How Treasury Drives Business Growth Through Relationships, Risk Strategy, and Resilience

Foreign.

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, delighted to be joined by Declan Ware, the group treasurer at emr, European Metal Recycling Group. EMR is a global leader in sustainable materials with physical operations in the UK, US, Germany and Netherlands. In the US it's got 54 sites right the way from Texas where I'll be in a few weeks time to New Jersey where I'll be week off to next core business in recycling of metal and plastics from a range of public commercial industrial waste streams, end of life vehicles, consumer products industry, all sources of recycling EMRs generate. This is great. Generate around 10 million tons of sustainable metals and plastics, saving over 10 million tons of CO2 compared to virginal terms. Great intro there. But Declan, we're going to go right the way back. Beginning of your career, if you would, if you. How did you first get started in finance and then Treasury. Over to you, sir.

Thank you. Thank you, Mike. That was a great introduction to the company. You should write our presentations. So where it all began, I graduated with a degree in economics at the University of Manchester and was fortunate to get a place on the graduate recruitment scheme at the then British Nuclear Fuels based in Warrington. And that presented a great opportunity to spend two years initially within the group finance function almost on a rotational basis. So I spent some time with her financial accountants, the management accountants, tax and he also spent some time at Sellafield in the operational finance side of things. So real good exposure to the business. At the time, the political agenda didn't want nuclear on the UK power source. There was also a significant amount of historical liabilities that needed to be managed. So the business BNFL in its current form was being wound up. I was then asked to, when my graduate training scheme came to an end, join part of the financial accounts team that we're going to be leading that. And at the time there wasn't a defined treasurer's role. So it was great for me because my time had come to an end and I was able to get involved in the treasury side of this reorganization of the sector. So that was everything from operational banking, setting up bank accounts to mirror the new site license structure that was going to be applied, the management of the investment portfolio to match the liabilities. I took over that, which was a crash course in the likes of bonds and gilts and fixed income. And perhaps most excitingly was the disposal of Westinghouse Electric, which was almost a jewel in the crown of BNFL at the time. And that entity was sold to Toshiba for north of $5 billion. And not me directly, but me, in consultation with the fda, were responsible for putting in place hedging instruments to mitigate any adverse movements in the exchange rate from the time the sale was agreed through to completion. I just want to jump in the pressure that.

Well, let me jump in, Declan. You know, you've come in. What first sparked your interest in treasury per se, or you didn't know what treasury was? And they're just saying like this because these were early days. You know, it's when I first started my treasury recruitment career. People like, what's Treasury? I don't know. I'll find out from these treasury guys.

Treasury, to me at the time was certainly early days, was someone who looked after the money at the football club. You went and played football on a Saturday and you had a treasurer who made sure you paid your sort of.