So cliche maybe, but to have a contract of how we work together. And it was useful because when bad behaviors emerged and it did happen from time to time afterwards, it pull people up and say, that's not what we agreed. That's not in line with the expectations. So, you know, a bit of creating the environment you want and making sure people are working together. I mean, the other aspect of it was, you know, AZ was investing 5, $6 billion per annum in R and D. So the focus was freeing up cash to invest, you know, raising money. You know, we did some receivables factoring. What are we doing receivables factoring for. You know, this is like a expensive way of doing that. But I learned from that process. It's not about this is a cost effective financing. This is freeing up everything you can to invest in R and D. And you can see that R and D investment subsequently cost me a few quid to leave AstraZeneca. But never mind, it's a different story. But that investment paid off. Like Adam said, the circumstances you inherit and the focus changes from role to roll. Yeah, there's been a good degree of change management in all the roles that I've done and that's frankly been the most sort of rewarding aspect of it because you feel you can really sort of contribute to the development of the organization.

There's a theme of change there with yourself. You obviously had some changes yourself. Catherine, what guidance would you give to people in the room about life changes, Treasury? You know, you went through lots of different things. Do you want to share with everyone but more career transitions? Because I know that you'd.

Yeah, I think you need to be a bit gritty, actually. I think you need to be a bit determined. I actually looked at, you know, some of the thoughts that we'd had before having this conversation and I thought, I'm actually going to say that, and I've now said it, I think you actually need to be a bit determined in life because I think at times it doesn't all arrive on a plate for you. And I think if you want to have a more interesting job or you want to achieve something that's perhaps nothing to do with your job, but it was more generally in life, you actually have to sort of roll your sleeves up time to time, and it can be a bit hard work. But the upside is that, you know, you end up, say, in the workplace having completed a project or completed your transition or whatever you've been working on. I mean, one thing I'm very proud of, having worked, alluded to the fact that I've done some of the treasury, applied with some of the treasury principles in a number of different sectors. I was head of treasury at Cancer Research uk, a number of jobs back, and what I really did there was reposition the investment portfolio, because for whatever reason, I'd inherited cash, quite a lot of cash. And without going into the details of how they got to that decision that that was the right decision, I got it back into a structured portfolio with Goldman's and I'm super proud of it because that was the right, right decision to make sure that, you know, that wonderful charity had a good financial basis going forward. I didn't see that coming, by the way. The job just arrived at mine. Suddenly I'm in there and I'm in a charity doing this job. But actually, fundamentally was learning a lot about treasury as well, and dealing with.

The outside as well, and advice to more treasury professionals who earlier stages of their careers, you know, what advice would you give to maybe some of the people in this room, there are some more experienced treasurers, but maybe those who are following the footsteps. What would you say? You know, what to find there. It's a very changing time with technology. We've done that this afternoon and things. But what are you thinking is also going to define them?

I think if you don't enjoy what you do, question whether you should stick in that field, don't just stick at something because you've been told that this is a field to work in, you must enjoy what you do, there must be some fun in it. I think it's a good idea to finish your financial education, if you can. I think that's helpful. I've definitely worked out that having the accountancy before the treasury was good, there's no question about that. But I love the fact that I built on that with doing the Kind of ACT courses and things. So I would definitely recommend while you're still able or even when you're not able, when it's, you know, when you're older, it's harder when you're working. But finish your financial education. You know, there are lots of ways of going at it, not just chartered accountancy and act, there are other courses too. I think it's useful to have that basis, that sort of slightly technical basis so you have something to go back to for now, some first principles when you're asked a sort of left field question and yeah, and kind of enjoy what you do, make a concerted decision to actually go down the route and say, I'm going to embrace it. Because then you make something of your career then.

Adam, you've been on the podcast a couple of times, my only third time guests, where you've made these moves over time. But you and I talked, we talked about getting stuck in. But also we've got the flip side now where you're, you're, you've got to trust your team and I know that you struggle with that. We talked about that, that letting them. How do you empower that team without getting involved? And what is giving the team space to run the projects? What sort of things?

Yeah, well, despite my intendencies to want to control everything, it's probably better if other people do the detailed work and control the projects that they're involved with. So I think for us in Smith and Nephew, since I've been there, it's been about trying to prioritize the most valuable opportunities and making sure that each of the team members have discrete, specific things that they can deliver that they can take responsibility for. And that's led us in a number of different directions around changing our FX strategy for one person or for looking at our systems environment for another person, or hiring different people around the world who can get closer to the business in APAC or latam. But I think for them to be successful, they need the opportunity to run with that. I think people need the opportunities to grow, to make some stumbles along the way and to know that they've got the support as well whilst they're going through that. And to me, really important that I use in our organization, the Finance and Banking Committee, as a forum to allow them to show what they've done to the broader leadership team, the finance leadership team, the CFO, the group controller, etc. So really important that when they do that they've got successes, that they've come to the forum with all the Things that they've done and that people are aware of what they're doing and that they can recognize the value for that as well. So that's worked pretty successfully over the last couple of years.

We're going to stay with yourself about technology in a moment, but we are going to have Q and A in a minute. Where's Katie? But we will be mingling with you, so you are going to get a chance to ask some questions. So we need some good ones. So think about those in a moment. But before we get to that technology, we did a great roundtable earlier. Automation are huge themes at the moment. Everyone's talking about it, but what do you think leaders underestimate or overestimate when they're trying to modernize? You come into Smith, you're looking at it, you're reviewing it, everything else, what's that been like for you? And then we'll do the same with you. So, Catherine, then back to you.

Brendan, maybe take a slightly controversial perspective to start with, that you know, using technology isn't going to fix a broken or rubbish process, Right? So technology is not always the right solution. I'd much rather people spend their time, time and energy focused on improving the processes, making it simple, making it easier, and then think about how technology can then help on top of that. So, you know, I think whilst I think there's a role for technology and it can be an enabler, it can be helpful, I don't think it's the panacea. It's not the only piece to focus on. And I think if we can work out how to do less things better sometimes, rather than how to do more things in a system, that's typically the right answer as far as I'm concerned. And that particularly comes to describing the strategy of what you're trying to do to the board and to the senior leadership team. So to make sure that you can describe why you're hedging five currencies rather than 25 currencies, for example, why you're hedging once a quarter rather than doing something in the market every day, that kind of process improvement helps keep the focus on what's important and then the technology stack that sits behind that, again, technology can be great, but it can also hide within it some things that probably need to be explored a little bit further. So automating an FX process through a platform can be great because it's easy to use, but if you don't have full price transparency as to how the bank got to the quote, you don't necessarily know whether you've got the best quote available. You might have got the best quote available from those that bid, but you didn't necessarily get the best pricing at all. So I think technology is much more about process for me. It's much more about making sure that we're doing the right things in the right way, and then that we use technology to wrap around that, to make those processes even simpler, even slicker, essentially.

Okay, Catherine, technology.

I resonate with quite a lot of what you just said there. I definitely think that it's important not to assume that you have a system which is a black box and some stuff goes on inside there and let's just switch it on and there we go. You need to spend time understanding what is going on. So I absolutely agree with understanding your processes fundamentally and actually also having. I know we've got some technology providers in the room this evening, but I think before you dive into a technology, you need to understand the principles of what you're going to do in the transaction. You need to know what the flows are, you know, what the amounts are, how often that's going to happen, what are the principles that you're going to propose to do to use the technology for, not just blindly plow on with plugging in some kind of platform. That's pretty important. And I think inevitably treasurers often have roles where one job, they're at the top of the heap and they have phenomenal processes. I can think of a number of treasurers who've presented amazing stories about how they do things globally. Incredible. And then, you know, they swap job and they're back down the slippery pole and right back with no tms and a couple of Excel spreadsheets and four people working for them and off they go again. And I think in our working lives we have a range of those experiences. So it's back to first principles, usually first principles about looking at examining process. And don't dive into the first technology, but do spend time on technology as well, because technology can take an awful lot of manual things away from you. Nobody really wants to do those manual things anymore, if you can help it.

Yeah, I mean, a couple of perspectives. You know, when I joined Compass team, had been incredibly lean in the past and was characterized by a huge effort in manual processes. Very basic stuff, nothing fundamentally wrong, not a catalog of errors, but all the effort was going into manual focus, reactive with the countries and the support, no fundamental problems, but obviously the limited resource. We're spending a huge amount of time, you know, half year Ends or period closes were difficult. People had to be brought in, people were passing out at their desks, you know, we had all sorts of issues. So work them harder. The first step was, you know, we can do this with technology. So it was a Treasury management system and a cash pool. It made a big change. So that was the sort of. The first step was to use some basic technology, nothing particularly sophisticated, but to eliminate some unvalue added manual processes, not to reduce headcount. Critically, the headcount shifted over time or the people doing the work shifted over time because things evolved. Covid came in the middle. Different issue. And now we're in a different phase of thinking about technology in the sense that we have as a business a very realistic opportunity to double the size of the business over the next 10 years. 45 billion revenue business, at the moment 100 billion is an aspiration, it's achievable. But we're not going to get double the resource because the company's twice the size. We're not going to work twice as hard because no one wants to do that. We're not going to do half as good a job. So you have to think about how can technology fill that gap. And there are certain things that are already in place which in my view are infinitely scalable. I need to change the tms just because the size cashpool does what it needs to do, irrespective of size policies fit for purpose. Yeah, broadly speaking, mindset. Yeah, that's probably the thing that needs a bit of change, a bit of work on having data at your fingertips. As you were describing Adam boards, CFOs don't want all the detail. And I think that's an important point to make. If people are stepping up from Assistant Treasurer to Treasurer. You change the mindset about. If you spend 5, 10 years of your career reporting into a treasurer or Assistant Treasurer, the discussion is very different from when you elevate it to the board and what's important. So real precision, clarity of message, simple graphics that explain complicated charts. That's what you need to be thinking. So we've done quite a lot of work and still doing it in terms of how you present this information in a very user friendly manner. Dashboards for CFOs and other senior finance folk that's just available with the latest information whenever anybody wants it. But I don't know, I'm not going to sit here and say, well, I know how AI is going to change technology going forward. Data is always a challenge in a very decentralized Organization, but everybody needs to have the mindset. The default should be to think how we can automate this, how we can do it differently. Because if it's a frictional, irritating point now, Even if it's 10 minutes a day, we'd be thinking about how we automate it. Because as we get bigger, we're not going to get simpler. So we have to think differently about how we do the same things. I think somebody else, it might mean somebody in the room heard another corporate describe it as lights out Treasury. And I like that mentality. You think about all the routine things that happen. That seems to be right for automation. Again, it's not about reducing headcount, it's just about being able to redeploy it to better support M and A or things like that. We have another example. We were trying to. We were trying to sort of link together, eliminate two complicated spreadsheets, one in my area, one in our planning area with multiple scenarios. Every time a scenario changed. How do you roll it through for your interest, forecast and leverage and covenant assessment and all this sort of stuff? We started looking at what technology we could use to do this. Started a project and then as we were going through it, we're just removing from two complicated spreadsheets into a complicated piece of software, which would be equally hard to maintain. So we scrapped it and said, well, let's just simplify the process. So we still have two spreadsheets, but they're much simpler, so they can easily talk together and the communication between the teams is much better. Technology can go so far, but I'm 100% in the camp that it's not. It's not necessarily needed for every single situation.

I want to do questions in just a moment, but just a short, short fire to you guys because you get to see from three treasury leaders, top of the tree, if you like. Now you touched on it a little bit there about what you're like as a leader of Treasury. Now. We did this on the podcast and I loved it at the time. You know, during COVID obviously, Compass Food Group, you know, everything was closed down. It says here, toughest times in your history. I remember one of the quotes from you when you'd gone to your CFO and said, look, what lines do we need to draw? What arrangements should we do when. All of it. Because you'll never get sacked for having all of it in place. That's recorded, don't worry. So that was published. Michael, Corporate comms. But what did you learn about yourself as a leader during that Period of time or more recently. Then we'll do the same with yourself, Catherine, and then you, Adam, and then we'll go to questions.

Yeah, I think, I mean, you're right. I appreciate other organizations had it worse, but we were 50% closed globally within three weeks in March 2020 and burning at the start 350 million pounds of cash per month until actions were taken. So everybody else left the office. We sat in our open plan area. The only person left in the building was the CEO. And he comes and sits down, just put together a one pager in terms of what we think we needed. And he just said, yeah, double it. Literally that was the amount. It's a joke. No, go ahead and double it. This was in terms of the first layer of financing. So you immediately sense, get a CEO perspective of positioning not just to get through the crisis, but how do we come out of the crisis in a better shape than the peers? So it was brutal. Six month period, Easter weekends, board meetings at the weekend, all written off. But I look back on that and say I really enjoyed it because it was an opportunity to step up. And I said to the team at the outset of this, when we all went home, this is our moment in the spotlight. This is our opportunity to step up. And it was incredibly satisfying to get through all of the. At one point on the sort of top 10 corporate priorities, my name was against sort of half a dozen of them in the initial weeks. When Covid kicked off, it was all about liquidity.

Right.

And managing it. But to get through that was incredibly rewarding. And some of the sort of feedback after the event, I mean, it puts you in an incredibly powerful position in the organization. I don't mean that in a we can do this, but just well respected in the organization because people understand, yeah, you can add value. I think one of the feedback comments was quietly went about securing the future of the company. I feel pretty good about that. So to have had that opportunity, that's why I still do the treasury job. That's why I like being at the center of the organization. Because when the stuff's really hitting the fan, there is an opportunity to really help out.

It doesn't have to be about COVID but you as a leader, what do you see yourself as a treasurer?

Yeah, I mean, I think it changes through the time as you get more senior in your roles as well. So I guess in the first decade, acquiring knowledge and experience and gaining qualifications and accepting it all like a sponge, I think is sort of the approach in the middle bit. You're sort of learning even more about how companies work and what's really important to the CFO and the CEO and the C suite, as Brendan was just talking about there and reminds me, you should never waste a good crisis. So that's certainly valuable. I've seen a few of those in my time as well. And then I guess as you get even more senior, you start thinking much more about how you are as a leader in terms of your personality traits, how that's different to other people, how the way you communicate is different to how other people receive that information and try and nuance the way you lead and manage to reflect that. But it's always fascinating me that everybody's slightly different to how I think about things, which is really, really awkward.

Think I always try and bring people on a journey, whether they're people who are in my chain of command or there are others that I meet in the business or externally, and I like to do that. I think treasurers like to talk to people outside the business and you learn things from that and then you can bring that back into your team and you. And reference. Have reference points for people to understand that you've grasped the subject matter and you got something to say about it. And I love asking team members, so ones who are in the direct sort of chain to step up and present things. I always think that's. It should never just be the senior person, the team, giving their view. It should be getting people on their feet and getting them to present back, because I think there's nothing like. And then, you know, hopefully it gives people confidence as well. I love that when you've had somebody come through a team and you can see that they've really grown in that role, you know, I always feel really proud with that. There's a few people I keep meeting out at dinners and things who worked for me several jobs back, and I can see that they've gone forwards. And I get tingly about it. Yeah, it's absolutely great. And somebody. I think it was you, Brendan said at the beginning about not micromanaging, never micromanage. It's much better to let something go a bit wrong and for the people involved, the person involved, to learn from that. Never hover over somebody if you can help it. I mean, occasionally, occasionally if there's an emergency of a fire drill, you kind of have to get it stuck in there, but try and always to be a little bit arm's length. And I think you end up having a better style than if you're too busy with it all the time.

Yeah.

Question.

Hopefully some good answers, you know, no pressure, guys. Katie, where we got? Oh, right at the front, so. And anyone else, get your hands up if you want to see them. We've got one there. So we've got one over here and then one over here.

Thanks very much. You've all talked about the variety of.

Qualifications, including the ACT ones, of course. But looking back, what has surprised you.

Most about the value of your post degree qualifications? Actually I think for me, and you talked about grit, coming out of university and going to do aca, working all day, studying most of the time for three and a bit relentless years. I think that for me that was forget about what I learned technically, this was about the hard work, determination, never giving up and just being all in attention to detail that actually that comes from working in public practice. All of those traits have benefited me in my career. The ACT stuff, which I did after having worked in treasury for quite a few years, actually filled in a lot of gaps. You know, you see one practical way of doing things and then you think, oh yeah, now I really understand the theory. So it helps with confidence as well as a bit of technical ability. Speaking the same language. But we talked about this before, is it a prerequisite to have some of these qualifications? My CFO now is not a qualified accountant, but I can guarantee you he's pretty sharp. Two PhDs in physics probably compensates for doing ACA or something like that. But you know, if people are coming or we're looking to recruit, maybe it's a point of differentiation as much as anything. I think when people are serious about their careers, put the effort in. It shows people are committed, willing to graph. Willing to put the effort in. I've seen ACT qualified people that are academics, so they pass their exams. Doesn't mean they're necessarily any good, but you know, it's worth having rather than not having.

For sure, yeah.

I mean, not to sing the praises of the ACT too strongly since you asked Naresh, but you know, the MCT qualification for me was very pivotal and I know it doesn't exist anymore, so that's another different point. But that transition from being a Treasury professional who was in the weeds towards a corporate finance professional was really valuable to me. So whilst I learned the capital allocation pricing model in my economics degree in the late 90s, when I learned it again at MCT in the mid-2010s, it was much more relevant and I probably used it far more since as a result of that. And it's made me A much better corporate finance professional. So I've directly seen the benefit of the investment that I made to become a chartered accountant and to become AMCT and then to become mct. But to Brendan's point earlier, it doesn't necessarily help you do the job better, but it can be useful additional skills to.

Yeah, agree with the aca. After university, quite a lot of hard work went into that. The MCT was absolutely the game changer. That's the mct, full stop, was the game changer, did the mct, no question.

Yeah. And I did have Tom Fuller on the podcast recently and he actually one of the things he referenced, not just treasury qualifications, he was just do your qualifications as soon as you can, he said, because it never gets easier now he's got kids. And he said, just leaning into that, you're not going to take it away from yourself. So that was one of the key things. Katie, there was a question from this lady here and then we're going to go to the takeaways because we know you're looking quite thirsty in audience. They look in a thirsty bunch.

But yeah, hi, I'd like to ask how to get into the overseas job market, especially to the first speaker. You try to put your CV out and, you know, get the opportunity or how do you get a headhunter to find you from overseas?

I'll tell you how it happened for me. And again, slightly by chance, I think it was an act session. I forget exactly what it was about, what we were talking about, but I agreed to do a panel discussion. The only thing I remember, it was in a hotel on Richmond Hill. And one of the other panelists was a headhunter who I met at that session, kept in touch and he was the one because, you know, we just followed up. So what are you interested in? And through his. His organization, I got the lead, the lead for my first overseas move. And that. That's how it happened. So again, put yourself out there, volunteer for these things. You never know who you might meet and where it might lead to, you know, and I appreciate people giving, taking a chance on me. I turn up and CFO over there says, you know, at some point someone's going to take a view on you. Particularly when you're stepping up. You're not necessarily proven at group treasury level. You know, you think of that now as a senior sort of treasurer and recruiter. It's my job, increasingly, it's my job to create the treasury leaders for the next generation. Pay it forward, basically.

Well, I'll contribute as well because so I've done these sessions across the world and one of the things, particularly with the us they've got the AFP and they've got their regional associations. I've said to those guys you've got here as well, come by, you know, the first step is turning up here today. You know, we've got pretty full room. There are some people. Oh yeah, dog at my homework. Oh, I'm not going to make the effort, but actually getting out of your.

Corner office, that's number one.

But then it's like putting your hand up, volunteering, you know, saying, oh, can I come to this? Can I help? Can I be on a panel? You know, some people, well, you know, I don't want to be a speaker. You can be on a panel, you can contribute your opinion, things like that. I think helping you guys, you guys are very good at helping sell your company, but sometimes you're not so good at selling yourself. And that's part of, you know, what you do, presenting yourselves. I mean, anything else to add before we go to other. No. Great. Well, so now we're going to takeaways. So Brenda, you got yours here.

It's a great professional post. What did I say tonight?

Just read that. There you go. That's it. Let's go for a beer.

Well, look, I think it's very simple. The one thing I would say is life is pretty short. Try different things. What's the worst thing that can happen? You don't like it, make another move. Everyone gets worked up about saying, oh well, a two year stint on my cv. People are going to. No one cares. If you've got good experience, you've learned from it and sometimes you learn from things you don't like. That makes it clear as to what you want to do next. So go for it.

My advice, you don't have to do all of them.

Don't worry.

Oh yeah, so I suppose the third one about spending time with the team members, I alluded to that. I think when you. The question that I stalled on, I think, yeah, putting time into people in your team is a really worthwhile thing. I definitely subscribe to having a wide range of interests and acquaintances because you learn stuff from people who aren't exactly like you don't just exist in an echo chamber. It's really important to do that. And then the last one, I don't know if anybody's read Covid 77 habits. If you haven't, go and buy a copy. Okay. It's mandatory. You need to read this book, Quadrant two is the not urgent but important box. So this might be not urgent. This might be quadrant two. This is not urgent, but it's important. And you want to stay out of the other boxes. If you read the book, you'll grasp what I'm talking about.

Yeah, maybe just building on what Catherine says. I mean, I think for me, in my career, the most important thing is to add value to the organization that you're working for, to find the ways that. That that can be delivered, whatever that means in the organizational context that you're in, in the role that you're in as well. Make sure you can articulate that, make sure you shout about that, make sure it's recognized. I think that's really important for all of us. No one's going to do the advocacy for you in all of these cases. So I think it's really important to add value and communicate that as clearly as you can. I mean, obviously, we couldn't do these jobs we do without having great teams around us. So I probably don't need to elaborate on that particularly. And then for me, being involved in the most strategic pieces that the business is focused on, whether that's around acquisitions or it's around divestments, or it's around fundraising, or it's around capital allocation, policy, share buybacks, etc. I think that's where I get particularly interested and excited. So, again, being strategic and being there, involved in the decisions that are made at the C suite and supporting those happen is an important function that we all provide.

Okay, so this is my challenge to you guys. There you go. Boom. There we go. Networking with purpose. It's all very well, it's lovely to share some drinks with you and the mingle up, make sure you talk to everyone. But this was one of the key things. So this is the live challenge. Now, I actually started this in Texas because there was a guy that came up to me before. He said, oh, thank you for inviting me. I'm quite introverted, but only recently moved to the area and trying to remember the guy's name. But he came up to me afterwards because I said to him, going up to people because he was going to network and meet some people there. I said, yeah, you can meet and you can get them on your LinkedIn, but you're not allowed to just meet them. Oh, hi, great. How many to your LinkedIn? I want you to go there with your little elevator, pitch who you are, what you do, but then just tell them one thing about yourselves. Either tell them actually network, make five meetings. He Came up to me at the end.

Okay.

Okay, great.

Good for you. No, you made me. You gave me permission. Actually, when we went outside of the room, the actual organizer said that was amazing because everyone started talking. Now, I think you guys are a little bit better at it, which is great. You know, I can see them that, you know. But do it with purpose. Don't just get five connections on your LinkedIn. It's great to grow that. But actually, this is the reason you've come here tonight. Now you can. This is the other bit with the coats. The coats. If you're going to pick your coat up now and leave, you're stupid because you've made this effort. There's free booze down there, but more, there's actually a free chance to talk to these amazing panelists. There's also the chance to make five connections. So you're five times more likely to grow your career, maybe to maybe have opportunities. Opportunity. That's up to you guys. So there you go. You can meet us in the bar. But your coats, as I say, if you're going to grab your coats now, they will be up here, but then they will be transferred if you're downstairs and they'll be right outside the room. So big round of applause for this incredible panel.

Okay, thank you.

I hope you enjoyed today's podcast just as much as I did recording it. But before you go, a couple of quick reminders. It's salary survey season, so head to treasurysalary.com take part in this year's salary survey. 1600 treasury professionals do it globally. If you haven't done it before two minutes start to finish. If you have, thank you very much. Only takes you 30 seconds to update your salary, then you're part of this year's survey. We run it all year round, but we actually take snapshots in January and July. So next one is coming up January 2026, end of then. And to help you even more, we've got some partners that can help you. So we partnered with the AFP in the U.S. if you're studying for your CTP or FPA, we make it cheaper for you. Yeah. 150 off your study, $150 off your preparation platforms. And every podcast episode you listen to also gets you CTP credits. If you've already done your CTP course. Amazing.

I know.

You're welcome.

Thanks.

We've also partnered with a couple of others. So if you're wondering about how to map out your org structure or work out where all your money sits across your businesses go to Fusible. These guys help you visualize it. Plug and play. It's amazing. Then if you're struggling maybe with signatory lists. Talked to a treasurer the other day and she said actually all these bank mandates, I've got to update them all. I said hang on, is my partner's signatize real headache for lots of teams but actually she's already using them. She said it's just amazing. But then also you need some training. Who'd you go to? Gazing Performance Systems, Ian Cochran and the team there. Fantastic. So if you're thinking actually 2026, you need to develop yourselves, get some more leadership training, Gazing Performance Systems and Ian and the team again go to Our Partners page treasuryrecruitment.com forward/partners. Check it out and everything else. I'm looking forward to seeing you in 2026 and lots of our events and looking forward to seeing you soon.