How to Deal with Uncertainty in Treasury with Himanshu Kher

The one thing that I was willing to do then was know what I knew and leverage it as well as learn new things. Because I was trying to make a fairly big transformation then moving from banking markets career to consulting without necessarily having the consulting background. So I just had to sort of invest in myself, back myself up and say I can do it. And which is how I landed my first gig as a consultant at Avantage and I absolutely loved it. Again, a two man team parachuted to the client which was rbs. There was a vast array of loans moving from ABN Amro to RBS. And my role then was to identify this is these are the credit risk models which are applied on ABN AMRO credits. If they were to move an RBS banking books, is there something we could do, use different models, assess risk differently or better and reduce the capital charge. So that was essentially what I did. Got my hands dirty, read rules, applied them and tried to see if there was any capital savings I could do as the loan book moved.

So what was it like for you going into consulting and this was your second role in consulting? What was it like?

You make a very interesting point, Mike. Before I decided on a career in consulting for those three or four years, I was warned by some of my friends that consultants, when you ask consultants what the time is, they tell you how watches are made and take your watch away in fees. So I entered consulting with eyes open. I think the only slight difference in consulting around the time of the financial crisis were and as you would agree Mike, is that banks were under immense pressure. They had financial contracts on their balance sheet that were mark to model, mark to myth and nobod really knew whether they were solvent or not. So consultants or big and small had, if they were able to add a unique value in terms of helping banks identify these risks and better still try and save capital which was scarce, they were able to differentiate themselves and avantaj was able to do that. The second thing where consultants were sort of where consulting was probably slightly different to how we both you and I described it a while ago is that banks were under immense pressure then, right? The amount of work they had to do was a lot wrong. Mergers and acquisitions, capital saves, asset write downs, deleveraging and you call it. They did not have the budgets to hire permanent staff. And again consultants did offer a fairly short term, maybe slightly expensive solution to fix the problem immediately and hopefully fix it for good. When I look back on my experience post the financial crisis, I think a few things stand out was that I knew what the problems and the challenges in the banking sector were I think my few years in consulting taught me a very structured approach to problem solving, how to look at a problem, how to do data driven analysis and how to present it to C suite and I think that is very, very important long term for the role of a treasurer who's who partners with the board and with the C suite of any firm that he or she works with. So coming back to my move after my redundancy at Barclays my option was I just wanted to sort of sit back and think what I wanted to do and I'd say I was probably lucky to have gotten the role at IG first as an interim as you know it. I mean okay, Chris did speak with you about it as well. After I did that role for a few months Chris IG then decided to make me a permanent treasurer and I absolutely took the challenge up with wide open arms and I not even once regret it.