Nicolas Carrera shares career lessons on moving up in treasury, including how to lead through SAP implementation, build strong teams, and prepare for blockchain's role in supply chain tracking.
I think you have to be always open to change and to move on new tasks. My father did say it once to me. He says to me very important sentence in my life. He says, if you want to progress, you have to make your work good. And you have to begin that somebody understand your work as backup. Then if you have no backup, you cannot move up. And that's true. That's actually true. That's exactly. I like to share. I like to share what I've learned. I like to share my experience and what I have done. I have worked very hard on this SAP implementation. So when we implement the SAP and then we moved in the first step to a second installation of SAP treasury software at the time. And I think I demonstrate at that time that what we have committed or the business plan we had so three years to implement that we had the PWC at the time helping us on this project and to implement SAP we have done three years. After three years system was there big revenue generation for the company this year in the trading space, we are multiple of 10 million. To give you the information and not disclose too much as we are not this information are not out yet on the market and we have not known. But only the share structure is privately owned. So it's not a big deal. But so the revenue streams that we generate now with this system it was great. And that's what did bring me to get the role Then at one stage they wanted to move me when I was. So I moved from project leader to aria Treasurer in 2011. So four years after, if you want, we have treasury area. So we have one in Europe, we have one in Asia, based in Hong Kong. We are one in China in Shanghai and we have one in the US in Boston or next by Boston. And so at that time when I was there, they asked me if I had an interest to go to Hong Kong and had to convince my wife. And we were ready to move. And at that time my boss was a group treasurer decided to move back. He was South African to move back in South Africa for some health reasons and as well to go to see his family. And so from one day to the other, I was ready to move to Hong Kong. We're looking to rent a flat and I had to take over this position. And that was mainly thanks to this implementation that we have done, this leadership that I had during this implementation. But it's not only me, it's often in a team. You have to have very good link as well with your team. You have to have a professional team. I think that's also where I had the big chances. When you move up, you have to have people who are well trained and as well have a good understanding of your business that they can take over your position. The blockchain was the most digital one that they could even use then for their process. Then if you take a gold bar that take from us one kilo, they can process that then in their system and interlink that with the blockchain solution to have at the end the fine product who comes out this diamond parure will be exactly the same than the gold that you had originated from mine a on one month before. And this is what I think brings visibility for them in the future. And actually the market is not mature enough. We have seen that a lot of them had an interest, but only few of them have purchased this solution. It's more the one who have done it, to be frank. It's more to do a testing, a test to if that works for them. And that is where we are today. It's in an early stage for this blockchain solution. But I mean you have that tracking today for meat, you have this tracking for cheese, you have this tracking for different solution. For example, in pharmaceutical you can track as well the drugs to understand when the when they were originated, when they were produced and where was the storage done. And so I think that's the future. But maybe for that we will need to wait some few years that the people adopt this solution.
