How Tradeweb Enhanced Its Treasury Team with Tech - No Expansion Required

I think about it the way I manage my personal finance, I get annoyed if I'm not earning the best return possible. Why not apply the same mindset to your own corporate job? There are options out there and just a question of taking a little bit initiative, doing a little bit extra work, but it's worth it.

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. This week's show I'm joined by Ashley Sorrell, the managing Director, head of Treasury FPA and Investor Relations at Trade Web Markets and a member of the executive Committee. Trade Web are a financial technology leader trademark driving the evolution of electronic trading. Tradeweb combines market expertise, technology, intelligent data and a global network of clients to improve the way financial markets trade. As an ideas and solutions company, they value the power of collaboration and innovation. And basically I'm going to get Ashley to explain all about them and then I'll also get Ashley to explain the linkage between ICD and Trade Web later on in the show. But first of all, I want to go back to how you first started, Ashley. How did your career first start in Treasury? Well, finance actually. And then, then you later on got into Treasury. Over to you, sir. How did it all start?

Yeah, so it's funny story, I was in college trying to decide what I wanted to do in life and at that point I thought I was going to go down the medical route, so bio chem, et cetera. I quickly realized that these subjects get incredibly hard the further you advance. At the same time, I was exposed to economics and economics came naturally to me. I found it fascinating studying markets and the interplay between different factors. And I thought about like, how can I apply this to the real world? Didn't want to be an academic and I felt like the finance was the closest match from a career standpoint to economics. And so I moved in that direction. I mean, I studied economics all through college, so I learned finance on the job. Essentially for me, if I were to boil it down, finance is just the ability to add, subtract, divide, divide and multiply. If you can do that, learn the language and you're off to the races. So that's kind of what I did. I taught myself finance.

And then where did you learn how to add up, as you said? And that added up to your career now. So what happened next because then you joined. How did you then get to Credit Suisse or how did it all start?

Yeah, so I was always fascinated by business ever since I was a kid. My dad used to come back from the office, tell stories about like what he did during the day. It was all fascinating. He worked in different fields, marketing, sales, et cetera. But then in college I got exposed to the stock market. I was part of the investment club there. And for me the stock market was fascinating because it was sort of this attempt at predicting the future. But in doing so it wasn't just a pure quantitative exercise. It was like a mix of psychology, emotion. And how did it all come together? It was very fascinating. So I ended up getting an internship at Credit Suisse within equity research. And that's where I started off my career. Ended up being an equity analyst. Got a full time offer to come back. It was just eye opening, the way folks craft a narrative, you know, for if you think about the stock market, for every buyer there's a seller, right. There's someone taking the other side of every single trade. Everybody, everybody. And both sides have the same amount of conviction that what they're doing is.

Is correct, is the right.

So that, that kind of tension that creates these interesting outcomes was very fascinating. And so that was my, that's where I started off. That's where I spent like nine years at Credit Suisse.

And you covered the non bank financials there. How did that then prepare you for later on? Corporate treasury or the move them into corporate development and things?

Yeah, I kind of consider myself really lucky to have may have been entering the industry at the time when bank stocks or bank financials were receding into the background. And it was all about how technology was taking over the world of finance. And so the non bank financials that were really powered by technology became hot stocks. And so these are like companies like electronic trading platforms, discount brokers, rating agencies, index companies, they're proliferating rapidly. And that's where I sort of cut my teeth as a, as an analyst, like really studying the space and kind of getting to know the drivers in depth, forming a view on the secular trends. And the good news there was it was all super positive. And sometimes you catch a wave and when it's a growth wave like that, it's like eye opening because you get to be at the forefront of seeing real transformation happen. Yeah, and that's, that's where I first actually came across Tradeweb as well, which is where I'm here, where I work today.

And who are Trade Web for? Those people that a lot of people do, but a lot of people going, who are they? What are they as a company or what were they at that time? Actually, that was eight, nine years ago. So when you joined them, what was the situation?

Yeah, so tradeweb is the largest electronic platform to buy and sell fixed income. And today our clients span this gamut. So you have large institutions like hedge funds, asset managers, central banks, to Fortune 500 corporates that we got through our recent acquisition of ICD to financial advisors. So we have the entire spectrum. Anybody who's serious about investing or trafficking in the fixed income space ends up using Trade Web. Our claim to fame is like we do this all electronically, so it's a easy, intuitive interface that people find very easy to use. And today we're a trusted partner for the financial ecosystem. There's about $2 trillion that trades on our system every single day. And so we are very akin to like an Amazon for fixed income trading. We have buyers and sellers just trafficking all day long. And we have done this over the last 20 plus years. We started off with government bonds and today we do credit ETFs, money markets, and now we're also global. So, you know, Europe, Asia is a big emerging area for us as well, alongside all the emerging markets. And so it's been a company that's been growing rapidly, that's been leveraging technology to capitalize on change. It's been a fun ride ever since I joined them about now. It's been about eight years.

And you're the treasurer there now, but you originally started, you went through the IPO where you were then in a role there, and then you transitioned to treasury. And having advised the CFO and Treasury yourself, I thought it was an interesting one. It's not me asking three questions, but that development, that arc for your story. Can you talk us through that?

Yeah. So, like taking a step back, you know, when I was an equity research analyst and that's when I first encountered trade rep, I knew this was a company that was shaping the future. And as I thought about my own future in equity research, I felt that the equity research industry was going to see some challenges. And I didn't want to grow in a shrinking industry. So I thought about pivoting to a corporate and a corporate that I felt had great growth prospects. At the same time, you know, any of these pivots, you take a little bit of risk. You're moving from a commentator to the role of a practitioner. So I started off corporate development and strategy. That felt like home to me. Coming from equity research, that's what I did Day in and day out. I tried to understand company strategy and direction. And so that was kind of my first pit stop. And then that morphed into Trade Web actually going public. And so we went public about six years ago. We listed the nasdaq. Today, the ticker is tw. And that gave me an opportunity to help the company shape their story for the external investors. A lot of the investors were actually my old clients when I was an equity research analyst, and the analysts were my old competitors. So it was a very natural segue into investor relations. And it was fun telling the story. And it's also at the same time challenging to be able to take a complex story and distill it into few sentences and make it easy to grasp. For an equity investor, it's always challenging. Lots of companies have done it, but every company does it differently. And so that's how I entered the investor relations side. And then on the investor relations side, I ended up playing a big role in shaping our capital management story. And that was really my first intersection with treasury as a function. And it was on the capital management side, or more what I described as more the strategic side. And we were contemplating things like our first dividend. Should we pay it? How big should it be? Should we have a buyback program and buy back our stock in the open market? How do we think about M and A and conserving or managing cash to fund some of these inorganic aspirations that we had? So it was like, very fascinating, but there was a lot of synergy between that and investor relations. So that then led into another pivot where a couple years ago we went through a CFO transition. Our old cfo, retired new cfo, came in. I kind of put my hand up and said that, you know, I'd love to learn a little bit more about the operational side of finance. And I got. That's when I took on FP&A, which is financial planning analysis. And the treasury functions full time in addition to also managing investor relations.

And now you're in that seat. How has your perspective changed sort of thing, you know, has it surprised you because you were that side and then you sort of. You were halfway around the table and then it's like, right now, this is your big seat.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, when you migrate from being a consumer of a product to maybe the creator or manufacturer of a product, you really get to understand or appreciate the inner workings or like how the sausage is made. And so stepping into the treasury role, it was an eye opener. I found it fascinating that it was incredibly manual at that time and in some ways ironic because, you know, as I described Tradeweb a little earlier, we were at the forefront of electronifying fixed income markets, but our own finance function wasn't necessarily that electronic. And so that to me was a low hanging fruit. You know, I often compare and contrast what describes institutional finance with personal finance. Right. Personal finance. You can pull up an app, get all the information presented to you or packaged in a really nice way. It's real time, it's instantaneous. There aren't any lags, you don't have to do a lot of work, it's all been done for you. And so that kind of user experience, you know, was sort of the vision I had for the treasury function. How could we leverage technology and maximize the efficiency of what we were doing? And efficiency expressed in multiple ways, Accuracy, saving time, making the job more enjoyable for the team, thinking about how to make the function more strategic. But these were sort of, if you set off in a different direction. I inherited the treasury function. When I described it's very manual, really Excel based. We didn't have a Treasury management system. That's the first thing we did. We went on this journey of installing a Treasury management system and that was sort of the foundation or heartbeat of the function today. And then we lay it on other technology platforms. I know we'll talk about ICD later on. ICD was one of them.

Yeah. And then, you know, of those, the TMS implementation, some of the investment strategies, what's been the biggest challenge so far for yourself?

Tmss or freshly managed systems, they're great, but in order to make them work for you in your ecosystem or world, you have to really integrate and create some level of customization to adapt it to your workflow. That takes time. And so the challenge usually is tasking the team to go about their day job, but also think about the future and almost wear two hats at once and invest the time and energy to get the implementation right and correct. And then once it's implemented, it's not like a set and forget it mentality. It's one of continuous learning. Yeah, Technology. I think technology and the evolution of technology doesn't stop, it keeps advancing and so new features and functionality get constantly rolled out. It's very important that we stay on top of those trends and really maximize the ability of software. Yeah. So that's always the challenge. Technology is changing. Are we set up in the Best possible way. And what else can we do to improve our process and try and be a best in class treasury function?

I was talking to a treasurer the other day and one of the key things we talked about, he said it's all very well, you set up your tms, you get all the pipe work sorted and it's like brilliant. And then you sort of sit back for a while and it's working. Brilliant, lovely. And then he's like, okay, and then all the pipes are going to change. He said, no, our pipes working and the pipes are working, but okay, we need to up the flow, we need to change this. And he was like, right, that. And we're not going to reimplement. But that's sometimes a challenge. And he was talking about also, you know, the attention sometimes going back to treasury when something breaks.

Yes.

When you've got that, how have you shifted? It's not just when things are breaking or stretched, you know, how have you done that?

I think at the end of the day, if you can maybe rise about the operations and get that important that at the end of the day, the treasurer's role, to make sure that the operational element is secure and well executed. But then how do you also earn a seat at this, what I describe as at the strategic table? Are you influencing capital management decisions? Are you influencing just technology transformation decisions by sharing your own experience within your function? I think at the end of the day you're trying to become a valuable partner to the cfo. And I think there are maybe a couple of ways to do it, but perhaps the most impactful way is to actually impact the balance sheet. And that to my standpoint, is making sure that you are not only just managing cash, you're also maximizing the interest earned and not leaving money on the table. And that is maybe the most tangible way to make an impact both internally and externally. Because your income statement, especially your public, is consumed by your board and investors, et cetera. That's probably the most tangible way when you can make an impact. But then it's obviously very important to get all the operational elements right as well.

Yeah. And then you. I know that and linked to that. We had our conversation before and you talked about the investment policy, rewriting some of that and what triggered that or you know, what. And what was the follow up impact?

Yeah, I think the ultimate vision that we had here was we want the treasury function to be as sophisticated as possible. And we wanted to do it in a way that made sense from, you know, a financial control standpoint. And all the parameters that a Treasury function needs to operate in. One of the gating factors. We felt that our all investment Policy Statement, or IPS that was written maybe a decade ago wasn't necessarily well defined or didn't really reflect modern investment options. There was a time when bank accounts were really the only game in town. Now there are so many other cash alternatives that a treasurer could potentially use and leverage. But you need to get permission to do that. And the IPS is a way to make sure your CFO is on site, your audit committee's on side, the board is on side, and so you get permission to be able to invest in other alternatives. Money market funds being one example, but there are others as well, and that's sort of your guidebook. And then as technology advances and there are new vehicles, instruments that Treasure could potentially invest in, you update it. But that was really the drive. The drive was we want to get more sophisticated, we want to maximize interest, we want to make sure we are operating a modern technology function and do it in a compliant way. So that led to the rewrite of the ips.

And is that the advice you're going to give to treasurer, other treasurers? If you want more visibility with your CFO and board, that's a great way of doing it, or are there other ways or what's the sort of advice you give them there?

I think so. I think it depends on where your company is in their company lifecycle. Right. Some companies are flush with cash, some companies, you know, cash management is an hourly headache, Right. Because you're trying to really optimize the flows. I think either way, I think you first have to do what I describe as the crux of the job, which is the operational side, ensuring that the bills are paid, cash is being collected, all of that, that is the core. But once you do that, it's that sort of almost becomes muscle memory in some ways. And then the only change you're making is when the company expands, adds new division and does an acquisition, which brings along a whole wave of work that I definitely don't want to minimize. But then if you want, if you want to go like beyond that, I feel like thinking about cash management proactively is probably the best way to go. And that has multiple dimensions to it. It's like actively negotiating with your banks around the interest that you get and then in many ways being a fiduciary to your shareholders and thinking about, like, how can you earn the best return on the cash without taking exorbitant amount of risk. We're still a Treasury function. We're not a hedge fund. It's going to be cash and cash alternatives. It's going to be short dated instruments, very safe and secure. But often you'll find that it's very easy to leave stuff in a bank account, but with a little bit of extra work, you end up. And a little bit of extra work, you end up striking the right balance between bank and other cash alternatives. And you can do it without really expanding the team. Our team hasn't changed since we moved in this direction. It's still the same size. We just use technology to do it in the most efficient way.

Yeah.

And that's been a great outcome for us.

And you touch on technology, obviously. I then got introduced to you through our podcast sponsors, icd and. But you had an interesting. And this is why we jumped on the podcast, because you've got an interesting journey with icd. You were a client of ICD or you brought in icd. Can you talk us through that? Because again, it was fascinating to me that you're a treasurer and, you know, Treasure said, well, who are icd? Why do they use them? And everything else. But what drew you in? Or what was the, you know, explain your journey, if you like, with the group and then we'll sort of bring the listeners up to date a little bit.

Yeah. So while I was working on the corporate development strategy side at Trade Web, one of the things we do is we look at potential acquisition opportunities. That's how ICD came across our radar for the first time. And it was a very interesting story that rhymed with the Trade Web story here. It was the. Rather than the electron fixation of fixed income markets, there's electronification of the treasury function from an investing standpoint. Treasurers bought money market funds picking up the phone or using very basic portals out there. And then ICD was sort of like the best in class independent platform. And so we evaluated several as a consumer in terms of, you know, that vision that I laid out let us establish a best in class treasury function. We looked at many different treasury portals and then what resonated with ICD and why we went with ICD was we felt that the product options were best in class. We had access to everything. And because that was all they did, they were independent. That was the entire existence of the company. The client service was phenomenal. And so if you think about a treasurer trying to embark on a transformation journey, it can be daunting. You don't know what you don't know. Having a partner who has seen other treasurers go down a similar journey, has advice, is very responsive. Is Tech Forward willing to integrate with the treasury management system, willing to help guide you with other strategic decisions on the treasury side? That's where ICD added a lot of value. And apart from their product options, where I really appreciated was the analytic capability. There are lots of portals out there with just limited amount of options to invest in. But marrying that analytics and having it all flow through, because if you do it on the ICD portal, it flows into the ICD analytics. You don't have to do extra work. That was an easy sell.

Yeah. And then I know that when you and I had our pre discussion and I sort of pushed it back to, you said, look, independence, you know, you've said treasurers at the time and it was, it was gold. You know, I said, you don't have to use it if you're a treasurer, but you're leaving money on the table. Could you explain that? Those are your words. Can you explain what that means? Some treasurers are not sure. But explain what that means to you.

Yeah. Simply put, like, are you taking advantage of the best yield you can earn out there without compromising on your risk parameters or principles? And so one easy example is what we did was we were cash was primarily at banks. We negotiated rates up. After that. There were still certain banking partners where the rates were not as attractive as money market funds. So we proactively shifted cash to money market funds to making sure that we were maximizing the yield we were getting. And the other thing we found with money market funds, especially if you're in an environment where rates are being cut across the global financial ecosystem, money market funds are in a lag. So they often offer higher yields than banks for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, depending on the product. But there's often a lag that you can capitalize on. So from my standpoint, it was earning significantly more interest, in some cases up to 200 basis points more, without taking a lot of extra risk. Money market funds are tested. They're fairly liquid, they're reliable. You can look at all the underlyings. You can run all sorts of analysis. You can look at credit ratings. You can get very comfortable with what exactly a money market fund holds. But it's designed to be a cash and cash equivalent at just a better yield on average than a bank account. And so we move a lot of our excess cash, or idle cash into money market funds as often as we can. By doing so, we're able to maximize the interest that we earn. We've also looked at other vehicles to increase our interest. We've looked at fixed term funds. We've also in the US looked at insured deposit accounts as well. So these are just different technology solutions that are out there, but they're all cash and cash equivalent.

And you and I also talked about the fact, and this was why we were doing this one to one that we were keen not to be salesy about it, you know, because there are, there's a sales element to. And you're not linked to that, which is great. And actually that's why they're independence, because you've been through that journey yourself. Is it as a product plug and play or is there more to go on? We talked about the pipe work. What would you say? Because, you know, some people say, hang on, I've got a lean treasury team. You're saying, I'll bring in a new tech. You said you've got a small team yourself, but yeah, that's all very well actually. But then I know you predated this and then getting together. Can you explain that?

Yeah, so I'll share with you. At the time we implemented icd, it was a team of two. It was myself and another person. They're really small.

Yeah.

And from icd, what made it easy was it was more of a software setup. So you can get the up and running pretty quickly and from there on it's a function of like how complicated you want to make it. Do you want to integrate the ICD portal with the treasury management system and extract or glean more efficiencies? You can do that. And so we invested the time to make sure we were taking advantage of all the efficiencies possible. But at the end of the day, implementation is very quick. Like I said, it's a software setup. And then from there on you have decisions to make. And that kind of comes down to the frequency of buying money market funds. Are you going to do it every day? Then maybe it's worthwhile integrating it with your treasury management system. You're going to do it once a week or once a month. Then you can just rely on the web software portal login, place your trades and then manually upload it to whatever system that you want to upload it to. But it's not labor intensive, which I thought was also a big selling point. And the other thing I thought was also a big selling point was it doesn't cost you anything. Implement the software. There's no software fee or recurring fee or license fee for Using the ICD software, they don't charge the corporate, they end up charging the money market fund families. So if I'm buying a fund from JP Morgan Asset Management or BlackRock Asset Management, I see these charging BlackRock and JP Morgan and not me. So it doesn't cost me anything. It can be quickly implemented. I can make a tangible impact to the bottom line by increasing interest income. I felt it was a win, win, win on many fronts. And so for me it ended up being a no brainer, something we had to sort of do.

And that was one of the reasons we partnered with icd because also that independence, you know, we get approaches from lots of cash systems and yeah, we can do this and immediately, oh, we're going to charge this corporate, we're going to charge. And I'm like, whoa, whoa. As soon as I'm doing that I'm like, that's not a message I want to be taking back to my treasurers. Yeah, I've got this great idea. It's going to cost you loads and there's loads of implementation. And you mentioned there about the not being time intensive and high value. Any real world examples or any. Anything that you can explain to the audience?

Yeah, I think we had our initial testing and website up in less than a week. Then after that we were in the midst of implementing a Treasury management system itself. So that was very labor intensive. But if we already had in place and we were just doing the ICD integration, we're talking probably another couple of weeks like max and you could be up and running in a month in a fairly sophisticated way without you doing a ton of work. Because the software installation is really. You work with E managers to get it approved for your corporate environment and then you're off. And after the races we've done a.

Quite a deep dive on the product there. Do you see that your role maybe needs to be more like a portfolio manager? Is that the way you think a lot of treasurers need to be or.

I think so. I go back to this concept of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders was like maximizing value. Right. Especially if you're public. The way to maximize value is to make sure you're earning an adequate return on your capital. Cash is one form of capital. So why not try and maximize the value on cash and do it in a way that suits your risk appetite. Right. You may want to just stop at money market funds or you may want to buy short dated government instruments like U.S. treasury bonds or European government bonds. You may be willing to get Duration, risk, money market funds are overnight instruments. You may want to go out one week, you may want to go out one month, you may want to go out three months. It all depends on your cash flow, life cycle and your needs. But making sure you have a point of view on that and it's just not parked in bank accounts I think is the way of the future. I've seen the rapid growth of the money market portal industry itself. You know, ICD and others as the CFO function gets digitized and there are lots of different software solutions for all different elements from, you know, AP, Treasury, Payroll, etc. It's a software, it's a software soup essentially. Making sure that treasury doesn't get left behind, I think is key. And this is like a very easy. If I compare and contrast some of the other implementations that I've seen at Trade Web, they are six months to sometimes a year long implementations of software. Here you're up and running, you know, in a week to a month. You're able to make an impact a lot faster than I think. And it's pretty, it's low hanging fruit in my perspective. I think you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you don't take advantage of it.

Our podcast is sponsored by icd. ICD are an independent platform trusted by thousands of treasury professionals worldwide to manage short term investments. One global treasurer recently told me it was one of the smartest technology decisions they've made. No license fees, rapid setup and tangible returns. If you're looking for a smarter, simpler way to manage your liquidity, then head to find out more at our partners page treasuryrecruitment.com forward/partners and find out more. Let's get back to the episode and I've talked to you and Trade Web and ICD and some of the guys. It's like that Trivial Pursuit, the sort of the pie sort of thing. And this is one of the slots in there because I know that there's other developments in commercial paper you've got that it really changed or enhanced it, didn't it? Because for you as a treasurer that was something you said to me that you've now got a handle on. Explain that for an audience.

Yeah, so the vision when we acquired ICD was great, was a great solution for overnight liquidity or daily liquidity in terms of money market funds. But we recognized that Treasuries had different risk appetites. Some of them are sitting on large cash piles. We're talking about very large tech corporates out there sitting on Billions of billions of dollars. And they're just very highly cash generative. And I feel like as more and more companies end up becoming more and more successful and profitable, the byproduct of that tends to be cash tends to build up on your balance sheet, especially if you're not acquisitive. Even if you do an acquisition, you end up in the same situation again. And so use the term thinking about it like a portfolio manager, I think that is going to become increasingly more common. It's not just about cash preservation, but it's also about cash optimization would be the way I describe it. It's a new mindset, cash optimization, doing both, having a dual mandate. And so part of that is what does Traderev excel at? Traderev, as I mentioned today earlier on the show, was it is the preeminent platform to buy fixed income securities. Some of them are US Government bonds, European government bonds, very short dated commercial paper or treasury bills. These are the kind of instruments that would appeal to a corporate treasurer, but I don't think a corporate treasurer will be buying equities, for example. Right. Risky, Too volatile? Not really. Doesn't really suit the treasury mandate. But other instruments can and making them easily accessible is key. With democratizing access to these instruments is key. And so we thought it would be a cool concept to turn ICD into like a one stop shop where you can invest according to your liquidity needs overnight, daily, longer duration. And so as you mentioned, the first product we're rolling out will be treasury bills because of the demand that we got from our client surveys. And we have a couple of others in the pipeline as well. And as you can imagine, they're all the cash and cash equivalent sorts like commercial paper or even repo for example.

And what's great is that you're doing it from a treasurer's perspective. And this is why we were doing it. Again, it was more, you could explain it from your seat literally with a small team actually implementing it. And this is what you could switch on and off and do everything else. And where do you see it going from here? Obviously technology's developing and stuff. What's happening next?

Yeah, I think one thing that we didn't really spend a lot of time on is okay, as you get more sophisticated, you need to also excel at reporting, right, the reporting and analytics. What are you doing? Are you earning the best possible yield? Are there any benchmarks out there that you're benchmarking yourself to? You can see like some of the language I'm using is very similar to A portfolio manager, this is the mindset that they think about, you know, what is the opportunity cost, are they doing the best job that they can. So I think analytics is a key thing. The nice thing about ICD was they have a tool called portfolio analytics, which basically if you buy anything on the platform, all the data rolls up into this analytics function so you can have a consolidated dashboard of all the investments and risk in one place. I think reporting is going to be increasingly important as the treasury function gets more sophisticated, more and more, there'll be more instruments that are democratized to every access democratized for treasurers. One of the things we also buy here at Trade Web are fixed term funds, which is basically like a security wrapped up in a fund. So you can buy a US treasury, but it's in a fund structure. So it looks like a money market fund, but just a U.S. treasury, all right, versus going out and buying the U.S. treasury itself. So these are new things out there, same risk profile as cash, arguably, if you are taking the risk of the government, the US. The US Government in this case. So fairly safe money, good assets and more and more will be developed. And you as a treasurer, I feel like staying on top of these trends and figuring out how to take advantage of them in a way that makes sense for you and your company at the life cycle that you're at. Right. It's not going to be the best option for everybody, but I think that's the direction we're headed. It's going to become more pervasively common that folks think like this. And that's what we've seen in all the data. And ever since we acquired ICD, the client onboarding, etc. And the feedback we get, we're not.

Quite at the end of the show yet, but we're not far off. But the thing I was going to say to you is when you and I had this conversation before, you talked about the risk analytics and all the reporting and everything else. When you would then talk about it, deepening your relationship with your CFO, you'd seen it also with other CFOs that you'd becoming, you know, more of that, that sort of moving to become their CFO's friend, you know. Can you describe that? How's it worked?

Yeah, I think doing anything to make your manager look good or their life easier, it's kind of like the name of the cave. Right. And so if you can show your CFO that you are running a Treasury function that is leveraging all the latest technology is operationally Efficient. Not only that, that you are actually helping them manage earnings with contributing through interest income. And on top of that you are giving them reports so they can be aware of what's going on without having to ask. They can share that with the board or the audit committee. You're making them look good. It's like a win, win, win on so many different elements. If you end up gaining the trust of your cfo, I think then you get buy in for other treasury investments that you may or may not need. We touched on the fact that you know a little bit the treasury at the end of day is a cost center. Right. It's not a profit center. A we're approach, we're adopting a the mindset of a portfolio. You kind of turn a little bit into a profit center of sorts, but at the end of the day you're just finding a way to add value. And if this is one of the ways to do it, I think it's one of the easiest ways to do it actually.

And just like yourself, as you put it, you become the trusted advisor to that cfo, they're turning to you for that kind of forward focused advice which a lot of treasurers are being consulted to by CFOs. Previously there was stuff like blockchain and go and check it out. Now we're not doing it. Now look at AI. Look at all these. These are the other future focused things that you're being asked to do, aren't you?

Yeah, definitely. We're thinking about some of the emerging technologies. A question of timing. When is the right time to seriously invest resources and your own time in researching and scoping out a use case? Right. I think AI is pretty promising. There's definitely stuff that AI can help in terms of manual processes, more efficient or even in terms of generating reports. We're exploring use cases here at Trade Web, so that can be pretty interesting. And I think the other part of that we touched on in terms of being a trusted advisor is as a treasurer, I think you have two options. You can either be a recipient of capital management decisions or you can be an influencer. Right. So I would say to the extent that you can get yourself into the mix or get yourself a seat at a table where you actually express your own point of view, what should we be doing with the dividend? What should the size of our buyback program be? And like, why does it make sense? These are other ways to kind of really make an impact. But these are the same questions that the board or audit committees asking your CFO So if you can help them craft the answer or come up with a solution and partner with them to figure out what works, I think you become that much more valuable as a treasurer.

Yeah, you have the voice, but also then you gain that seat at the table, you know, and help them as well. And we're going to put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. This is how we wrap up each of the shows, you know, the takeaways. So if you're looking back at your earlier stage career and then maybe a bit further on in your career. Any advice? We've given some great advice for current treasurers, but also maybe as we reflect on this as well.

Yeah, I'd say don't be afraid to try something new. You know, if I look at my career, I've pivoted multiple times. I feel like all these pivots collectively, when I step back, have helped me develop a keen sense of the big picture. How do all the functions interplay with each other? How are we all rowing in the same direction to advance the corporate cause? How to really influence or make an impact with your cfo. And I think that's invaluable. Ultimately, I think wisdom is a collection of experiences. The more you can accumulate, hopefully the more savvy you can be in terms of making decisions to help the company.

You become a portfolio career, your portfolio managers, your portfolio career. Amazing.

I feel like I've been fortunate to be given the opportunities. You also got to put your hand up. You got to take a little bit of risk. Right. Sometimes it may not work out, but I think I've enjoyed kind of having to learn and relearn every few years.

And just coming back just to wrap up, as I say, about icd, you know, we've talked about it quite a lot, but I just wanted to round out on that. As you said before, it's, you know, why wouldn't someone use ICD you're just leaving on the table? Would that be right. The right way to describe it?

Yeah, I. So I think about it, the way I manage my personal finance, I get annoyed if I'm not earning the best return possible. Why not apply the same mindset to your corporate job? There are options out there and just a question of taking a little bit initiative, doing a little bit extra work, but it's worth it. And it's at the end of day, it's not really intensive. A lot of it can be automated, too. It's just a function of spending a little bit of time.

Returns are fantastic. Right?

Yeah.

Ashley Amazing. Knew it would be like this. We had a great call before. We had a great one. Now we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes so lots of people connect to you. So LinkedIn is going to take off now. There you go. And also we're doing this just before you're having your second child. So in. Enjoy, enjoy that time. And yeah, thank you very much, sir. It's been brilliant.

I'll have a new portfolio to manage.

Yeah, exactly. Lots more. Lots more on your hands as well.

Yeah, Fantastic.

Great stuff.

All right, thank you. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Cheers. Bye.

Today's episode of the Treasury Career Corner was brought to you with the support of our partners, icd. If you're looking for a smarter way to manage your short term investments, ICD's independent portal gives you a access to a full range of investment products, integrated analytics and a simple centralized platform built specifically for Treasury. If you head over to TreasuryRecruitment.com partners, you can learn more and we'll be able to connect you with the right person icd for both you and your business. Many thanks for listening to the show and thanks for your continued support.