How to Lead Global Treasury Teams Across Cultures and Borders at Computershare

And this is what you get to hear from today's podcast. So what's the biggest difference? Well, what are the differences between them?

When I land in the UK the first day with your team, what do you do? You say, hey, go to the pub tonight, pints on me. You know, that's how you get to know people. Yeah. In Hong Kong. No.

And the same in Singapore as well. It's a much no, Exactly.

No, it was definitely like, let's go to dim sum, let's go to lunch. You feed people, you either feed them drinks or feed them food. But Asia, it's much more. Yeah, it's take people out to lunch, get to know them. It's also, I think it's really important to learn how to manage different teams. As a leader, I think it's our job to adapt to the team versus this is how I manage people. And they figure it out that that doesn't really work. And you manage a team out in Asia, it's if you have a meeting, no one's going to speak. If you're the manager, speak last. Because once you say something, no one else says anything. So you always speak last. Let everyone speak first. And most of them won't say what they're really thinking. So you need a lot of one on ones before and after the meeting to get the real feedback of what they're really thinking. And there's incredibly smart people. And how do you get their ideas out? Because trust me, I do not have the best ideas. It's how do you get those best ideas out of your team?

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. In this week's show, delighted to be joined by Mike Larson. The global head of client treasury at computershare can be genuinely considered, as it says in my notes, an Australian success story. But to tell you about it, from modest beginnings in 1978, they're now a global leader in share registry employment, share plans, proxy solicitation, stakeholder communications and other diversified financial and governance services. Now, Mike will explain what all that is about in a minute, so don't worry, we'll come back to that. But what we're going to do. The world's leading organizations basically work with computer share to maximize their relationships with investors, employees, creditors, members and customers. Fascinating business, but we're not going to start there. What we're going to do is Mike, we're going to take back to the beginning of your career, how you first started in finance and then Treasury. I'll hand the microphone over to you, sir. Over to you.

Thanks for having me. And I guess it's easy two mics on the phone today.

Yes, great.

An easy one. But yeah, no, I think treasury, it's an interesting one because there's no courses really in university that you take. There's no treasury path in your university career. I took some accounting classes. It made sense to me. It was easy and ended up at PwC. It was right at the end of the dot com era, started in San Francisco. I do recommend even to a lot of young people. I think the Big four is still a good starting point because you work for a lot of different clients and you see how different companies work. So you learn a lot in a very short period of time. And another thing is you work for different managers. And to me, what I've learned through my career is it's your job satisfaction is directly linked to. It's 50% what you do and 50% who you do it for. So picking your manager and picking your job are just as important. I've had some great managers, I've had some challenging managers at PwC. You're going to have to see been in the shorter time I was there several years I worked for maybe 10 different managers, partners, things like that. So I, I learned a lot. Not just about different companies that I work for, but different managers and what did I need. Yeah, that's a great way to know. Yeah.

And then you were PwC. So you're doing capital markets there. What then or what then attracted to your next move? Because I think it's a fascinating one where you've done the banking side and there's corporate so you know, carry on.

Yeah, no, I've been lucky enough as well that I think a lot of my jobs have also come with new locations in new places. So I started out in San Francisco and then so another theme throughout I would say my career has been, I think networking is so important. One of the partners that I worked for at PwC happened to become the CFO of the Treasury Services business over at JP Morgan. It was building out a controller team and said hey, she basically brought over the. The PwC B of A team ended up becoming the JP Morgan Transaction Banking controller team. And so it was a network. I never had thought that okay, I'll go work for JP Morgan in New York. So I had two great opportunities to go work for a global financial institution as well as opportunity to work in New York. So turned out to be great. And I never. When you're a little kid, you don't grow up saying I want to be a controller or a treasurer, but it was quite enjoyable and I like the work and I was learning a lot and like I said, it was someone I trusted as a manager to make a big chance to move my personal life all the way to New York and into a new company and enjoyed that challenge.

And you really, as you said, you're very geographically mobile, which I think some treasury professionals maybe earlier in the careers do embrace, but you've embraced it globally. So you were west coast, then you've gone east coast. Talk us through how it then developed or because then you did some UK as well and you know.

Yeah, yeah. And it was the same thing. I was at JP Morgan and there was an opportunity to move on, take more responsibilities, moving from say being a liquidity controller to working as the controller across all the transaction bank in Europe. And they said would you like to move to. It's like the Gilligan's island for the old people on here. We. It was supposed to be a two hour tour, a two year tour, turned out for 10 years and I absolutely loved it. Was able to expand my career in outreach, manage bigger teams across multiple legal entities and businesses and learned a lot. And then I think there's really challenging parts within a career is knowing when to stick and knowing when to move and that's hard being in a big company. I was able to stay in the controller space for a while and then they said, hey, we need a treasurer for our security services business globally. Would you like to do that? Sure. Took a chance, moved on into the treasury side. I'd never worked in Treasury, I'd worked in Treasury Services as a controller so it was adjacent but it was a very new thing and it was me and my admin started that team. There was no one else there. So it was a big chance within a company I knew and trusted. But take that chance and I, I'm really happy I did and moved into the treasury space there.

Looking back on that time, how close was that to corporate Treasury? Because I placed people into banking, corporate treasury and people said do you recruit banking? I went no. He said I recruit for the corporate treasury sometimes in the past four banks. But that's alm, that's Group Risk, it's Group treasury. And people are like, oh yeah, I know Those group Treasury guys, but they're.

Over there, you know, what was that like? Yeah, and that's really good question because I do think that's something. I learned a difference too. This was a line of business treasury role which exists within many banks. Not so much in the corporate space probably, but in a lot of banks you end up with a line of business treasurer who is really focused not on managing the corporate balance sheet, but how do you optimize the returns for your business. So a lot of your. I would akin it to a. Sometimes like an inside salesperson. So sometimes there's salespeople that sell to external clients to internal. So you deal with corporate treasury about. So that was when Basel III was coming out. How do you have operational deposits? So you would be defining what does, how does Basel III impact your business and teaching corporate treasury about your line of business and how to get the best value out of say your deposit base or get the least charges on your asset base. So it was a lot of line of business work, which I like because you're in the business, you're very close, you're sitting outside with the salespeople, with the head of the business and you're very close into the business, which I always enjoy. And I think that's one of the things I like the most about treasury is it is an excuse to learn all the businesses of a company. Especially when you're, say you're in a corporate treasury role, you need to learn say computer share. We have a trust business, a plans business, an issuer business. I need to know how all those businesses work. So if I go talk to the people in the trust business, they know a lot more about that business than I do. But I know a lot about their business and I go to the issuer business, I know a lot about that business, they know more. But I'm probably one of the few people in those roles that have to know all of it. Right. And how to make all of those businesses and how to manage their liquidity and cash flow in the best possible way for the group in say my current role. So that's what I've always loved about Treasury. It's a great excuse to tinker and learn about so many things and.

But as you talked about, you got in there, it was just you, your admin, but then you built what, a 20 strong team, I think globally, wasn't it?

Yeah, yep.

Built a team just whilst relaxing, sitting back in your chair. What was that like?

Oh no, it was great. Building a team is a lot of Fun and sometimes you have to go through the other way where you're shrinking your team, which is not fun at all. But growing a team is great thing which again it goes back to your network. Like people you known, people you're like, I need a North America head of security services, Treasury. I know I should call Dwayne, let's call him, see what he's doing. And those networks and those relationships that you build are so important because even if you call that person and they're not available, they go, let's talk to somebody else. Or call people like yourself. And having long term relations with people like you, it's great because you can call and say, hey, I need someone out in Hong Kong, who do you have? And let's talk about it. So it's about people you trust and bringing them in and going on that journey together. So that was a great experience building out a function within the big organization. So it's, it's a startup with a big PE backer. You know, you're not worried about the paycheck still clearing. It's taking measured risks.

Touch on their Hong Kong because then. So you were London talk us through the geographic moves throughout that time because then, yeah, it leads us into neatly into HSBC in Hong Kong. So yeah, yeah.

And I'd been in London quite some time. It actually was one of those almost a personal family thing. Like I said, we were just having. My son was born in London and to be fair, I was thinking, I'm from California originally. Do I want to go back to California or do I want to take one more chance? Mentors are very important. I reached out to one of my mentors and said, thinking about come back to the state, should I do that? His advice was once you leave, stay gone as long as possible. Because once you come back, it's very rare that people then go out again. If you come back, you're coming back before doing that. And again another person I'd worked for JP Morgan back in New York had taken on a big role, hsbc and said hey, I, I need someone to be the treasurer out in, in Asia for asset management business. And I'm like, never done asset management. Yeah, never lived in Hong Kong, but I love it. I've visited many times. I really enjoy it. Why not do kind of one more, one more trip, let's call it. Yeah. And it was great. Definitely running teams out in Hong Kong is very different than running a British team or running an American team.

What's the biggest difference or what are.

The Differences between them, it's probably, you know, the most. I don't know, it's politically correct. But when I land in the UK the first day with your team, what do you do? You say, hey, go to the pub tonight, pints on me. Everyone loves you, you know, that's how you get to know people. Yeah. In Hong Kong. No.

And the same with Singapore as well. It's a much no.

Exactly. No, it was definitely like, let's go to dim sum, let's go to lunch. You feed people, you either feed them drinks or feed them food. But Asia, it's much more. Yeah, it's take people out to lunch, get to know them. It's also, I think it's really important to learn how to manage different teams. As a leader, I think it's our job to adapt to the team versus this is how I manage people. And they figure it out that that doesn't really work. And you manage a team out in Asia, it's if you have a meeting, no one's going to speak. If you're the manager, speak last. Because once you say something, no one else says anything. So you always speak last. Let everyone speak first. And most of them won't actually say what they're really thinking. So you need a lot of one on ones before and after the meeting to get the real feedback of what they're really thinking. And there's incredibly smart people. And how do you get their ideas out? Because trust me, I do not have the best ideas. It's how do you get those best ideas out of your team versus you're dealing in an American team. They're gonna talk, we're gonna say what we think. It's gonna be loud and boisterous. And so it's learning how to get the best out of your teams in multiple locations. So that was great challenge and love living on Hong Kong.

And then the next move, I want to get into this because I know there's some great value here. But then you went back to the US and the west coast before coming back to the east coast, so.

Really? Yeah. Yeah.

You don't mind?

Yeah. You like. I don't. I know. And I keep moving east. It's been sequential. If you say I've been on a plane, just I bought one of those around the world airline tickets that I'm still using it 15 years later. No, I think it was time for us to come back to the U.S. it was also challenging. Again comes personal things where there was Covid starting and living overseas. Hong Kong was a Challenge. During that time, an opportunity came to be a corporate treasurer at a very small company, Change Lending in a mortgage business, which again I wasn't very familiar with, but they were trying to go public via a SPAC and they needed, let's call it, they needed some people on the roster, that is.

But some of our listeners, number one, they won't necessarily know about, you know, change Lending. So give us a bit more of an insight to that because I know that you were raising a lot of money.

Yeah.

Doing this back and everything else. But what does that mean?

Yeah, yeah. Special purpose acquisition company. So again, sometimes the nomenclature is a blank check company. So it's a company that has already raised money from investors, is already listed on an exchange, they're already a public company and they've raised X hundreds of millions of dollars and they're looking for companies to buy, to then fold them underneath them as a public institution. So it's when you look at starting a new company, there's many exit strategies. You can get bought by a PE firm, you could get bought by a competitor, you could go public on your own via an IPO or a SPAC is another way for companies to exit and get their investors back their money. Be independent. Yeah, yeah. And so they were looking to do that. And when you want to go public, you need more controls, more belts and braces around a company when you're a small. So Change Lending was a small non bank financial lender in the mortgage space. There's lots of them, a lot of them. They're scrappy little companies but they needed to institutionalize and professionalize it. So again I came in, we put in Kyriba, we put in a treasury management system, we put in really strong policies, procedures, everything from the lowest level accounts payable procedure down to how do we get debt funding and raise money in the capital markets, how do we get a rating?

Right, but why was that so important? I know because you and I have talked about this, but why do you think again, someone listening today you gave clarity to the balance sheet. You gave her all that. You were telling a story, weren't you?

Yeah, no, and it's definitely, it was things like did we have a three year liquidity plan, a cash flow forecast, Cash flow forecasting. To them it was like how do we have cash flow for the next day? And it's like, well what about 30 days, 90 days, 120 days? What about years people get floored with that week? What do you mean? If you said in two years time we're gonna start doing securitizations. How are we going to finance that? Fund it. Yeah, exactly. So what do we need to do if we want to do securitizations in a year's time, what do we do? We probably need a credit rating. That would be important. That doesn't happen overnight. So let's start contacting the rating agencies, let's start telling our story, let's start showing them things. And what they'll want is liquidity plans, multi year forecasts. And when you're talking to the founders of a non bank financial lender and they're like, no, I do mortgages, what about all the. And so you really bring that kind of discipline to the organization? Within reason. Their founder sales lead is going to push you as far as they can this way. And your job is to bring that discipline and show the value of it. No, if we get a rating today, we're going to spend some money on it. You're going to thank me because then we can raise debt cheaper. Our securitizations can get rated as well. And that discipline is an important job of any treasurer I think is to bring that cash flow and future thinking discipline, whether that's for forecast or other things.

You're touching on that. I think there's external investment and I think it's like an internal investment, just as you say, then your debt is going to be cheaper, everything else and you can raise the funds because you invested in having that infrastructure, haven't you?

Yeah. And I think also I was lucky to have worked at very large global financial institutions and bringing some of those lessons learned into a smaller organization. You don't need the same belts and braces of an HSBC or a JP Morgan, but those things are still valuable. And I always say things like even Sarbanes Oxley or I think most regulations have a good intent. They sometimes go way overboard. But even when you're not subject to say Basel 3 or Sarbanes Oxley, you should look at the concept of having a strong internal control environment or what's Basel 3? It says capital, liquidity, leverage. Those are all key things to look at. Are you too levered or you're not enough levered? Do you have enough liquidity? Too much or too little is not great. But do you have the right amount of liquidity to run your business and capital on a risk adjusted basis? Do we have enough capital to withstand the storm that inevitably will come? Right. And so I think I've taken those learnings and applied them to even Companies where they don't have to but it's should I should be this is the right way.

Yeah. This is the rigor to have. And then.

Yeah.

And so from there you've done Covid you come through that. So started to move out of that.

Yeah.

What next? And what about the next move is fascinating as well.

Yeah, yeah. And then kind of Computer Share came along which I really enjoy the same thing. It's like I probably barely knew the company mostly due to my share plans at HSBC or JP Morgan. I've probably seen the name before but I didn't have a great understanding. Did a lot of research about what.

They did, what do they do and what did they do at that stage.

Exactly. Yeah. In Computer Share it's actually quite a big company that I would say from my perspective we do three things. We do record keeping, calculations and payments and that's the three things computershare does. We do that across three lines of business and that's our we call it issuer services business which really is just we call it transfer agency. So we keep the shareholder records of large public companies or private companies and we pay their dividends, we help run their annual meetings. We take their voting and proxy voting and all those activities. We also help companies when they go public or have what we call corporate action. So either going public, going private because you take their shareholder register and you have to get a new share register and combine the two or you're taking a share register that's public and taking it private. So we help them in their corporate activities and we run share plans so equity stock compensation around the world. We basically help companies. When you get stock in your company, Computer share is a pretty good chance we're the one behind that. Yeah, we track when that vest and we help you sell and buy into shares, employee stock plans. And then our trust business is something we've really recently got into which again is we help around debt issuance and we again it's record keeping. You're keeping track of who owns all the debt and paying the interest on the debt. If the company wants to extinguish the debt, how do you pay off all the bondholders and bring that back in? So the trust business has been something that's very successful for us recently which has been interesting since I've been here. Right when I got here actually we've transformed the company to 40% of our revenue is now comes from our trust business. What company on the planet can say 40% of the revenue didn't exist four years ago. Not very many. There's not very many. The one thing we don't do is sell computers, by the way. So we don't sell computers. But it's really, it's helping companies with their back office activities. And you outsource that backup activity to us and we do it in a more efficient manner.

And as you walked in as the treasurer or the new treasurer four years ago, what was the global or how was the treasury team structured globally or locally? Internationally? Because I know that's a big thing, you know, and I just talked about that. So talk us through. Yeah, no, it was, it is in daily balances. So that was.

But yeah, it's a big global team. I think it was the same thing where the company Since 2018, we've almost doubled revenue. So again, it's grown up very fast. I think I would put us at a teenage company, as I would say it, if I worked at Jaybird. Those are adult companies, they've been around a very long time. You're a steward of those companies where computer share. We're evolving, we're adapting, we're very acquisitive, we're buying things. But that same thing of taking some of that discipline from those bigger companies and putting that in place I think has been really important. So when I came here, my role was somewhat new. They used to combine the corporate and what we call client treasury were together. But they realized our client treasury activities were so big it needed a focus. Because like I said, It's 80 plus billion dollars in client assets that we manage. We're trading, we're quite a bit of FX. It's a huge number. We make $2.5 trillion in payments across 80 million transactions a year. You needed some focus around it. And so it's really been about structuring the team in a front office, a middle office and a back office, as well as having a strategic investment team to get that structure. Right. Because as a manager of a large global team, you can't do everything right. What you can do is get the right people reporting to you, put the right controls and structure in place and then let people go within the guardrails. Right.

And when you did that, what was your framework idea? Was there already a framework that you just followed or was there. Did you have freshen up?

No, I think we spent a lot of time first got here. For me, it's always you start at the top with do we have the right policies, do you have the right procedures, do you have the right kind of controls around that how does the forecasting process work? How are we comfortable with this? What banks do we leverage? Where's our money? What kind of reporting do we have? So it's been a. Like I said, it's a teenage company. So the one advantage of that means for me, it means there's stuff to do. Right. You can add value. I think first thing I got here said, who's ahead of credit risk? What? Well, who's had a market risk? We have a risk guy, he sits over there. And so it's bringing some of those disciplines into the thing. We don't have credit risk. We have 80 billion of assets held in the bank. Yeah, there's credit risk there. And so I think where that's really come around is we went through the regional banking crisis not too long after I got here. In running that process of saying, daily call, six in the morning, everyone's on the phone, where's our cash? Every morning and every day and be like, this takes us a lot of time to get together and say, okay, what we learned in that was we probably didn't have the right systems in place. So then what we did after that was, well, now we're on a Treasury transformation journey. So we took a learning from that and we're putting in a tms, we're putting in a global payments hub because we realized we had all these different payment systems around the world that had different controls and different features and functionality. So now we're on a journey to have one global treasury management system and one global payments hub that will enable us to. Me, I walk in the morning, I want to see the dashboard. Where are my balances? What banks? Where are they every single morning. Exactly. So you take a lesson learned from a crisis, you learn more in a crisis in a couple days than you learn in two years. That's for sure.

Let's just go to that little dashboard. It's a very small dashboard. As we were joking about before. Some treasurers go in and they see their dashboard and they've got maybe they're five, maybe 10 banks. You've got a couple more. How many bank relationships? We were just talking about this. When you and I go to the conferences, we just deluge with different people. But yours is a different kind of deluge. So. Yeah, talk us through that. And why is it so large as well? Because that will give a better insight to you guys.

Yeah, when I got here, we had over a hundred banking relationships. That was three years ago. We're down to about 65 at the moment. We have 13 lending banks and then we have 65 payment and deposit banks. And that's just due to, I think a couple things is one, the acquisitive nature of our company. So we kept buying companies and they had their own bank lists and those bank lists kept being additive and additive as opposed to rationalized. And then we're just in so many markets. We are a global company and we span the world. Any large capital market computer shares there providing our services. And so sometimes you do need those local banks with local payment. So you use Hong Kong as an example. You need access to all the apps that are available in Hong Kong. You need Pay me, you need paytm. If you're in India, you need all these different ways to make payments because that's what we do. We execute payments for our customers in certain banks are better at connecting in certain markets than others. So, yeah, we manage quite a large bank list. 65 at the moment, I would probably say. I would like that smaller. Maybe half is probably the right number, but it will always be.

You still need those relationships, as you say, because of each of the different jurisdictions. They each have it like India, you need two for each of the states there and one for the tax, one for the other bit. So it's hard being a global treasurer, isn't it?

Yeah. No. So that is every company you work in, there's going to be different challenges, which is fun and exciting. This one is definitely managing your banking partners and then just the risk management side of the due diligence. Think about the amount of time we spend on due diligence every year going through credit analysis and understanding is our money safe there? And it's not just, oh, they have a good credit rating. It's. We were one of those people that always looked at credit differently. We would always look at the bank's capital, less their unrealized losses. Right. If anyone else would have been doing that, you never had money at First Republic, you would have never had money at certain places. And so there's some basic block and tackling things. If you do that well, it's incredible information that then you can show your management team that, hey, this is the value we add. Because we really thought about how we evaluate these partnerships in from both a risk and capability perspective.

I want to come back to a point that you made about different people managing global teams and stuff, because I think that's a real strength of yourself that you mentioned there. The move from London, New York to Hong Kong and the different ways of relating to individuals. But now your Leadership style, How has it evolved? What is it like when you're managing 24 7? How does it work?

No, it is and it's definitely an interesting one that I do think about sometimes. I would probably say my management. It's definitely has evolved. I've learned. And I think there's a great quote from some people might get. What is it? It's be a goldfish. I think that's from Ted Lasso. You're going to make mistakes, wake up tomorrow, it's a new day. You can do better. You can always do better. I would say my management style has, I would say softened and hardened over time. So how's it exactly? Yeah, it definitely has. Like I've definitely especially becoming a parent, understanding the pressures that many of your employees face. I'm much more empathetic around. People do have personal family needs, there's sickness, there's things they need space and time. And what I've learned is when you treat people well, they come back and give you that a hundred times more. Give someone, hey, you need an extra couple days. Hopefully HR is not listening. You don't have to put that in the system. You need a day, you need five days. You do what you need now to make it and then you'll be the next crisis you have. That person will be in the trenches 24 hours a day working you through that. So the softening, like being softened and knowing when you should give people the leeway because they'll come back to you hardened, probably a little bit less. There are people that will you give them something and they'll take and they'll never give back. And so I probably have less patience and probably am able to spot those things sooner rather than in the past. And also people that don't want to be team players is hardened. I'm not as maybe. I guess what I've learned is how I'd say it is. It's 50%, you know what you do, it's 50% how you do it. So I think in my earlier days I would say, oh man, that guy's a hard charger. He's stomping on people, but he's getting everything done or he or she getting everything done. They treat everyone terribly, but they got everything done. So I would reward. That's it. Now it's no, I'd rather someone that gets 80% of it done, but 80% of the people are happy with them. And that person will be more successful and better team manager and a better corporate citizen than somebody who got a hundred percent done, but 20% of the people like them and 80% hate them. And so that's definitely when I say that that hardened and softened is I want to give people more leeway, I'm more empathetic, but hardened to people who just are out looking for themselves. You can maybe be a great individual contributor, but you're never going to be my next global head of Treasury Ops or you're never going to be the next global head of front office. Softened and hardened, I would say.

So that's great advice to treasury professionals for self awareness, but any other advice you'd give to the up and coming treasury professionals, whether because you've got different regional experiences, you've got institutions, you've got industry, so you've got all of those three different circles if you like, and they cross over in the middle with your experience. What are any of those you'd really pick out for people?

I would definitely say, I mean we touched on earlier. I say your network matters. Treasury I would say is a small industry and then if you say you stick to financial services, that's a small sub industry within an industry. Right. And so I would say I still run into people I've worked with for the last 20 years around the world and some of them I've worked for, some of them have worked for me. And being able to use and leverage that network is just so important that you won't know it until you're older, so when you're young you won't even realize it. Don't burn those bridges. I've worked for people multiple times. Same people, people have worked for me multiple times. I've laid people off that still come to me for advice on career. And so I think it is keep that network, even if it's you send a text or an email every six months or where are you right now? Over LinkedIn. Send that comment. Go to a conference like we talked earlier, Work that room. It's so important. Walking around, shaking that hand, make time for that coffee. You never know when that could come back to help you.

And so that could form part of this. You and I have just been back at a number of conferences. We've done Euro Finance and we went straight to afp. We do all of them. We got our treasure, Career Corner Live coming up. We do all these. We do them and there are different topics that come up. AI was on everyone's lips and then different things about risk. I do feel it's slightly different. A while ago it was all about blockchain. That's gone away a little bit and people got that under their belts. But what are the issues you think that people need to think about or what are the challenges that if you're a treasurer listening today, what's on your mind?

So I think, yeah, I think the pace of change with technology now is just so much faster than it used to be. It's keeping your finger on that pulse and being able to filter the noise from the reality. Right. That's like the blockchain crypto. Everyone thought, you know, crypto is the. Every payment in the world is going to be crypto. Blah. That was the last couple years really hasn't touched a dent in it. I think you have 18 trillion plus of deposits in the banking world and crypto people, there's $10 billion, 20 billion. When you put it into a relative size of the real stuff, it's really not there. I am a bit stable coin I think will be. That's the new one, right? We talked a little bit about that. That's kind of the new one. I think that one I'm a bit more. I think that might have some more legs than say crypto. You have the backing. The US government's now getting into it and saying, hey, this is a real thing. They need buyers of US Treasuries, so there's a very big incentive for them to make this work. They need buyers of U.S. treasuries. I think that has some legs, but same thing, it's filter the noise from the reality. What are the real problems? One of those things is Netflix didn't kill Blockbuster. Not meeting your client needs. Killed Blockbuster. Killed, killed, killed. If people actually, the old people on here know, remember Blockbuster, but it's stable coins. It's just a payment method. But what's the problem it's trying to solve? Is it a hammer looking for a nail or is there a real problem? So really focus as a treasurer, focus on your business's needs and if there's a new mousetrap that's better, use it. If it's better, cheaper, faster, use it. If not, if you have your needs working right now, don't worry about the new shiny thing on the wall. If it's working, if that thing is working well, keep using it.

And that's a brilliant segue. I'm going to jump in there. Thank you very much for this. And this wasn't even prompted. We've just put on a stablecoin course and actually specifically for treasurers and CFOs because I've been getting Questions like on the podcast, people said, mike stablecoin, what do you want? I'm a recruiter, guys, I'm like that. But yeah, probably hearing from other treasurers and actually we've just put this on with Christina. If we'll put a link in the show notes. Actually, she's in our partner section. She's running these stablecoin courses and they're more for treasurers to get that understanding. Because I've been approached by a couple of guys. In fact, I was approached earlier this year and I had my head on the swivel thinking, yeah, is this legit? And it wasn't legit. It turned out to be a semi fraud stat sort of thing. And they're thinking, oh, okay, luckily. But Christina, I placed many years ago at Colgate in Treasury, so we were friends. And then she's gone into that world. She loves it and she can stay in that world. I love the podcast world and corporate Treasury. But there's that crossover where treasurers are saying, how do we account for stablecoin? How are we going to implement it? If we're asked to pay things in stablecoin, what do we need to. They want understanding doesn't mean they're going to leap in both feet. But it's. Hang on, I need that understand. So that's what the course is. And you know, we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Yeah, no, that, that's great. But yeah, I think with all these things, it's filtering the noise from the real stuff and taking. It doesn't mean hold still. It means if you have a problem and technology can solve it, get in there. If you don't have a problem, don't, don't bother. Think of your problems and what's the best way to solve that? Yeah.

And any others. We're not that far off. I won't go to LinkedIn yet. But any other things that you think again from walking the floor, as you and I have just done over the past few weeks at these conferences, Anything else you think that was coming up?

I would say be a salesperson for your company and be a salesperson for yourself. Right. Treasurers always aren't that great about that. I always laugh when I give my team stuff. They love to walk me through. I've done. Look at all these Excel sheets and I've got this, all this data and I've done all these things. Start with the punchline, start with the punchline. And one of my mentors said the same thing. It's like everyone does their PowerPoint decks backwards. They do 20 slides to get to a punchline. Take that last slide, put it in the front. I trust my people that they've done the real work, that they're not lying to me. The data is there if I want to dig into it, and I need some sleep tonight. I'll just read through all their spreadsheets and get a nice sleep. But it's. What's the punchline? What does this mean? What did all that analysis mean? Do I need to take action? Do I need to do nothing? Is there a revenue opportunity, a cost savings? What is there? Start with that punchline. If we do this, if we spend these, this 5 million, we will make $20 million over the next year. Okay, well, hey, I'm awake now. Yeah. Now walk me through a couple. Yeah, exactly. Walk me through the details. I don't think treasurers inherently are that good about it. We love to geek out about our, our spreadsheets and how much data we have. Start with the punchline. Both in your professional life, even with yourself as a salesperson for your own career. What's your elevator pitch? What have you done? Two minutes on yourself. Make me excited about you as a treasurer, as a, as an employee, as a person. Oh, now you've got my attention. What do you want to do next? That would be definitely my advice. At the same time, you got to stay humble. I think having kids does that for you. My kids ask me, what do I do for a living. My kids think I hunt for treasure. So that's what I do for a living. I tell them, daddy, what are you doing? What are you doing today? I'm going to hunt for treasure. It's true. Looking for the cash.

I got the same. My daughter, now 25, but she asked me, she kept on asking the same question, which was about 8 or 9, and I kept on answering until she could understand. Eventually, I find people jobs, love. I try and help them find jobs. And she was like, what kind of jobs? I went with numbers. She went, oh, okay, great, thanks. And off she went. I was just like, yeah, that was it.

Exactly, exactly.

So we're not that far from the end. So what we'll do is we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. You've given some great takeaways already, but let's wrap it up. So I think, what are the advice? You've heard a couple of the podcasts yourself. What advice would you give to more junior guys, mid level, senior guys that, you know, that they should think about as well as connecting to you.

Yeah, no, I would definitely say take chances. There's one certain thing. If you put a five year plan out there, the only certain thing is the thing you put in there will not happen. We don't know the future. But take those chances. You know, take it. Get a good mentor, listen to what they've done. Find people whose careers that you are interested in and admire and ask them what they've done. But it really is, I think, say yes. Take those chances, because those things will lead to things you never thought about. If you asked me 20 years ago, did I think I would live in San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, London? No. But it's been a great experience. I've had some great opportunities leveraging my network and leveraging your skill set. Learn as much as you can and take those chances. Say yes and I guarantee five years from now you won't regret it.

Great. Final words. I'm going to leave it there. You're a Superstar. Thank you, Mr. Larson.

Thank you very much this discussion.

Thank you. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. I love making these for you guys, but it's that time of year for us to try and help you even more. Time to benchmark your salary before pay reviews and everything else. So head over to treasurysalary.com take part in this year's salary survey that we're going to be running. Someone asked me the other day, does it finish? Never finishes. It keeps going all year round. But we take snapshots. One snapshot in January, one snapshot in July. So get in there. 2026, end of January, we're going to run the salary survey. We're going to do the snapshot then why should you do it? Over 1600 treasury professionals globally take part in the survey. I know, it's amazing. And we don't give you stupid ranges. We give you exactly what the average is for your position. We give you ranges, but you get to choose. And you can see lots more information. We're here to help as well. Helps you benchmark your salary properly. You can go into your salary review with real confidence. Say, hey, it's what this is what the treasury recruitment company did for us. So salaries move fast, you need to move faster. This data helps you keep the whole market accurate for you guys. So enjoy it. Two minutes, start to finish. If you've never done it before, if you've done it before, you'd have received an invite from me. 30 seconds, that's it. And in addition, that 2026 event season. We're partnering with a number of associations. We're going around the world. We're doing all our conferences. Treasury two, Treasury Career Corner lives in New York, two in London and lots across the us, UK and Europe. So looking forward to it. But don't forget and we partner with the AFP as well. So if you're studying for your CTP or your FPA certificate, we partner with them to make your AFP cheaper for you. You get $150 off your studies and $150 off your preparation platform for each of the papers. I know could total up to be 600 bucks. Yeah and you can buy me a beer for that. So thanks very much. In addition, whenever you listen to our podcast you get CTP credits so we're here to help you. Thanks very much guys and looking forward to seeing you. If you want to reach out anytime, drop me an email. Mike treasury recruitment.com I really appreciate you listening to the podcast today.

Thanks.