How Treasurers Navigate International Crises with Toby Shore

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 and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next this week's show. Delighted to be joined by Toby Shaw, Senior Director, Group Treasury Risk and Insurance, and at Emirates Global Aluminium. The group is the world's largest premium aluminium producer and biggest industrial company in the uae, outside oil and gas. Now, I've got lots of stuff here about Baux Mining and everything else. I'm not going to go into that. Toby wants to talk about that later in the show. Feel free. Yeah, just you can you pile into there? Just before the show, we were having a really good chat about Toby's background, which is really different to a lot of treasurers didn't come up through the sort of treasury analyst, manager and everything else. Actually jumped in from insurance and risk and lots of other areas and things. So it's going to be. Be a great show. Toby, take us back to the very beginning when you're, you know, you're a young lad and everything else. First getting into finance and everything else. Talk us through it because. Amazing background. Over to you, sir.

Thanks, Mike. Look, yeah, I think. Great to be here for a start and yeah, thanks for the summary. I think I'm a big advocate that every story has to have a beginning, middle and end. And so I think way back in the beginning, as a young lad, finished my. My university degree in international business. Why I did that, I've got zero idea today and I don't think it actually qualified me to do anything. But my first job out of the university, apart from PA pouring beers in a bar and living on a resort island on the Great Barrier Reef, was actually working for the Indonesian government, of all things, doing customs clearance from Australia. So that was really involved around mining, metal, agricultural products that Australia was actually sending up to Indonesia. And the whole idea back then was to clear the goods from, in a customs perspective, to hopefully stamp out graft and corruption on the docks in Indonesia. So I've got a very, very, very quick baptism of fire into international trade, into commodity trade and into geopolitical politics between Australia, Indonesia and elsewhere around the world. Moved from there into a credit insurance company, part of now qbe called Trade Indemnity. Head office was in Canary Wharf. I think it was one of the first entities down in Canary Wharf there. And it was a niche part of the insurance industry. So niche that my manager at the time Tells me that when he actually applied for the job, he was a big samo guy, played rugby, said, I thought the actual job said undertaker, not underwriter. And so he thought he was applying for an undertaker's job, ended up as a credit insurance underwriter. So spent four or five years doing that is like one of those things you never wish ill on people. But I was very fortunate that we had a couple of crises at the time. We had the Asian crisis, we had the Russian crisis. So I spent two and a half years circumnavigating the globe, restructuring corporate debt profiles, negotiating insolvency proceedings, doing all the things that you'd love to be doing as a. As a young 27, 28 year old. And that took me from the Philippines to Latvia to Czech Republic, into the States. From there I actually moved into the Australian Government Export Credit Agency Ethic, Export Finance Insurance Corporation, doing exactly the same thing for the Australian government, except two years later. So all in all, I've probably spent about four or five years just circumnavigating the globe, doing some. What was probably on, in hindsight, some silly things on occasions and going into some difficult situations. But in terms of the life experiences as well as the general economic and financial experiences that was given to me at that time was it was unparalleled.

So when you say that, you know, you were gaining again, these are treasury guys again, hang on, you know, Toby's our Treasury, you know, all this is different, but what was it giving you in terms of international finance and understanding of relationships? Because, you know, again, for some of these guys that are like, oh no, I should always stay in treasury, what has it given you?

So I think that. And that's actually an excellent question, so I think that grounding really gave me the ability to do three things. One was to have a keen understanding of financial balance sheets and how resilient businesses are. And you don't always see a resilient business through the balance sheet. It's the ownership, it's the structure. It's actually understanding what the whole business is about, who they sell to, what their customers are like, what keeps the owners awake, what keeps the CFO awake at night. And it's really having a deep understanding of that. Second, I think certainly living in Dubai now, but I've always worked in a multicultural environment. I've worked in Asia, I've worked in Australia, I've worked in the UK and now in the Middle east. And I think that actually gives you an enrichment and as a treasurer, to really look to understand the different dynamics that people can bring and from different cultural backgrounds. And I think that too often in life, we don't necessarily appreciate that cultural richness. And then thirdly, it's the ability that's brought me the ability to be quite resilient to myself. My bosses have always been overseas, most of the time on the other side of the world. And that autonomy, and really, it's those three aspects that have really tried to take that and actually mold that into my treasury career.

And then you sort of continued. And again, we talked before the show, and Toby's got this great background in risk management, insurance and understanding how that feeds into Treasury. But that's built out. Then you did a tradius and then started to sort of discover the world of treasury, if you like. So sort of an evolution or revolution, you know, talk us through how you then went through those.