Andrew Hawes talks about building a treasury career. He emphasizes understanding people and business fundamentals over technical skills, and says automation will handle routine work while treasury professionals focus on strategy and relationships.
Foreign. You need to know the people in your business who you're dealing with. You kind of. You kind of need to find who is the right person to speak to. So in a. In ap, who is that right person? Who, who's got their finger on the pulse? You're hoping that the AP manager and the AR manager are good. And generally everywhere I've been, they have been. Actually, it's quite a. You know, they're, they're, they're a decent set of people who get to that position and they know what they're doing. And so you're always talking to those people. And you, and you, you get them to understand need, but more importantly, you to understand how it works with them. Because I can sit in my ivory tower and speaking to someone and say, in Poland, and something may look really silly from my perspective in Poland, but actually in Poland, and I can sort of say, why are you doing this? I don't understand this. Until you go out to them and then you see and you explain to them, you talk to them about these things, then you get a kind of understanding from both sides. And actually, the chances are they know a downside more than I do. They know their customers, they know the suppliers, they know the sort of local sort of foibles of what's going on. So you have to work with them to understand that. So that's kind of where you start from. But then you've got to push to make sure that there's no, there's no slippage, you know. So, okay, you've got to give them that sort of bit of a leeway because they understand what's going on. But. But at the end of the day, cash needs to come in, be proactive, be prepared to learn, want, want to learn. There are elements of treasury where, you know, it can be. You know, there are lots of dull things. There's, there's no doubt as, as with everything there are, there are plenty of jobs that we come into. You've got to the same thing. Churn, churn, Ch. There's no doubt everything has that. There's no career that doesn't have that. You've got all that learning, but it's the. On top of that, you know, want to develop it, want to move it on. You know, if you could show a sort of keen attitude and are willing to learn within treasury, actually, and because it's a fairly niche side of finance, you know, you're going to be competing with a handful of other candidates for roles, and if you can just sort of show that sort of zest and that sparkle to want to, want to learn and so want to move it on. Then you can shine and the curve can climb up quite quickly. In Treasury I said there's always a stress, I think I mentioned before, about not being afraid to put your head above the parapet. It's a learning curve. I learn all the time. Every week, most treasury committees, I learn something new and they can sometimes get caught out with questions. I should have known that, okay, next time I'll do that. And then you're always thinking about the stuff that you produce for the treasury committees. Okay, maybe we can try this. So don't be afraid to suggest new ideas. But then, but know your audience, you know, they don't want it to be, you know, a showy off thing, but just be prepared to move things on. I think people like to see gentle proven in things rather than big ideas left, right and center because again, treasury is about risk and it's not, it's not supposed to be flamboyant, but it can still be exciting. I think the key to any treasure coming forward is I think you need to be more dynamic. It's a lot more dynamic of a profession and you've got to be able. The soft skills are really key. So of course you need to have the, you know, qualifications. I've got a bit of, you know, certificates and one in, in act just to bolster the, the SEMA qualification. So the technical side is important but beyond that it's, it's the, it's the ability to sort of look at things and try to evolve all the time. We all know that going forward, I mean one of the big projects we've got coming up now is going to be automation looking at evolving treasury management systems, looking at in fact how the cash forecast becomes more AI driven. So that's going to be a big thing and that will feed into everything. So as soon as you do, you know, if you do an FX transaction, it will feed through automatically from you. Perhaps you getting a forecast in, it then looks at what you need, it then goes away and produces the ticket to buy and sell currency in the future. That will then automatically feed into your cash forecast and into your accounts and into your hedge accounting. All that's probably going to be done by AI going forward. A lot of the cash forecast will be AI, but someone needs to understand it. It's all well and good having reams and reams of numbers lying around. First of all, as I said before, when you go to the next level, so you're looking at director levels. They're not interested in that detail. They just need to have a clear picture. And they need to know that you know where that's all coming from, because you'll get asked awkward questions.
