How to Position Yourself for Promotions in Treasury with Nicolas Carrera

So 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 built their careers, where they are now and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next in this week's show. Delighted to be joined by Nicholas Carrera, the group treasurer at Metalor Technologies. Metalor is a Swiss based global independent company. They work within the precious metal area. They've been going for over 150 years. I'm going to get Nicholas to explain that a little bit later on in the show. We met each other a number of times actually at a number of conferences. He's really great speaker actually. Communication is one of the key things we talk about in our treasury skills wheel that treasurers need to be out there. This is what Nicholas does. He goes out, preaches the word of treasury, tells everyone about how amazing it is and some of the developments there. But as always Nicholas, enough to chat from me. Perhaps if you would talk about how you first started you did your economics degree but then discovered the world of finance and Treasury. As always, it's over to you sir.

Hi Mike. Hi everyone. Thank you for having me here today.

Pleasure.

So all begins for me, my career or with my study. So my study, I've done it in Switzerland. I'm born and raised in Neuchatel with part in the middle of the watch and jewelry region of Switzerland. You will see that as important a little bit later with the company I'm working with. And after doing my study in economy I went to do the faculty of law in Neuchatel. During this I have done part time internship during summer vacation with Shell. That is at that time that I discovered actually that all the trading world in oil and I was studying there. My father was working for Shell and he gave me the opportunity to go there to do this summer internship. And I found out that actually law study was good but that was not what I wanted to do in my future career. So I took then a first job in Geneva that was a little bit to go out from Neuchatel to see a little bit another city. Neil is quite a small size, medium small size city in Switzerland. We have like 35,000 people living here. It's a nice place with a nice lake. But I wanted to see a little bit more international city like Geneva and I have worked there for seven years actually my first responsibility was on accounting and ethics, trading and cash management. I entered there in 2001 as Treasurer. Treasurer in accounting. It Was actually sorry. And after some years I had the possibility to take the treasurer role there in this company. The company is called Skyguide. Sorry, it's an air traffic control company that was from 2000, from 1999 to 2007.

And air traffic control just maybe if you can explain Skyguide. Surely it sounds like a civil service type. I know it's not. But a civil service type company, you just come in, turn the handle because you're regulated. What's that like again for the listeners to perhaps describe it to them.

So it was very interesting time then they had decided at the time to move the headquarter from Bern from the Swiss German part of Switzerland to Geneva. And actually one of my skills is I can speak a little bit English, as you can hear French German and Italian. And so they were looking somebody who could have also the skills of the language. Then I had to interact a lot with the Swiss German part and as well the Italian. As you have an airport in Lugano, one in Bern, one in Basel, one in Zurich and one in Geneva. So you had to be able to interact with people in the main language. So in their own language was always better. And we had there the first. When I arrived, they were implementing SAP. That's where I have learned to all the different modules in SAP. That's a very important step also in my career. That's what has opened a lot of doors in my future career having done this SAP modules to understand how the full finance. But as well production planning and other modules works, sales works. And I was member there of implementation team. That was for three, four years after. After that achievement, the treasurer moved out to another company. And they did give me the role. Thanks to the good accomplishments we have done. On the same year we have done this SAP implementation. They decided as well to move from Swiss gaap. So from the Swiss accounting rules to efrs. And so as well there we had to build all the new regulation for EFR 16, 32 and 39.

Can you explain again for the listeners? So what does skyguide do their air traffic control planes.

So that was. I wanted to come to that now actually. So what they do the mission they have is to control the air traffic with crossing Switzerland and landing in Switzerland. It's a non profit organization. So what they have to do is they have to cover the cost with the air traffic fees that they are charging the airplane or the air companies to land in Switzerland or to fly through Switzerland. The big challenge is skyguide is affiliated to a European company which is called Eurocontrol and this is the company who is taking all the fees from all the companies were flying through Switzerland and over Switzerland. The point there, and maybe the people who know 1990 to 2007, the point there is you're getting revenue stream in euro and on the other side you had the cost were mainly people costs, salaries and some IT development or IT infrastructure that you have to build were in Swiss francs as well. So you had a lot of revenue in euro and a lot of cost in Swiss francs. And you had a yearly budget to have and you had to hedge yourself the Euro against Swiss francs. And now if we go back to 1999, the euro was at 1.60 in 2001, September 11th happened and in one night, one morning actually for the US but end of day for Europe the euro went from 160 against Swiss francs to 089. Wow. So that is where I get my second maybe small star. It's one of the things that we have inputted or I did bring that time is to build a hedging plan to smooth and the average hedging for fx. Why we have done that and we have seen that we had a lot of volatility actually in the year. So what we tried to do it's to avoid to have this volatility to have a better budgeting of our FX revenue that we have. And so we decided to hedge 80% forward for the full year and 20 to leave it open and to put some option structure beside lucky us. That was nice as can imagine. If you get revenue in euro and in September you are losing partially all to 60% or 70% of the value of what you are expecting to have for the next three months. Then we had this opportunity to have this build in place. So that was very interesting. I was there in Geneva region for seven years and that's a little bit when I decided after seven years there implementing this SAP and this treasury management system as well. Then we implemented a small treasury management tool to cope all these ethics operation. It's more front end than treasury management person safe. And then I had the opportunity and I was looking to relocate myself in the chateau where my girlfriend and my wife now lives at the time. And we decided. I decided a little bit by chance. I was having a solid interview with another company in the pharmaceutical in Basel. And coming back from this interview I had my head hunter at the time was not you. Sorry, Mike.

That's all right. No, it is now just for clarification, that's I've replaced him now that's it. Yeah, he's buried six feet under. That's it. We got rid of him. Now why we carry on?

And so at that time had the opportunity to have an interview here in the chateau for Metallur. And that's where I learned that they were in the commodity space in precious metal. That's something was frankly new for me. But they were looking somebody who had expertise to implement SAP and who have a good view on the FX exposure as that. At the time we had swings in the P and L in ethics who are more 5 or 6 million a year and they were not able to explain it. So that's why when I joined Metalor in 2007, at the time my position was a Treasury Ethics PM Trader and Project leader for this SAP implementation. That was a very challenging time then I had a lot to learn about the commodities. That means the first three years of my Metaloc career were very challenging. A lot to learn. People who are moving from a normal corporate to commodity space, you have a lot of more interaction than when you do a fix. For example, you are doing euro, Swiss dollar euro dollar pound. You don't care about where you have to deliver material. What is the issue behind that? I will explain that a little bit more later. But in the precious metal field you have a lot to link with the physical flows and that's also important to understand. And so when I move to Metalor maybe that I will tell you a little bit more later about what we are doing. That was for me a good challenge to take and that's why I decided in 2007, March 2007 to move, make the move.

Nicholas, one thing I want understand and listen to is the fact that you joined them in 2007. You're still there now, so 13 years later and your progression has been great. You know, within that I want people to understand and maybe as we go through just if you can explain how you position yourself for each of the promotions if you like again what you did and you know, I know this because I've got the background, we've discussed this and things like that, how you prepared yourself for each of the step ups. Because you know I've had it before where some of the listeners will have been in one company for 10 years but they'll have made two or three moves. You know how you achieve that within Metalor? Obviously you start as treasury project Manager so we'll start with that. But then how you progressed over to you.

Yeah, yeah. So I think what I have seen in my Career I think you have to be always open to change and to move on 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, what I have done. I have worked very hard on this SAP implementation. So when we implemented SAP and then we moved in the first step to a second installation of SAP treasury software at that 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 disclose too much as we are not this information are not out yet on the market and we have not seen. 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 I get a little bit lucky. 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 have 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 yeah, from. Yeah, 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 chance is when you move up, you have to have people who are under well trained and as well have a good understanding of your business that they can take over your position and your role.

Well, as your dad's. Yeah, exactly. As your father said, you know, have great backups, have great people that can your team around you rather is more important than just you. They say it's greater than the sum, don't they? The parts, I think.

Yeah, exactly.

And then you should do the area treasure role then. Because I don't want to run out of time because I think there's some great stuff I want to do back into with this digitalization of the chain and stuff like that. But then you got the group treasure role in 2013. Talk about the step up if you would then bring us up to date. And then let's dive into some of the blockchain things and stuff because otherwise we won't have time because it's great stories and some great developments with you guys.

Okay, so I mean before to go to that. So I quickly give what we have done during this area treasury rule. So mainly what we have built we were in Excel spreadsheets. So in 2011 to give you an indication we are trading monthly more than US$2 billion. So if you imagine we had settlement, we had daily payment of thousands of hundreds of millions going in and out. And you had all that in Excel spreadsheets. You had part of it. The accounting was done in SAP, but all the settlement and all that was done in Excel spreadsheet. To give you an indication in 2011 when I went treasurer I had to sign in the morning more than 80 faxes to send for between trade confirmation and settlement. And so we understood at the time we were so Metador did come from a company was owned by UBS. And so three old vice president of UBS did purchase the company at the time and to make it work and they get only we were linked to a bank. And then at one stage UBS decided to sell to sell Metalor. So to sell the asset of Metalor to this three person and they had to begin from scratch. When I arrived we had three banks counterparty we had 300 million of working capital financing. To give you an idea in 2011 so four years, five years back we were at roughly 1.8 billion US dollar of working capital financing with certain banks. Now we have 4 billion US dollar with 24 banks. So I mean you Cannot live with that in Excel. And already with seven or eight banks it was not. It was no more manageable. I mean if you had to do reports, you had to take too much numbers, Excel databases. And so it was very difficult for us to work with that. We decided at the time to take the project to put a Treasury management system. We went to do our RFP for four vendors. There was three systems where at the end we decided to go to SAP. Then the main decider for that. It's all the treasury system is in the middle of our core business. So we have three units we're producing. So one was refining the precious metals. So taking in all the scrap worldwide from mining, from recycling, from pharmaceutical companies, from electronic scrap. And we are recycling that. And then we have two others streams who are selling to semi finished product. You can find precious metal originated from Metalor in your mobile phone, in your connectivity, in 5G to the network. And you can find that as well on your credit card. The chips on the credit card is paid with platinum or palladium or gold. So you can find that. And so the two other companies are selling and one is doing more switches for electricity. So customers there are abb, Schneider, Siemens, Eaton of this world. And so the big companies. And that's how it work. We are centrally in the middle in a treasury. So all the companies were in SAP. And the best choice for us was to go to SAP. So we had to create the less API to intercommunicate with the system. And I think it was a good choice. And I will tell you a little bit later also what we are now doing. But it was a good choice. The only point I will say SAP is not a front end. So each time I have my traders and I have 12 traders in the company. Each time if I speak to my traders, they say to me, oh, Nicolas, I have to input each time the trade inside SAP, that's a loss of time. Yes. But on the other side, SAP, when you have done the flow and the flow are right, I mean you don't need to look at it, it's done. So I mean there was the give and the take. I think the give is we have a very nice system, works perfectly. The settlement. We were the first company in the commodity to put the empty six messages for precious metal. So the. We were the first corporate company. We work with a banking network, with the Swift network to be able to exchange that. So we have done a lot of steps. I have a very good team for that who are very did work very hard on this side. And that was very important for us, that we were able with now these big flows or inflows that we have on a daily basis to have that on a treasury management system.

Tell us about this blockchain solution, because it's something I've seen you present on at these conferences and things like that. I think, again, it's fascinating. We didn't, you know, I want to get into detail, but not, you know, sort of explain to why is it valuable? Why is it valuable to the company?

I mean, I don't know if depends where the people will hear the podcast are from, but in Switzerland, we had lately, in the last years, a lot of pressure from NGOs for sourcing in the precious metal field. There was a vote in Switzerland three weeks ago where it was called multinational responsible, where the initiatives were to put a rule that in the future NGO could attack a company like Metalor or like Nestle or other company, saying that you are not sourcing properly in this region. And then you had to demonstrate that you are doing all right. This is in the precious metal field. I mean, I'm 13 years now with Metalor. From day one, we had NGOs. I remember I live five minutes from work. We had people with flags in front of the office coming to demonstrate, saying, you are sourcing metal from Africa. In this region, there is child labor and stuff. And so we have done our homework. I think it's very important for us to find a way to be able to source the precious metal and to bring it to our end customers and to be 100% sure that what you have sourced in a dedicated region is the precious metal that you showed up to the customer at the end. And so that is why we decided to go. In a way, the blockchain was only the best system we had in the hands to demonstrate that then. Actually, what we have in blockchain, it's what we have today already in our system in SAP. But the problem is, if you want to put a trust in a system, then you have to go in a blockchain solution where you cannot go and amend something if you see there was something was not done properly. The big advantage of the blockchain is you have different players. So I explain you quickly the flow in few minutes.

Yeah, that's lovely.

We have at the beginning a mine. This mine will take pictures of the mining dory, so they will process the material, have a bar of precious metal with actually a percentage of gold with roughly, if we speak about gold Dory with 80% gold with different precious metal and with different deleterious elements at that time. The mining, for example, I take an example that we have shown demonstrate will be in Suriname, in South America. And they will make a picture of the doray bar. And they will input the information of the bar. So the weight, the quality, the deleterious element in a system so that is automated by them. So they have a machinery. They put the bar under. They make a picture. They have X ray gun, they put the X ray gun. There is the numbers. These numbers goes in a. In their system. And that is all this information goes in the blockchain system that is there. And the bar exists is bar number one and is there. Then through the process, you have transport companies. So a transport company will go to fetch that in helicopter to bring that to the capitals of Suriname. And then from there it goes via two flights, arrive in Zurich and then from Zurich come to Neuchatel with a truck. So you have between one and three to four different companies who have this precious metal. In each of them they have an app where when they receive, you have a seal, a crypto seal which is attached to the bar number. So it's in a wood box. And you have this crypto seal attached. The guy will only take that. He has taken the responsibility of the precious metal on that date. And then when he hands over to the other, the other will take his mobile app and rescan it and say, I take it over from Brinks, from Loomis and then Loomis. When they arrive in our plant, we will take it with our app here and add that. So you will have a tracking of all the precious metal. You know that the bar is always the same. This crypto seal is as well attached. So if it's open or break, then you have to redo all the checks. If all goes well, you have at the end a nice gearbox and security chain. At that time, we put that in SAP. We are running the full process on a dedicated plant. So we have a small capacity, small capacity. We have different industrial processes with our smaller industrial process to only have this precious metal for mining. And so you have a fuel value chain in your system with then interlinked with SAP with a different module. So we have the sales module, you have the purchasing module, you have the production module. And all that is interlinked. Why treasury has run that. That's also important. We are on one stage paying out the mine. And at the end we are delivering this precious metal to banks or to the other division. So we are in middle of all the flows. And so it's why we decided to have all the flows by us as well. We had this possibility to have already a lot of different interconnection API with the bank. And so that was the best place to have that. And so at the end you have a process. You can all sell a precious metal bar, a kilo bar. The owner can take his bar, can take the crypto seal with on the bar, he can take his app, he can put a picture of that. And with that or RFID and with that he can see when was the gold originated in which country and what was the lot originated and how many bars was created. And he has one of the bar of 130, for example.

Yeah. And why do you feel that's. I know why I feel that's important. But you know, maybe in your words, why do you feel that is important in treasury or important to the guys in the corporate and things like that? Obviously you've then got the responsibilities. But you know, why is that so important going forward as well?

So it becomes more and more important. And actually for us, we have seen that a lot of companies are investing a lot of time and money in ESG standards. And we as well, by the way. And what we have seen is a lot of company who are also luxury brands. So the watch and jewelry. Well, in our region. So in this region of Neuchatel, you have all the watch and jewelry guys. The biggest name that you can have in Switzerland. They are 40 km from our plant. And they have a very interest to be able to. So when you sell a diamond parure in gold and this has a cost of $1 million, what you don't want to find yourself, it's one day that you see that the gold comes give a country who's maybe not the best case, but comes from Congo. And then you have child labor there. And then you add mergers behind this gold source, bad sourcing. So what you want to be sure is when you sell that and you are a nice brand, is that you can at any time if somebody comes to say, oh, where the gold come from to have this information ready. What we have seen is the people who have done the different steps, there is different way to achieve that. Or you take it from A to Z on your side. But that is very difficult for these watch and jewelry guys. So then they have given us the mandate to say, fine, what can you propose us to have in the future as solution? Blockchain is one. We as well working for other initiatives. But 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 so 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 the 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 they were originated, when they were produced and where was the storage done. And so I think that that's the future. But maybe for that we will need to wait some few years that the people adopt this solution.

Yeah, and what you know, just going back, you run your great group treasurer run you know, a large team globally and things like that. I mean coming on to the people aspects because obviously you know we're hosting at the treasury recruitment company so we're very much into the people aspect. You and I have spoken about this as well and we've talked about, you know, the strength of the people. Exactly as you talked about earlier, your backups if you like, what's key to you when you're coaching, managing those guys, leading those guys. What's your ethos if you like. Again, this is for the listeners today and they're going wow. And I know that we'll put your details in the show notes later but you know, we're not at the end of the show yet. It's more, you know, what are your views on that? How do you lead them?

So first things it's to be part of a team and when I speaking with other group treasurer, what we have seen in treasury, in pure Treasury, I mean there is some, you can be trained today with some trading. But for example if you do treasury in a corporate companies and then you move treasury in a commodity companies, then you will change from A to Z. It's very different, different world, different dynamics. I mean we Are paying same day value, high payment, corporate, normal corporate. They have forecasts, cash flows and different. So what you have to be is you have to be open mind to learn. I think that is the most important point I've seen in the recruitment we have done in the last five years. I have changed a little bit my way to recruit people. I'm more taking people who have a good background. So good study, willingness to learn. Willingness to learn is for me the most important. And have demonstrate that this willingness to learn has bring them a lot in the company. So in the future, in a previous job and what we have seen here in the first, in the last people that we hired between two candidates. If one candidate is maybe a good study, but when we interview him, we see that this willingness to learn is there, but he's not maybe his first asset we will take better. The second candidate was this willingness to learn. Then it's a lot to learn when you move from say plain vanilla corporate treasury, say to a commodity company. And that is for me the first point is the people need to be willing to learn something every day. I mean I'm 13 years here. I mean we had Covid situation and I can give you an example there quickly. It's from one day to the others. We had to change our workflows to make payment to customers. We had to organize flights from Europe to us, from Europe to Africa, from Europe. And we had to learn that you can take a plane that costs you roughly $200,000 to go from Zurich to New York to deliver 10 tons of gold. And if the people they are not willing to quickly react and to change and to have a new challenge in front of them, then you're stuck. And that is, that is the most important. I think you have to have people who have this mindset and love to work where they are. And we have to change as well. We had to do a lot of different things. And now still today, 50% of the team works from home. But that works well. The people, they know when they have to be there. They know when it's a little bit some days the months where they can relax a little bit. I think for me that is most important. It's this learning skills and willingness that's very important.

Yeah, so we've covered blockchain, which I know is a big thing. We've covered the team stuff before we wrap up the show because again we keep the show to about half an hour, 40 minutes. It used to be the typical commute time for people though. People don't commute anymore. It's now. How long does it take you to go from the bedroom to your desk, back to the shower to get a coffee and then there. So maybe you made that stretch out for half an hour as you're very slow and you listen to a podcast. Joking aside, what else do you think is important about the future of Treasury? What are you seeing the developments? I know that again we see each other at all the conferences and I hope to do that in 2021. What are you seeing as the future? We've got the value chain. You've talked about that, we've talked about the people that you're managing. What other area you talked a couple of there is. What else do you think are important?

I mean, what I have seen in the past years, it's treasury was before part of larger finance and we were like helping finance for some tasks, like for hedging, for ethics exposure, for commodity exposure. I think what has changed already I've seen the first changes from 2001 after September 11th and now after Covid. It's when a CEO wants to understand where the cash sits, what you need as working capital in the next 10, 15 days. The information is biased and where the risk sits. So we are a little bit the risk mitigator and the cash owner of a company. And so with that, the visibility in treasury for me becomes more and more and it's very important that in the future. And that's what I've seen. And when you speak with other peers, they mentioned me the same. It's going forward. We have a lot of card to place on the digitalization process. All the flows on the payment and all these flows come to you. So we will be the first we'll have to move to a full digitalization. I'm expecting one day and I'm looking to be able to provide payment with cryptocurrencies that they can make the payment in the next six minutes. For us, it's very important that for the commodity space, when you purchase gold, you purchase with payment directly to our customer. And they are expecting when the plane is ready to fly away from a country, they are expecting to get the funds by them at that time. So response time to pay a payment 20, 30, 50 million of US$2 days. When we begin, it was like half a day and today already you can have it in the next 10, 15 minutes. But when you will be able to have this digitization step and have it in the next 10 seconds, I think that will be a next game changer. At least to be the first to provide that you could earn a lot of customers, only demonstrating that you are able to pay always on time and always when you mentioned it, and that's very important is that as a treasurer or even a Treasury member, and I always say to my team that they should go to conference. It's very important to go to conference to exchange with other treasurer to see what they are doing. What are the points? What are important for you? I mean, in the last Euro finance conference I was there, I was exchanging on a panel discussion on security and the new role of a treasurer. And I asked the treasurer from another big company next to me and he said to me, oh yo, by the way, we have done a penetration test in IT to see how our network can react if we have an attack. And that was last year in Switzerland. Four of the companies were here and one big company in watch and jewelry, they had attacks and they were penetrated by hackers and they were not more able to pay for a week time. So if that happens to us, I mean, and so we have run one. So they have finalized that these guys are professionals that are doing that and they find a lot of loopholes. I mean, we had senior management of Metalor, we had on the seventh senior management. Five of my colleagues did click on.

Oh, the Pentagon sending me this.

Yeah, they click on a link where they ask them to give the password from the computer. They did not seen at that time there was something bad, but they have clicked on the link. So this is also very important that when you go, for example, then you can come back say to your CEO and your IT manager, when was the last time you have done this test? The guy says, oh, it's four years ago. Okay, fine, then we put one in place. That's what you have done and you don't need that. But at least you have the possibility in going in these conferences and having exchanges with peers, even digital in these years to have the possibility to see what is the need of your company and to take the best to bring it.

And this is exactly. And this is why we do the podcast to get people like yourself on here. That actually really how you're bringing treasury properly value adding, not just looking after you talked about cash being the key thing and everything else, but you're actually really adding value to the business as a whole. And that's what a lot of the people listening today listen to this. Re. Listen to this. This is fantastic stuff, Nicholas. As we approach the end of today's show, I mean we could Keep going. There's so much more knowledge and stuff, but you're being kind enough to give us all this time. But what would you say? You know, we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes so that people can connect to you if you want to, if they're in treasury and things. But what would you, looking back over your stuff, your history, your career, and people look at you and say, do you know what? I want a career. Just like that. What would you tips would you give them? What top two or three tips as we end every show with, what would you say?

First thing is willingness to learn. I mentioned that. I think that is great. Six or seven times, I think. Yeah, I mean, you have to be, I mean, in all stuff I'm a person who have a lot of interest, different interests. But yeah, to learn each time something new and even to put yourself in a position to say, okay, fine, I have something, I have achieved something with my team. What are the next steps? Are we missing something? What is the next step to do? So that's the first thing you have to do then to be flexible. I mean, often and more you go up more you have to be flexible. Often you want to put something in place and then you see that maybe the priority of the company is not the one, but to take maybe the point that you want to achieve on site for half a year, a year, often two years. And then when is the right time, when you have the right possibility to demonstrate that you have to put that in place. For example, Covid, for example, if we did not have a Treasury management system and had to report, and before that, when we are in September 11, but already in the crisis in 2008 and 2011, we had to have the cash ready in the morning. It was ready at 10:30. Today with a treasury management system, you click at 8:45 traders comes in at 8:45 minutes later we have already and we are 100% bulletproof that the figures that we have in front of us are the correct one. And all this was only done that we were able with a very good, nice professional team to be flexible and to put in place the right steps and the right controls to have that ready at any time when you need visibility. And then I think when you are in treasury, you will have to run a lot of small projects, can, can be to generate a small API between a software with outside and your functional system with collecting, for example, cash. But when you do something, you have to be reliable. So you have to demonstrate what you do. You are professional and then it works if with that. That's for me, the three more important points if you want to progress in.

Treasury learning cash visibility and really employing all those systems and things like that. So amazing, Nicholas, amazing to chat to you today, sir. Thank you very much. As I say, connect with him if you want Amazing guy to see on stage and if you get to have a beer with him, he's great fun as well. And we, you know, there's, there's lots of stories and lots of different things, real passion about Treasury. So thank you very much for your time today, sir.

Thank you, Mike, and see you soon, I hope.