Christian Schmahl discusses building a treasury career in dynamic workplaces. He emphasizes that a unified vision and strategy across the team matters most, along with alignment and shared passion for the work.
I think when we want to work together because we have, for one group, we have one treasury vision and strategy. And it's key that your teams out there, I mean, it's also for the, for the central team, you know, within my team, we talk about the vision and the strategy and it's important that everybody is aligned, understands it and agrees with it. I mean, it's not me who's saying, hey, this is the path we go. You know, we, we align it all together and then we go that path together and. But that also counts the colleagues that sit in Montevideo or that sit in Singapore, that we have a one vision approach and a one team approach. I never want to hear that someone in the treasury team says, they say this, they think this one, there is no day, you know, this is not an external party or whatsoever. It is your treasury team. It's an US approach. Absolutely. It's absolutely. That's a good way to say it's an US approach and not a day approach. If I for example, interview a management position, then it's very important that identify like that this person shares the same vision and strategy for what does it actually mean to build an amazing treasury experience for delivery hero. So the vision of that person, of what a great Treasury Department means, needs to fit, right? And also like me, for example, we go for centralized and regionalized approach. We are have a streamlined core bank partnership approach and the one treasury management system approach so that we, and that we automate processes, et cetera, et cetera. So I would say if that manager, for example, does not share this kind of, you know, to, to, to centralize standardized processes and automate processes, if that doesn't match, then it wouldn't make sense, right? Because I need people that create this amazing treasury experience in their region, for example, or supporting here at Central. So vision and the same idea of what an efficient and amazing treasury means. I think that's even more important when I look at analyst positions, for example. Yes, knowledge as well. But there, it's even more important that there is that people are interested and maybe if you want to call it even passionated about treasury, look at me. You know, you, you remember what we said at the beginning, this late evening in 2010 when the gentleman came to me and asked me if I want to join the Treasury Department at Groupon. I said, yeah, let's do it. But I had to Google, right? Because I had no clue what it is, but I was interested and I was kind of passionate about it. So I had everything that I needed to develop myself and to develop a career and the knowledge within treasury, even though I didn't even know what it means when he asked me the first time, you know. But again, of course, I studied business administration. I knew about numbers and I knew how to, how to work with an Excel table and putting numbers together and building reports and things like that. Yeah, this is what I needed as an analyst at the very beginning, but that's it. More important was being interested in this type of field and being also a bit passionate about it, if you want to call it.
