How to Build a Treasury Function and Drive Strategic Value

This week's podcast is an update show with Ben Loper, the SVP and Treasurer at Hilton Grand Vacations.

Ben and I originally spoke way back in July 2022, and we're catching up 4 years later.

Fantastic to talk to Ben.

One of the key things he talks about in the episode is about AI fraud and being careful.

You have to be careful with your imagery, you know, whatever you have even on LinkedIn. Actually, I'll hand over to Ben. Let him talk about it a little bit.

Cartoon avatars are nice because obviously if a cartoon calls you, something's up. But it is, we're looking at all those kinds of things and really re-scoping who can handle money, when they can handle money, how they can handle money, why they can handle money. Because the more you distribute that out into the field, certainly a business like ours with over 200 resorts, there's going to be a lot of people in the field that are handling some measure of funding or vendors or vendor signup. And now I used to say, okay, this person called me, I can do a Google, I can go to their website, I see their picture, I see them on video. Okay, this is really that person. Now with AI avatars and the ability to create synthetic voices, you can't do that anymore. And even now with Claude and others, you can throw websites up very quickly. It doesn't take a lot of resources to completely fabricate a vendor or anything like that. And so it's caused us to rethink. I think I sent you months ago kind of a famous case out in Asia where someone got a quote unquote call from the CEO and said, hey, I need you to spend $20 million or $40 million out the door to here. And the person did it and they probably thought they were following every protocol that they have. We really put a lot of time and effort into vendor verification, vendor vetting, all types of even some of the older school methodologies around anti-fraud to help buttress what is a very front-leaning organization. We've got a great technology team that we do a lot. We use Copilot and Copilot Studio, Power Automate, all these systems. And the combo of Kairiva and the bank puts a lot of good safeguards in place, but we've also added some of the older school. Anytime an account's changing, who knows the person, what are the code words and all that kind of stuff.

What we're going to do now is we're going to do the main show and then a bit later We run, run right up to 2022, and then Ben brings us up to date with what's been happening since.

Lots of more financing across the world and very interesting times. So I'll get on with the main show. Welcome 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.

Delighted to be joined by Ben Loper, the Senior Vice President, Corporate Treasurer, and Head of the $2 billion Asset Financing Business Segment at Hilton Grand Vacations. Now Hilton Grand Vacations is a global timeshare company engaged in developing, marketing, selling, and managing timeshare resorts underneath the Hilton Grand Vacations brand. Ben, as I say on each and every week, enough of me. It's over to you, sir. How did you first discover finance and then at least say Treasury?

Yeah, perfect. So thanks for having me on. Excited to come on here and speak. Been a big listener of the podcast here for a long time, so it's great to be on. Finance was new to me. I always liked economics. I started studying economics in high school. I did AP Econ and was sort of dual enrolled in college classes for econ. And then I went to Auburn University for undergrad. To study economics, and I just assumed that's what I would do. I went through that process, took a lot of econ courses, and then my uncle— and never forget, it was like Christmas one year— and he was like, "There's no jobs in economics." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" He was like, "You have to have a PhD to have an econ job. There's no econ jobs." And I was like, "Huh." And I went— there wasn't really Google as much at the time— and I went and did some research. I was like, "Wow, I can see schedule. So I had to pivot. So I started working, graduated college a year early, started working at this bank, which is now part of PNC, but at the time it was BBVA or Compass Bank. So I worked there for about a year and it was, I loved it. I learned a lot. My parents were like, you really need to go to graduate school. You, this isn't going to work. And I remember at the time thinking, I'll just work myself up from here. I'll be one of those stories. You started at branch and then you're CEO and it's that easy. And I didn't really realize at the time that it's harder than that. So they were like, you got to go, you got to go get some kind of graduate degree. So I just sort of started looking around, okay, if I want to do banking or investment banking, or really what is finance? At the time, master's of finance are pretty common now. There were really only, I think maybe 3 of them at the time. I think there was Vanderbilt, Tulane, and MIT. And they were all sort of varying levels of mathematical rigor. My wife now, but at the time girlfriend, we've been together for a long time. She was a student at, in Birmingham. So I drew this 3-hour circle around Birmingham and was like, where can I go? What can I do? And the 2 best schools, I think, in that circle were Emory and Vanderbilt. And Emory had a 2-year degree and Vanderbilt had a 1-year degree. I actually am not a great student. I just don't like school. The actual studying is not for me.

Sorry. So you were studying that, but did you then know that you were, you went in to do that study, as you said, your parents said, no, you've got to do this. This is the direction. Did you have then, actually, I'm gonna go the accounting route later, or CFA, or— because I get asked this by some more junior candidates. They said, oh, what should I do, CFA, CPA, or what do you recommend, CTP? I said, yeah, they're all great.

And they're like, oh.

I said, you've got to decide where you want to go or start to sort of direct it.

We can't—

I can give you some advice, what I've seen and everything else. What were your thoughts? Or what, you know, where did you think, where is it going to go next? I know it's a while ago now, but Within recollection, as it were.

So at the time, it was 2007.

Yeah.

And Wall Street was booming and that was going to be awesome. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to Wall Street. So that seemed like the fastest way to get there. By the time I started, graduated in 2009 from graduate school, that was not the time to be going to Wall Street. So that was what drove specifically that finance. I ended up doing equity research. And to your point on CFA, I have a CFA. That was the old bread and butter equity research. CFA, that's the route that you go. It's a very interesting industry today economically and where that sits. I think it'll— the death of equity research has been overexaggerated, but it's not like it was in the early 2000s or late '90s after the— I guess it was the Spitzer. I would recommend it to anybody to enter a career because it teaches you very quickly how to analyze companies, how to break it down. How to go to SEC filings, how to pull investor relations information, how to build a model on a lot of different companies quickly. So I benefited from the experience, but after 3 years, the writing on the wall was there for me. In fact, I'll tell you a funny story. Pat Campbell at the time was the CFO of 3M. I remember somebody— 3M, which you probably see it now with all this inflation, that's like a gross margin story. So people always talk about their pricing power, right? At the time, people were like, "Why can't you grow gross margin? Why can't you do this?" It was me and this guy, Ajay, who I worked with, and Pat. He's like, "There's not a dial on my desk where I can just adjust up gross margin. I make payroll in 70 different countries. Do you have any idea how complicated just doing that is?" At that moment, I thought, "Yeah, if I walked in his office tomorrow, short of turning on the lights, I wouldn't even know where to start." I mean, I knew nothing about running a business. —being in a business, how a business runs, accounting, none of it made any sense to me. There's no change to their pension, no change to the fundedness. They just changed the accounting. This is called corridor accounting. And the stock's up. And I'm like asking my boss, why is this? And they're like, oh, take the noise outta earnings. I'm like, but nothing changed. The economic value of the company's unchanged. He's like, it doesn't matter. It'll clean up the earnings release. And I'm like, it just made no sense to me. So at that point I was like, look, I'm done here. I need to go work for a company. So that was really basically my brief 3, 4 year foray into Wall Street and back out into actually working for a company.

And then talk me through, you did that and then, and I was just doing the research as I said before, Wall Street, and then was it then straight to the move to BBVA or how did it work from there?

How did it sort of flow? Yeah. So I was looking for different jobs, and my wife and I, at the time, was pregnant, and we started doing the math, and we're like, look, if we go to a suburb, there's no point in being in a suburb next to New York. If we're going to go to the suburb and live— I was looking at this job in Princeton, New Jersey, and that we were sort of just doing the math, like, why not just be back close to our family if we're going to be in a suburb anyways, if we're not going to be in the city doing the city life? And so we started looking around, and Birmingham actually is a pretty big legacy banking town. In fact, it's coming back a little bit with a couple of public companies, but you had a lot of banking in Birmingham. You had Wachovia, Colonial, Regions, Amsouth, all these banks were based, and Compass Bank was one of them. They were publicly traded. They were acquired by BBVA, and what happened during the crisis, which seemed good at the time but ended up not being great, is because they were an FBO, they didn't apply to TARP or TALF or any of that kind of stuff, all those rescue programs. At the time, if you recall, Europe was actually in stronger footing initially in the crisis. BBVA just kicked all this money into what was Compass Bank, their US franchise. They effectively mothballed anything and everything that was going on in their treasury group. They no longer issued bonds. They no longer did repos, reverse repos. This time the bank was probably a $40 billion asset bank. All those things just didn't exist. Spain just sent them money. That's common for someone like Deutsche Bank or Barclays, they call it single point of entry resolution authority, which is where you have a parent and they just kick money down to— All these investment banks here that you see that way. But at the end of the day, what it meant was once the Fed put in CAPRA and CCAR, all of these US subs had to have their own funding. They could not rely on the parent for funding. This guy, Chris Marshall, was a treasurer of BBVA, super sharp guy. I just resonated with him. He was like, "Look, we need somebody to come in and build up a lot of what—" So at the end of the day, I was like, "This is going to be perfect because I'm going to go work for a company. We're going to be building things." That's exactly what I wanted to do. So we left. We went back to Birmingham, Alabama. Still traveled a good bit to New York, traveled a good bit to Madrid for different things at different points in my career there, but Houston, and they had a big presence in Houston that was growing. By the end, when I left, I think it was about a $120 billion asset bank. So we grew a lot. Over those 6 or 7 years. But what was fun about it was the treasury team had really had handcuffs on. We weren't doing bond deals. We weren't doing anything like that. And throughout the years, we did all the regulatory things that we had to build, but we did the debt IPOs. We started putting up fixed income investor relations, working with the rating agencies, repos, reverse repos, brokerage funding, home loan advances, a lot of that kind of thing. That was where I got a taste of, okay, we're managing our own money. We're stewards of our own capital. I realized too quickly that it was like turning a battleship. That's not to say that bankers, when they actually go to sell it, don't do work, but initially, you're just coming up with these thesis, particularly on the equity research side. You're looking at 20, 25 companies. It's really hard to execute on some of the things that need to be done. That's what I like. It's no longer 2 people, 3 people, 4-person teams. It's 50, 60, 500, 1,000 people to get all of this stuff in order. And so I really enjoy working for a company and being on the inside there. And at this point, I think I'm— that's probably a lifelong career track for me because I certainly love my time on Wall Street, but personally, it just wasn't for me. I was happy to get in and sort of work in the company, kind of cut wood that way.

Ben, I want to just dig into this a little bit more, but sort of from a separate point of view. And what I mean by that is, so we just spoke briefly before that Summer Simmons, a previous guest over at Victoria's Secret, but she was with Morgan Stanley, not just similar time actually, for 8 years and period. And she accounting control through to transfer pricing and stuff. And you then were treasury funding strategist through to VP of liability-based funding, which is— you'd got into this And this is again for the listeners, and they might be going, well, let's stick with corporate treasury rather than banking treasury. What did banking treasury give you in your back pocket that you've then used as a springboard? Because you have effectively, and that's something we're going to come on to shortly. Why go into banking? Surely it narrows your experience. It's going to make it more difficult to go into a corporate role later. How would you answer that, if you like?

From my perspective, if you work for a large bank, you're running a book, and I forget the total assets or liabilities I was responsible for, but at the end it was over $10 billion. You know, we have 6 pay-fixed, plain vanilla interest rate swaps, right? That's probably all we'll do on interest rates for a long time. The bank, we were doing it all the time. We were offsetting customer risk. We were offsetting all the deals. We were doing our whole asset liability picture with changing. We were doing a lot of that. From a size perspective, we did a $500 million bond deal. We did an $850 million bond deal. We would borrow in a day $2 billion. One time, actually, I meant to repay $300 million and I borrowed $300 million. I mean, that's— that was the scale at which we were operating. So there's definitely benefits to doing it that way. So we were always dealing with large revolver draws or large customer deposit balances or ECRs, and we saw all that. And so when you flip to the corporate side and you're trying to negotiate that, you're negotiating credit agreements, you're sort of sitting on the other side. So it's always been beneficial And I think you're right. You do see a lot of people making that move, whether from a bank treasury or just the investment banking side at Royal Caribbean. So they both left to become CFO. So there's definitely different routes to roll in through treasury. And I think treasury had rolled up to Naftali prior to the CFO role. You can come in from different ways, but for me, liking the operational side, and then as we look at now the lending business that we have, which is over $2 billion in assets, right? That's effectively a bank. So we're granting loans to people to purchase fractional vacation ownership. Working at a bank really helped because all of the allowance models, the credit loss models, all that work that we do here now, that was all things that we had experienced with at the bank.

So you then made the move across to corporate. How did that come about? And again, as I say, I get a number of banking guys go, here's my resume, can you make, help me make the move? Unless it's a big role as you've got there, How did you convince them you were the person, or what was it they were looking for? Did they come looking for you? How did it happen?

Yeah, so my wife reminds me that she found the job. I knew a few people that it sort of worked around the deal. So you got to go, got to go back in time. So Hilton was acquired by Blackstone in a, at the time, massive LBO. It was thought to be a terrible decision initially, right? It was right at the peak of '07. But it ended up being one of the most profitable deals Blackstone's ever done. So it's worked. I think John Gray is still on the board of Hilton. Nissetta and Kevin Jacobs and these guys have done a phenomenal job just over the years turning that business around. And one of the things that they did was then they IPO'd it. So Hilton became public again. So you had 3 distinct companies and you have Hilton, which is the mothership, the hotel business, Park, which was a REIT, and then you have Hilton Grand Vacations and we're the timeshare company. And what we do is we Ourselves are fairly large, but we license a brand from Hilton. So we're similar in the sense to just a regular hotel operator, except we're massive. We have over 100 properties. We all focus on really just this Hilton Grand Vacations brand. There's some sub-brand stratification within that brand to, to hit different price points, but basically it's Hilton Grand Vacations. And we ourselves are a public company. There wasn't a treasury group. There was a lot of things like that had always been done centralized, and then when they spun out, they just didn't have these roles and these groups built. So same thing at the bank, especially a foreign operation, you were really going to have to go to the risk side to really, really make your way up. So when this came around, I knew the backstory and I'm like, "This is building a treasury department all over again, but on the corporate side, I'm in." But I was a VP at the bank and remember that Kathy Angel, the head of tax at the time, She was like, "How do you feel about taking a step down?" I was like, "Look, I don't care if it's senior director. I don't care if it's director. If I'm going to get to really build the treasury group, that's all I really care about, and I'll come." So I came over in July of '18. A lot of things happened in the fall. As any time the company spins out, it's just a lot more work than people think from a SOX control perspective, from an operational perspective. We had an Oracle Cloud go-live. We had to get on all our own systems. Just all these kinds of things, put procedures in place, all of that kind of stuff. And I think within 5, 6 days of joining, our CFO left. So we were without a CFO through November. There was just a lot to be done. And it was really a sink or swim environment. I liked it. I got a lot of exposure to Mark, our CEO, which has benefited me over the years as we do different things. I know a lot of the people here to get things done, which has really helped. I was all in. That was how I got there. And it's been nonstop ever since. But as you see, I just don't like to be bored. So it was a perfect decision for me.

And when you made the move from banking treasury, but you came in and yes, you were leveraging a lot of your previous expertise, that level. But what was it like to move banking treasury to corporate treasury? If you can think back to that time, were there different things?

Obviously you were the other side of the table, which was—

I've heard, I've spoken to a number of candidates and they said when they made that move, it actually makes the conversations with their banking partners that much easier going, "Yeah, but I did your job. In fact, I was equivalent to your boss actually." So you know what they're looking for. But what was it like for you making that transition, would you say?

It was very helpful to have that experience to lean back on. At the time, our treasury group was like 2 people. There was like a manager and an intern. We've grown obviously since then. And even in the last 18 months, we've done almost everything that a treasurer would do in a career, in a lifetime, in the last 18 months, just what we've gone through. That started, frankly, that fall of 2018. So we instituted a share repurchase program. We did securitization, asset-backed securitization, which we used to do at the bank through indirect auto. So having that experience, there was no one at the company that had really done securitizations. We had done them. And not only that, we had worked on one that failed, which is exceedingly rare. I didn't lead the team at the time, but that's how I came to take over some of that, was these guys had a deal that failed, and You learn a lot from that too. So I was actually very fortunate. It was perfect because I got to learn everything, but I wasn't necessarily the one responsible. So those are rare, but when they happen, you got to take advantage. We did securitization. So I knew how to do that. We upsized our credit facility from $200 million to $800 million. I had done that. So I had worked through that on the other side and that, that helped. As I mentioned, we did share repurchase program. What helped is banks are very regulated and regimented, and that's not always fun. But when you're a new company and you're spinning out and you just simply do not have policies and procedures and you don't have the rigor around these processes, that actually really helped to come from a background like that. So we put a lot of procedures, policies in place, SOX controls. We strengthened a lot of things, we reviewed a lot of things, and we built a really smooth system. So that experience actually really does help. I know that the knock on it is not corporate treasury, it's bank treasury. If you're really doing it, there's a lot that you can bring to the table. On the corporate side as well. And especially if you're coming from a public bank where you're still doing— there's less activism in banks. Apart from that, you're still doing share repurchases and fixed income investor relations and all that kind of stuff. So we had some bonds that were tied to our spin. We were looking at, do we take these out? Do we refinance these? And having done a lot of bond deals and looked and traded a lot of bonds, right? We had about a $14 billion asset portfolio too of treasuries and Sallie Mae's, Ginnie's, and all that kind of stuff. I knew a lot about how bonds were priced, how the convexity worked, and all this kind of stuff. So that helped when we're out there looking at pricing bonds or renegotiating bonds that we had from our spin. So it ended up being the perfect experience. I mean, it was just a different pace. People weren't working all night, and that's the same thing here, I think, as it should be, but I had already made that adjustment as well. And sometimes that's hard to come down. He worked at Bank of America covering us in in their investment bank. When he first shows up, he's, what do you mean we're not working all night? And we're not, I mean, there's a lot to do. We just completed a big acquisition. So there's definitely late nights, but it's just a different culture. And I had made that transition as well at going to the bank. So a lot of those things were already done, which was helpful.

You talked about being able to make your own policies and create them because you weren't inheriting them. You were coming in with this new view, if that's the right way to put it. And I get a number of listeners to the show where they say, I'm going in there, I'm the first treasurer. I'm the first real treasury professional. What's your ethos? Or you've got your whiteboard there, right? Is it risk? Is it cash? Is it assets? What's made your focus? Because I want to then move on to the future of treasury as we see it. Maybe this is the springboard for it. How do you view treasury fundamentally? Is it that all comes down to cash or other things? What are your thoughts?

I think treasury, you have to have the basics right. Like you have to have the policies, procedures, the practices. That all has to function perfectly. There'll be incidences, but that all needs to work. Hedge committee is a good example. We had no hedge committee, we had no hedge policy, we had none of that. And so just literally writing the policy, putting the committees together, chartering the committees. The reason you want all that stuff and you want people doing that is Treasury really should be, particularly in a business that's expanding, in the conversation about capital allocation strategy. And in our company, it's that way. We spend a lot of time on the front end, We implemented Kyriba. We've done a lot of infrastructure investment, Oracle Cloud, all of that, so that our processes are fairly smooth. That frees us up to think about things like we put on almost $750 million of pay-fix hedges over the last— prior to this rate run-up during COVID and all that. We were able to take the time and think thematically about where we needed to be from a risk perspective, and that saved us tens of millions of dollars in cash. So you need your treasury team thinking about these things, and they need to be free to do that. So that's in my mind, the way you want to think about it. And the other thing I would say is you're— if you go back to when Sarbanes-Oxley came out, the CFO role almost immediately overnight, everybody was a CPA, right? I think the mandate now for CFOs has translated back towards a strategic guide or strategic asset. And that in our company, I see it in a lot of other companies. There's a lot of things like that aren't just tying, ticking and tying numbers. So you've got to be able to bring to the table some sort of strategic value. And in our case, we do a lot of what we call fee-for-service. We'll run a property for Blackstone. So Blackstone might own the, own the actual building. We'll run it for them. We do asset securitizations with Blackstone. We have joint ventures. We do a lot of very complicated things, and we've gotta be able to take the time to think about how to do those properly. So I think having a very regimented process, a lot of systems, a lot of compensating controls in the way you design your process is very helpful. We have a control that just catches any payment above a million dollars. Doesn't matter what it is. Doesn't matter who it's been approved by. It just catches it for just a second set of eyes. And so there's a lot of things like that we've built into the, to the piping to just protect us from having to fight fires. That frees us to think about, okay, in this kind of rate environment, in this kind of inflation environment, in this kind of property market, how can we think about partnering? How can we think about a whole loan sale maybe? Right? So we deal with a lot of hedge funds that want to buy our loan portfolios, our subprime loan portfolios. There's a lot of things like that we can be working on and you've gotta have the basics in place. So we've spent a lot of time over the last 4 years focusing on that so that we can make sure we're free to really do the work that's value added.

And when you look at the future of treasury, you've touched on there obviously technology, which is great, but what are the other things for you as a treasurer that you are thinking about? We're post-pandemic, we've done so many shows about the pandemic, everyone's like bored of it in a way, but it's affected everyone's businesses. But where are you seeing it going to next?

What are your thoughts?

What are the things you're thinking? What are your thoughts?

I'm from Alabama, so, you know, I always follow the University of Alabama, and Saban says this all the time, right? Like, last year was last year, and we need to win this year. And I think about it that all the time. We've got to do our job. I mean, everybody's got to do their job. And the pandemic was crazy, and it was what it was. We put a plan in place, we responded, we executed on the plan, we were fine, and that was that. And we've got a playbook now on our shelf. We have another pandemic or another shutdown. But at the end of the day, we can't just live on that. My CFO always jokes with me. We did all these interest rate swaps. They generate a lot of money. They're done. You can't just keep milking them and say, oh, look what we did. So it's on to what have you done for me lately? And I think that is any high-performing team. You and I mentioned the Green Beret tournaments we do. So talking to these guys, right? So whether it's University of Alabama, the Patriots, Special Forces, everybody focuses on let's do our job and let's do it better than we did it yesterday. And yesterday's over, right? So we've spent a lot of time focusing on what's next, right? From a fraud perspective, what is going to be the issues that we have to contend with in a remote environment? Right? Because I think we are going to be remote for longer than people anticipate. So not necessarily a pandemic issue going forward. How are we going to train new treasury analysts remotely if that's what we need to do? Right? Inflation, interest rates. Clearly we've not seen inflation like this in— is it transitory? Are we just going to live with higher inflation? There's all these different —things that we have to think about. We have to think about how they affect our business. Fortunately for us, we don't have really a lot of exposure to Ukraine or Russia in our business. From an interest coverage perspective, we're in very good shape. I was at a fixed income conference a couple weeks ago on the West Coast, and there's certainly concern there, right, as interest coverage ratios compress, pricing power and those types of things. I think our business, leisure and hospitality in general, is doing fairly well. But we have to think through that, like, what is the next step? And then in our case specifically, We made about a $3 billion acquisition last year, so we are in the process of go-live, retraining, onboarding, synchronizing systems, just pulling all these things together is enormous. I think payments are going to be a big focus for at least if you have a customer-centric product. If you're buying steel, you're probably always going to, I don't know, wire the money in or ACHN. If you're consuming a leisure product and you're at the pool or a yacht or whatever, you may want to use your Apple Watch and you may want to use Bitcoin or those things are more front and center for us as you start to define your product in terms of experience, right? What's the comprehensive customer experience? What's the consumer aesthetic when you walk into a property? That type of stuff is a big focus for us. And a lot of that has to do with upgrading legacy terminals, right? If we want to do Apple Pay, that can require new terminals, new backend, new PCI compliance work. So payments is a big part for us as well. We actually just brought on Flywire to do some of our international payments. We have a fairly large— post-acquisition, a fairly large international business, but even pre-acquisition, we had a fairly large Japanese business. Capital markets is a focus for us. You've seen deals move a lot slower, particularly on the asset backside. You're seeing spreads widen. I don't think you're going to see some kind of great financial crisis market shutdown. We had a very successful deal. We've seen a few other of our peers come in over the last few weeks and have deals go to market, and everything's been fine. But again, you have to just think about all those things. What kind of capacity are you keeping? How much dry powder do you have? How do you think about capital allocation in this market? So those are things that just never go away. And to your point, the pandemic is— I had an econ professor one time who used to say, all you need in life is one good excuse. And I think the pandemic has become that for people. Oh, COVID. It's just not the case anymore. We've got to start thinking, okay, where's the future? And we need to have a playbook for if things do shut down again. But each time that goes by, I think people just become less and less willing to fully hunker down for 4 weeks. I'm not sure we'll see that again. So those are the hot button issues for us. And as for how we respond to them, we focus on teamwork, we focus on everybody doing their job, we focus on anticipating, you know, what can happen, we focus on a contingency plan. We have planning called PACE—primary, auxiliary, contingency, and emergency. We think through for everything that we're doing, what are those 4 levers that we can pull.

And Ben, I just want to take you back. We're gonna— I'm gonna ask you to wrap up in a minute, but before we get there, I just wanted Just go back on one of the areas or one of the questions you talked there about training junior members of staff. Obviously, this is a Treasury recruitment company. We host the podcast, but I deliberately avoid going on about recruitment all the time because I don't think it's that forum. What I'd rather do is explore with you just briefly, and that's— I'm actually speaking about that in a couple of weeks' time, about how people recruit, you know, what treasurers now need to think about. But it's, as you say, it's not just about— great, it's getting them on board. But then how do you remotely onboard them? If you're a junior member of staff, you can't literally sit next to them and show them which keys to use on the keyboard because they're doing it over Zoom. How have you approached that? And then we'll go towards the wrap-up of the show. But how do you as a company and you as a treasurer approach that, would you say?

Our approach has been to try to get people in the office. I think people have clearly proven that they can do their jobs remotely. I don't have any issue with that. But normally that's their legacy job, right? Learning things new is different. And so we really try to get people in. We have people remote in different states. We have people in different time zones, Nevada, Texas, and it is challenging. We don't begrudge anybody for being remote at all, but the issue, and it comes down to personal preferences, if you're in the office, if you're around the things going on, you're just more likely to get pulled into something. We've done asset-backed securitization. We did workout waiver requests on our credit facility. We upsized our credit facility. We did share repurchases. We've done interest rate swaps. We've done just a ton of things that would make a career. And it's tough to get exposure to that if you're not here. It's not to say people aren't working, but it— my advice to someone who really wanted to come on would be come in, be present, and get exposure to things. But you're right. I mean, it's something I think everybody's going to have to contend with is what is the future of training look like? And how do we all approach that? Mostly on the treasury side in the office. So that's helped. The company that we acquired had an excellent treasury team, so they know what they're doing. So we go out to Vegas and see them, but that has helped. We've brought in a few new people here in Orlando. They've come into the office, even if it's just a few days a week, it doesn't have to be every day, but even a few days a week, just to, hey, I need to learn this. And the people that I've seen who have done the best have come in for a few days just to pick up, okay, now I see what you're saying. I think the job quit rate is at an all-time high. When people don't feel like or understand why they're doing something, it just becomes a job. We were actually just meeting on presentation here in my office before this call, and I had asked for something and then something slightly different came across. And then they were like, why would you want this? And then we were explaining, here's the point I want to make and here's the trajectory to how we'll make this point. Oh yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, we can, I understand now. So just getting the context around it helps people develop. And at the end of the day, not everybody wants to be the CEO, but If you want to advance in your career, it requires a set of soft skill sets and understanding the details, the context, the exposure, knowing who to go to. That all helps. Some people are going to have to just pay up for digital training because it's just going to be tough to train people fully remotely. Yeah, I think you're right.

And I think it's definitely something I've seen. And way back when I was talking to the head of the UK Association of Treasurers and I said, look, you guys as treasurers, there's also that need for executive training as well. Because you'd gone, you get all this way to be a real specialist in your field and then you're running these teams. And I said, well, how much coaching have you had to run these now big skilled treasury teams? And then a lot of the time it was like, none, because there's a real opportunity there. I'm not saying we're filling it, but I think that's definitely, you identify there, that's something that is needed sort of thing as well.

And we haven't had the turnover where we've had to really contend with this. But I would presume that it's going to be harder to get into these areas that you want to be in because without maybe a certification— I think certifications are falling by the wayside. They may be coming back because now if I'm trying to hire someone who's going to be remote and they have no treasury experience, immediately in the back of my mind, I'm like, okay, how's this going to work? They might be smart, they might have financial experience, and they might in the office become a perfectly fine treasury person, but How do I bridge that gap if I don't have time to train? I think all that education, and I'm not huge on certifications. I don't have a CFP. I did the CFA, working on a CPA for different reasons. But at the end of the day, I think that they may be having kind of their time in the sun because again, people are looking to minimize risk in this kind of environment. And if you don't have the previous experience, it's really tough to find. I think that's what's driven the wage inflation and the hiring stats is that if you know how to do something right now, and a company needs that role, they used to say, we can pay this person $30 grand less and we can train them up. That was the whole thing. We can teach you, it comes down to work ethic, and we can teach you what to do and all this. That doesn't exist anymore. Now, in a remote setting, you really can't train them. You're almost— it's almost the inverse. You're really hiring this person to bring in that expertise because you can't train on site. And so I think that has flipped kind of the desirability of certain candidates and pricing power of other candidates.

Brilliant summary. I love that. Although we are going to summarize in a moment and we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes so people can connect to you as well. But as we wrap up today's show, at the risk of you repeating any of that, which you might, if someone's listening today and maybe earlier on in their careers, certification is maybe coming back and digital training is key, but what advice would you give to those more junior, earlier on in their stage in their careers, or Maybe later on. What are the takeaway tips? What are your thoughts? What would you say?

I think definitely be present, have a personality. I think that's the big misnomer is, oh, I gotta come in and I gotta be straight and narrow and I can't talk. Have a personality and people are bringing you in to work with them a lot. The people that come in and integrate and talk and joke and all that seem to do a lot better. Certifications, a personal preference. We don't hire or not hire. I think the big thing is you gotta enjoy what you do. I love coming and doing what I do. It's been crazy for 4 years now between COVID and all this, I love what I do. I don't want to be doing anything else. And not everybody's always going to be that way, but I think you definitely got to find a team and a job that you want to do because it just, especially with COVID people have started to become introspective on reassessing work-life balance and what they want to do with their time. Life's just too short to do stuff you don't want to do. And COVID has really illustrated that to people. So I think you really got to find something that you want to do. Treasury can be incredibly rewarding. You see a lot, you're in the middle of everything. You see all the payments. There's nothing that really happens that the treasury group doesn't see or touch or isn't the first to hear about. So if you like being in the flow of information, that's obviously helpful. You learn a lot from a skills perspective. You become exceptionally valuable. I think— I don't look at a lot of those compensation surveys, but it seems like analyst-wise, treasury analysts tend to be a little bit on the higher scale just because of what they need. You need the fidelity of what they're doing when it comes to trust. And then when it comes to skill sets and At the end of the day, I mean, in some of these cases, I don't want to say making bets, but we're moving around or securing funding hundreds of millions of dollars, and in some places billions of dollars. And so to be trusted with that, you've got to be trustworthy and people have got to relate to you. So I think that kind of having a personality helps. And then the last thing I'd say is just giving back. I know that's not Treasury-specific information, but if you come in every day and you just think, hey, I'm going to work my way to the top and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this, you just get burned out. You got to have fun. That's why we do the golf tournaments we were talking about. You got to have fun and enjoy what you're doing. And it's a lot of work, especially when you start getting to sort of the middle to the top. There's a lot of travel. You've got to always be on. There's always questions coming across you have to know the answer to. A lot's asked of you, but I couldn't think of a better place to be. So I'd recommend to anybody Treasury career for sure.

Exactly. You can do that, as you say. Yeah, salaries. We do our global salary survey. Go to treasurysalary.com and you're exactly right. I think one of the things there which I certainly notice is that there is a rapidly rising junior market, if you like. As you say, if you secure the treasury analyst or manager you want for an extra $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, at the end of the day, as you say, they're going to de-risk hundreds of millions. Maybe worth that investment. I'm not saying all the time, I just think it's there. I've done it 20-odd years talking to you guys and we brought it to life over the podcast, over the past 3 years rather. It's been amazing. So just very grateful to you and look forward to catching up hopefully this year, really.

I can't wait to see you. Appreciate it. Anytime. And schedule permitting, I'll be at AFP, but we'll see. There's a lot of moving parts with this integration, so hopefully it works out. But yeah, anytime. I'm looking forward to hearing it.

You're a busy man, but yeah, I hope to see you there, sir.

Thanks for your time. We'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes and look forward to seeing you later in the year.

Sounds good. Thanks, sir.

Thanks. So welcome back to today's show. I'm actually rejoined by Ben Loper, who's now the Senior Vice President and Treasurer at Hilton Grand Vacations. Ben will bring up his story up to date, if you like. So Ben, if you like, for anyone that has heard the original episode, could you give us a refresher on what's happened to you in the past 4 years, sir? Over to you.

We built Laugh, we were coming out of COVID acquired Bluegreen 2024, which was another large-time operator, multi-billion dollar deal that's being integrated now. And then of course, there's artificial intelligence, continued kind of geopolitical disruption. And now we have this Iran war going on and the world keeps turning and the world keeps changing. We're doing a lot out in APAC. We did the first Pottery Security Basin in Japan last year, which we can talk more about. We've just been busy integrating these 3 companies and trying to kind of build and grow in an uncertain environment.

And you've progressed your role. You were before, when we spoke, you were Vice President of Treasurer. Now you're SVP of Treasurer. Is that just an evolution or what changes as you've stepped up in terms of responsibility and how does it— how has it changed from a few years ago?

Yeah, but being vice president treasurer, we have a very kind of— I have to read my book— treasury team and really broader finance team. So within our lines of business, we have 4 lines of business. And I also now run the financing segment, which is over a $3 billion loan portfolio. So that has collection, title, recording, deeding. I've got a full-out P&A group that rolled up that runs that portfolio. The loan loss allowance is one of our critical accounting matters, so we've got a big team that looks at that. We've got a data team that's looking at all the loan data that feeds into our securitized and non-recourse borrowing. So the scope has definitely expanded. My boss is Walter Schieffel, and I report to him. I tried to report to the CFO, but then he's also president. And so I sort of report to him as an operational leader rolling into the president. And he's got, of course, everything I have and a lot more. Key development, all of that. So the role definitely expanded significantly. And we've got teams now. I've got teams in the UK, teams in Japan, teams in Vegas, Hawaii, and then some residual coming out of Boca Raton, which is where Bluegreen was based, and then obviously corporate headquarters in Orlando.

And you talk about the capital markets segment of that and how that's evolved.

You had some of that before, but what innovations or shifts have you seen? And as your role has come up as well, how has that space changed? And then we'll come on to, as you say, the stuff you've done in Japan and various other stuff. So yeah, talk us through that briefly.

A lot of our capital market activity over COVID was about waivers, cash flow, and the nature of our business, obviously very resilient. Since COVID a lot of our capital markets activity has been related to acquisitions and a broad swath of PLAs, PLDs, secured and unsecured notes from all the, all the things that kind of went into underwriting these large acquisitions. Now we're getting a little bit warmer than that front. So we're starting to talk about renewals and really just asset liability management off the curve. And then on the non-recourse side, so the securitization side, that's the kind of like larger franchise with the size of Lowe's portfolio, we're doing somewhere around $3 billion of owned contract sales and over half of those people finance. Think about the receivables you're generating in a given year, over a billion dollars and into a billion and a half, $2 billion at some point, potentially. So there's a lot of security data work that goes into that. And then you were telling, we've got over 700,000 members. Within Japan, we've got over 70,000 members and we've got almost 5,000 in Korea. So we're starting to expand now into some of these geographic markets and doing individual secured investments, notably in Japan, where we think, you know, and that market's changed a lot. We, we then fed UAT, and I'll get the numbers wrong, but effectively almost or over half of GDP is in some way kind of driven or touched by securitized activity, structured finance. So RVFs, BLOs, things like that, and obviously regular way ABS. Within Europe, that's a tiny number. And so FDA and others have come out recently and tried to look at that regulation and lower the burden of regulatory reporting to help drive some growth here. Notably, they didn't have the same, you know, rewrite that came out of the Great Financial Crisis, and a lot of that initial framework around securitization came out of English and US securitization law. So they're actually a pretty attractive market. There's a lot of issuance out of Hong Kong. I'll be in Hong Kong next week speaking or sorry, week after next, speaking at the 80th Summit there. A really fast-growing, best-case innovative space. And I think given our physical business and all the work that our sales and comms and H2A teams do in-country in Japan paved the way for us to go out and have that from a capital markets perspective. Very exciting. We've got a good team working on it, but the cost of financing out there is just incredibly attractive. I think we had a 1. Or 1% coupon on our Japan ADF deal last year. So when you look at the size and scale that we are, you're talking millions of dollars annually by going out and doing that.

And how is it— you talked about how it's evolved differently, if that's the right word, but is that the factor that matters most? Because there's still regulation, but it's different, it's gone a different way, or how does that help you guys?

What do you mean by it being They're more—

is it just they're more open or they want to do business, or what's the difference?

I think it's more— I don't think it's regulating around safety of assets. I think it's more regulating around retention of regulatory and reporting. Europe, I think, more aggressive on that front. And not that regulating is bad, can encumber growth, though regulatory reporting within Europe as it relates here in Asia and a good bit more cumbersome than the US. And so we've gone out, we market several times a year. We do Asia property, we do road shows, we go up to Hong Kong, we go up to Japan. We've even invested— we've never gone to Europe to go out and meet with investors. And there's obviously large pockets of money there, but the incremental risk retention regulatory reporting that's done here with entering into the European market, it just isn't worth the cost. We tend to have our deals very well over subscribed. So for us to go pick up the incremental investor doesn't do a lot to drive pricing, and we're over-subscribed. In Japan, where we're really doing Nikkei debt market issuance, there's where the investor sort of matters. And I think they don't have the regulatory reporting environment that you're—

it's just different, as you said, more around reporting and compliance.

Yeah.

And less about Because you're not criticizing, it's just different markets and different requirements. And so, you know, you mold it to that, don't you, as well.

And that's one of the key things, sort of thing.

But with the, what's the word, if you like, you've worked across these different areas. You touched on there that you've had this perspective. You were in banking many years ago and research, now corporate treasury. How does that influence you when you are doing your funding? You personally, what I mean by that is Does it influence the way you run your treasury team? You sort of, you question it a little bit more, say, hang on guys, we can think that, whereas when you see some of your peers and they maybe follow one direction and go, so there's more than one way to do this. Would that be the right way?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think we bank tend to be effectively, I worked in banking coming out of great financial crisis, but preservation of assets and a lot of risk management. I think we certainly, we're very conservative with our Treasury cash, but at the end of the day, we're also running a business. And so we, we have the financing group rolling up under me. That's a business that can and does need to grow. And we have obviously a big sales force that does a great job driving people into these loans, but it's a little bit of a different approach. You're not really in the field. You're doing a lot of transfer pricing and you're a lot of ALM work and you're pretty conservative with where the money's going, especially coming out of SVB and some of these other banks that blew up a few years ago. On our side, while we're definitely careful with the operating cash, we do have a business that walks hand in hand with the bailforts, and that's why the securitization becomes super important is we use loans to fund future development and fund lending. So the ABS side, we are much more active. We're doing 3 to 4 times a year. In fact, last year we did 5 deals if you include a joint venture. So it's more of a business approach, I think. And that's what's fun about our treasury role or treasury team is you're a little bit more on the front office side and deal a lot more with the front office because the assets that they're bringing in, we're going to go out and refund into the securities market. That's probably the biggest difference. I think we pulled a lot of the asset liability best practices, a lot of the fraud best practices into the treasury group coming out of banking. So we got a hidden robust kind of anti-fraud program and we utilize a lot of bank tools coming out of the banking world. But the other thing is kind of the ALM approach that we think about, okay, if we can put a term loan B here, we can put a secured note here and spread from secured to unsecured very tight. We may go into unsecured, we may take a term loan, be repricing, and then use that to put down TLA. So we really try to build a good credit curve that goes out several years. Yeah. And then will we be accretive points on the curve that we can refund or reprice? We try to do that and then we use that data point, put down other components of the curve.

And that's a very kind of bank ALM approach. So 2022, when we last spoke and caught up on the podcast, that is, I think we've kept in touch, but AI technology I know that when you and I spoke, you, you like technology. You've used automation analytics tools across different treasury systems. Now technology is entering a new, a new era probably. And we did our roundtable sessions in New York last week and just the AI stream, everyone was like, we're still on the early days, but we know it's coming. We're just trying to work out what should we be paying attention to? Which direction should we go? Garbage in, garbage out. It was just amazing. With yourself and where do you see it? What, where's it helping you? And actually feel free to bring up about the photo thing as well. We'll bring up that about your imagery and stuff. Maybe bring that into it as well. So back to you about AI and technology.

It's changing and changing very rapidly. We were an early adopter of Kairiba, the Kairiba treasury management system. We were very early on that. We like having scale and build a very scalable architecture. I think on AI, and a big reason for that is people are able to create avatars, walk and talk exactly like me. And if you're out public speaking, think about earnings calls, people going and giving interviews, conferences, you don't need more than a few pictures and a little bit of soundbite to go in and create an avatar that looks exactly like me and speaks exactly like me. And so it's funny, we're going back to, much as it's an advancing technology, we're going back to some of the older school methods and code words and things like that. And so if my boss called me, I know Dan enough to know if it's probably him or not, but we spend a ton of time together. If Dan were to call an accounts payable clerk who's working remote, so the ability for people to go in and sort of rapidly build org charts, there's the org as an example, and LinkedIn does a lot of these things where Yeah, you have a lot of data out there on, on what the reporting structures are and just do, and you can start to build org structures and avatars and it just increases the amount of work you got to put into safeguarding the assets in the pipeline. So cartoon avatars are nice because obviously if a cartoon calls you, something's up. But it is, we're looking at all those kinds of things and really re-scoping can handle money. When they can handle money, how they can handle money, why they can handle money. Because the more you distribute that out into the field, certainly a business like ours with over 200 resorts, there's going to be a lot of people in the field that are handling some measure of funding or vendors or vendor signup. And now I used to say, okay, this person called me, I can do a Google, I can go to their website, I see their picture, I see them on video. Okay, this is really that person. Now with AI avatars and the ability to create synthetic voices, you can't do that anymore. And even now with Claude and others, you can throw websites up very quickly. It doesn't take a lot of resources to completely fabricate a vendor or anything like that. And so it's caused us to rethink. I think I'd sent you months ago kind of a famous case out in Asia where someone got a quote unquote call from the CEO and said, hey, I need you to $20 million or $40 million out the door a year. And the person did it and they probably thought they were following every protocol that they have.

Crack down on it.

We really put a lot of time and effort into vendor verification, vendor changing, all types of, even some of the older school methodologies around anti-fraud to help buttress what is a very front-leaning organization. We've got a great technology team that we do a lot. We use Copilot and Copilot Studio, Power Automate, all these systems. And the combo of Kairiva and the bank puts a lot of good safeguards in place, but we've also added some of the older school anytime an account's changing, who knows the person, what are the code words and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, why are they doing that? It is a very interesting time. And also we think about it from a building perspective. Can the treasury group be more effective with virtual agents and can I train it to do certain things? And we want to look at trading data. We have Bloomberg terminals. We're going to look at trading data on our bond. And we build agents that make recommendations and say, hey, I noticed that these bonds are trading above par and a bit above par for a week. Why don't you go look at a reprice? And so there's a lot of efficiency gains potentially, but I think on the fraud side too, it's something we're watching very closely. Yeah.

And it sounds like, again, there's a big opportunity to use that. We've touched on some of the dangers, but are there other things that you think other treasury teams should be employing, or you just talked there, actually I had one of my, Julien Mouet in Europe, we talked to him and they've created that AI bot, which actually answers a lot of the more basic questions for the people as well. So it's sort of rather than trying to search around for an answer, and it's an internal system if you like as well. So it's secure if you like, but it's answering their questions. That was one example. Any others that you think that other treasuries you're going to, as you say, some of these conferences that you'll be saying, hey, you should look at this, or what else should they be thinking in Treasury specifically?

Yeah, I think definitely, I think there's two things. I think first you have to look at your business and say, are we a business that can be disintermediated by AI? And so I think that the focus for anybody in a strategic seat, probably first and foremost that. So if you're working for software, it's gotten a lot of headlines recently, and I'm not a software person. I don't know what software companies will make it and what won't, but that's probably your first thing is, okay, do we have a real risk of being disintermediated? I think in our business, I think there's no risk to that. We sell hard assets face-to-face in awesome locations. That is something that AI is not going to replace. I can tell you, I would never go to my wife and go, hey, we're going to put these VR goggles on for a week. Just isn't going to happen. So we feel like it's actually a great opportunity for us. And if anything, intermediates, you know, OTAs and things like that, they actually even help us. I think the— stronger and we can get closer to the consumer. So I think we feel pretty good about that side. So now it's really about efficiencies and how do we build the ability to build efficiencies. And I think our shareholders are probably focused on, hey, AI can be expensive, especially it being subsidized right now, but at some point we'll bear the cost of all of that compute power. But if you're going to make the investment, can we make sure that the bottom line is really accreting to us. And so that's really the way we're thinking about it. I think that the chatbots are good, but it's great to ask in a question. A lot of that benefit accrues to that individual person. I think what we're looking at is further up the chain, either AI-assisted processes or AI-mediated processes where a vendor change, right? Can we have that communicate directly with our bank partner to do vendor validation? And then we don't necessarily have to do some of that work and we can take risk out of the system and manual work out. So that's really where we're looking at it. Obviously it's great to throw presentations up quickly and that is real time saving, but where we really get into the benefit, I think, is especially on the actual financing side where I've got hundreds of people doing collections, I've got hundreds of people doing, you know, recording. Can AI make them more efficient? And then they spend more time doing higher level work. And less time doing some of these manual things. There's RPA and bots and automation. I think that particularly around unstructured data allows us to check things more quickly. And then again, people just spend more time focusing on strategic initiatives and implementing broader scale things that benefit the business and less time having to review some manual components. But I think that's where we'd see a lot of opportunity. In that building.

For someone that is—

and you've touched on a lot on your capital markets, you had your Wall Street experience, you have now, and you've continued your growth, if you like. But if someone's listening today and they want to move towards a treasurer role, they— again, when we go to our Treasury Career Corner live events, I say, look, this is— you can learn from these treasurers live on stage about the steps they made and things that made a real difference to their career. What experiences do you think have really made a difference in your own career that you know, as you've grown and what other areas do you think you look back and go, yeah, that really helped me?

I have a CPA and CFA and those kinds of things help and lend credibility. I don't think they're necessary, but it can be important depending on what you want to do. I think similar to the AI, I think what's old is new again. And when you think about getting jobs, you go down the pavement and talk to people and network and then it became digital and now so digital that put the button and you get 50,000 applications. And it's going back to networking and those kinds of things. And just broke his arm, I'd be on an e-bike, but we were kind of talking about what he could do and he wants to be a director. And it's an interesting career choice because with AI now, you can create all this stuff automatically. But I think at the end of the day, there's always a place for good storytellers and he's very articulate and he has a good emotional quotient on what people water need to hear. And so I think it's a great thing for him to do. And I think the extent to which you can market yourself, market your product, just becomes more and more important. And I think AI is a great opportunity. I think it's going to create this incrementality around jobs and functions. And I think that maybe somebody used to work for a big company and they were afraid to go out on their own. And now with AI, they'll work with 3 or 4 support staff, roll into this person, and here's a new business. Businesses are just going to grow. So I do think that it's probably a net positive for jobs. And I think that a lot of physical jobs are never going to go away. So I think that it really comes down to being likable. And by that, I mean showing up on time, having the support of the team, having the team be able to rely on you. I think all those things are important. I think people want to do business with people that they trust and that they like. And that is another thing that been around for thousands of years. I think with AI, there's always a view of just put Anthropic on it, put Claude on it, put Palantir on it, whatever the service, and it's just going to fix itself. And the reality is that is not the way that it works. I think that you can leverage AI and build more resources to generate content, but it still comes down to marketing and people having some sort of connection with what you're doing. And even if you're using AI to generate a lot of that work, They want to have the trust at the end of the day that they can go to somebody, somebody's looking at it. And we do this all the time with all of our consultants and auditors and everybody's trying to implement AI. But at the end of the day, I want a tax partner looking at tax work. I want audit partner looking at audit work, whatever the specialty is. And maybe they're more efficient and they can do more work than they could previously so they can double their client list. Great. But I think that the human component is still very valuable and I would encourage people to spend a lot of time working on that component because with all this tech, it's easy to see that get lost on some people.

You and I last spoke 4 years ago and this iteration is exactly 4 years ago. If you would have, we were having this conversation in another 3 or 4 years' time, what would you hope to have achieved by then? If again, what do you think you'd be doing in 3 years? Because I barely, sometimes you can think what are we doing next year, this time next year, it seems appropriate to say, where do you see it going? What do you want to have achieved? Where do you see it going next?

Yeah, I think definitely we've got an eye towards expanding our foreign capital market debt. So that's a driver there. A lot of the implementation of all the technology into our business that can drive better, better sales, lending, all these tools that say, okay, who's going to default? Who's more likely to default? Why are people defaulting? And we get the data to the point that We can tell between different people that if this person just gets free night, then they, maybe they won't default and they just need the dinner reservation, whatever the components are. I'd love to see the data get to that point. Personally, I really love the operations. I've got hundreds of people doing all kinds of things. And to me, it's almost more fun than the treasury side because the problems are just much more distributed and they're never the same. I think that's the operations side. Buying more closely into the financing side. People are understanding more what we do and why we do it. And I'd love to see, you know, that partnership and alliance grow. And as a company, as we build more of an ecosystem, our strategy is more around, hey, travel with us and we'll make sure any experience you want, we can try to make that happen. Less around the old school sort of timeshare methodology. And so I would love to see that technology enable that and allow us integrate them quickly coming out of these acquisitions, the ability for AI to help accelerate that. Some of the things we thought about maybe combining, now if you have AI sitting on comps, do you really even need to combine them or can you just do, you know, two separate ones or can you just have AI build a new one? So I think that's what's going to be really exciting over the next 3 years. And again, tying back to our investments in APAC, particularly expanding both the business and the capital markets access over there.

I was looking up earlier the notes from our previous podcast. So someone, you know, listening to this, they'll have heard your early career, got you to your previous role before you got the promotion and stuff like that. To quote you, here you go, some of the stuff: be present and show your personality. You like certification. Treasury can be very rewarding, which you and I both know, and it is great. And the closing words were about having fun. And things like that. Now you might just say, well, yeah, I repeat those 4, which is fine. But if you're listening today, and as well as listening to those, anything to add to those or reinforce out of those ones that you talked about before? What are you thinking?

And I think I would almost kind of lean, lean more into those. I mean, if you're not having fun, you're not gonna enjoy it. And the reality is, and too much time at work to not enjoy So I think being present to perform, I think that's important both on the professional side and a personal side. Taking the time to be in the moment and taking, giving everybody your full attention. And that's one thing I used to be, I know 4 years ago I was really bad because I had 2 cell phones and I would be on the phone 3 times.

And now you got 4.

I actually went down to 1 phone so I could just be on one and I really try to put that away in meetings and dinners and things like that. Again, both on the personal side and on the business side. Because time is scarce and you learn that more the older you get. Yeah. So the ability to take the time and really focus on what you're doing. And then, yeah, I mean, credentialing and things like that are definitely important. I don't necessarily hire or not hire somebody because they don't have a CFA or do have a CFA or don't have a CPA or do have a CPA. There's certain roles where it's required. Yeah. But it definitely helps you stand out and I think that those credentialing organizations, they are what they are and they come with inherent limitations. But at the end of the day, I think they are important and they do signify a certain level of expertise. But I think with so much noise out there, I see people all the time using these generative AI chatbots to kind of give information and it becomes, those bots are not 100% accurate. And so they're giving information sort of coming off as an expert, but the reality is they just don't have the background to really make those determinations. I think within accounting and legal particularly, and medical probably, it'd be very dangerous to use AI bots and you don't know all these things. So I think those are all the same. I would just say too, maybe kind of hang around the rim, right? That's one thing I've learned as time's gone on is you just don't quit. And I was like, I was a great grappler and I wrestled coming up. And so even when things are not necessarily going your way, continue to chip away at it and something will open up. And I think that I think like treasury particularly, there's no shortage of opportunities out there and there's all these branches that it can feed into. And in my case particularly, it fed into a large operations group and the lending book, and that's all a lot of fun and a lot of craziness. But I definitely, that'd probably be the one thing I would add is keep plugging away at it. Don't quit. Hang around the rim, whatever phrase people like. It really is important to just keep moving. And I think that opportunities break their way when you do that.

Brilliant. I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave it there. No, it's been fantastic. Thank you, sir. And I really appreciate your advice and anyone listening today, we'll put Ben's details, LinkedIn details in the show notes. You will see him. I've actually checked his profile, but you, he won't be a cartoon on there for now. It's okay. Maybe it'll change in the future, but I know great person to have in your network and thank you very much, sir. It's been brilliant to reconnect with you today.

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

Before you finish today's show, a quick reminder: you can earn CTP credits just by listening to the podcast. Listen to the show, take a short online quiz, pass the quiz—

gotta do that— and then we'll send you CTP credits. This means you can recertify, which I know you have to do every 2 years, and lots of people do it.

It's so convenient. They do it whilst they're commuting, they might be at the gym, walking the dog, We're there to help you.

It's designed to fit around you and your real treasury jobs, not add more work to it. If you're already listening, you might as well get the credit for it. All you need to do, head to the episode page, take the quiz, and as I say, as long as you pass, we will send you the CTP credits. I know, it's all part of the service. Thanks again for listening. We appreciate your support. I'll see you soon.

Thanks.