https://www.listennotes.com/e/bc0a24727b1f435aba34137492a58a3e

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. In this week's show, joined by Richard Abigail, the group treasurer and head of Corporate finance at Knight Frank LLP. Founded way back in 1896. Headquartered in London, Knight Frank is one of the world's leading independent real estate consultancies. They provide innovative property solutions for their clients that add tangible value across property sectors and services. They've got a footprint in over 50 territories, 740 offices and more than 27,000 people. They operate in locations where clients need them to be providing worldwide service, locally expert and globally informed. There you go. So I could do their PR blitz. There you go. But I know Richard for a number of years we're going to go back to how he first started in treasury and finance and then got into treasury as well. Richard, there you go. Enough of me. Over to you, sir. How did he first start?

Thanks for inviting me on the podcast, mate.

Pleasure.

First started as a standard accountant with Coopers and I'm showing my age. Then Pre merged with PwC and spent a number of years auditing clients in the sort of biotech media sector both here in London. And I did the traditional thing of accountants. I used PwC to go and travel and went down to Melbourne for a couple of years and was an auditor down in Melbourne and yeah, during that time enjoyed various different aspects of auditing. But I quite like sort of the biotech and media companies, the sort of high intellectual property consultancy style businesses. And then my time as many people find came up with PwC, I wanted to change. I was sick of checking people's work and I wanted to do the work myself. So I decided to jump ship and jumped into a company called Itouch which was listed full list in the UK and it was a ringtone and logos and premium rate telephony. Call any, anything and everything with premium rate telephony, apart from adult, which is very specialized areas. But we would run things like the voting for Big Brother and Pop Idol and programs like that. And then if you remember when we had bricks of phones before the iPhone and Android was even a dream, everyone wanted to buy logos, ringtones. Yes, yeah, it was a great time. But they just listed on the stock exchange when I came over and this is when I started to think about treasury as a career because they Had a whole pot of cash, they were raised and they would burn in a hole in their pockets. So initially it was investments, putting it on deposits, keeping the money safe and secure. And then a big acquisition opportunity came over or came up in Spain, the market leader in Spain, and we bought this company and that sort of chewed through our cash. We were left with very little. Then tables flipped and it was getting cash out of the subsidiaries where it had been pumping it in, we now had to bring it back out. And alongside that we were highly acquisitive. We had obviously our paper of shares that we could use to acquire people. So we started. I started doing the corporate finance side at the same time. So we had a. We used to call them horses on the course. So we would always have about two to three acquisitions at any one time at various stages of work, buying companies in Austria, as I said, in Spain, we bought companies in the Nordics, we merged with someone in the States. It was a really interesting time. So there's this sort of twin approach I had even back then, and we're talking early noughties here, of having both the treasury aspect of looking after the cash and the finances and also doing the corporate finance elements. And that was on top of my sort of job. Yeah, I've been group financial controller and just looking after the. The business, the financial reporting.

How did that shape your sort of understanding of Treasury? Because obviously you said you were dragged into treasury as well.

Yeah, I think it's. It piqued my interest and it wasn't until quite a bit later when I went, right, treasuries for me, but I started enjoying it and I like that sort of twin aspects that treasury gives you of the relationships with the banks, the external view of life. There was treasury of trying to manage all the risks and then the internal. The sort of more techy aspects of it. But back in those days, I wasn't doing too much treasury, it was on the side of my desk as I was more focused on the M and A and financial reporting. But it was becoming more and more interesting.

So then from there you moved to arup. How did that come about? And can you explain who ARUP were and everything else? You did a great. The explanation of your itouch were.

Yeah. So ARUP came about, I. We had delisted itouch. We'd sold to a trade buyer and they wanted to move the head office to Milan where they were based. So looking for a new job.

Yeah.

And I Arch Kembau, I like the name. And bizarrely, my university Halls were opposite their office. So I'd known about them since I was 18 or knew of them since I was 18.

Wow.

And one of my old flatmates worked for Arup and they had a reputation and still do have a great place to work and I found my time there absolutely brilliant and really enjoyed it. So they ticked all the right boxes. International Group, which I really enjoyed. They had a role looking after their infrastructure business from a sort of management accounting point of view and also looking after the Middle east and Africa. Quite small presence there, but it was enjoyable. But when I joined, we hit the global financial crisis and if you remember, Dubai just absolutely collapsed. So I spent quite a lot of my time working with the guys of working out how we collect the debts. How do we get ourselves onto a shore of cotton again in the Middle East.

And Arup as a business, can you just. You and I don't know them, but for say, our U.S. listeners, they maybe sometimes may not know the name.

Yeah. So Arup's a consultant engineer.

Yeah.

Famous for some of the real top end, amazing buildings in the world. So still their calling card is the Sydney Opera House. They were engineers behind that absolutely fantastic building, the Pompidou center in France. High speed one in the uk they go from buildings through water, through all types of infrastructure. They're a multidisciplinary consultancy. They've got a unique ownership structure. It was a partnership but Ove Arup himself decided that they would gift their partnership state to a trust. So it's now owned by the employees through a trust structure. So it's got that unique ownership structure in large scale. Consultant engineers.

Lovely. And there you then went from financial control. But then when it's treasury and what was it when you walked in the door of Treasury?

So it's an interesting sort of stepping stone into it. The treasurer at Arup was on leave at the time. We wanted to buy our head office building. So that came up. We had an opportunity to do it. We had to raise debt and term finance and the finance director asked me to babysit that treasury aspect of raising the debt and putting it in with the lawyers. We went out to market. Actually a consultancy helped us go out and we, I think we approached something like 10 banks to raise the finance for it. It was the first time Arab had ever taken on any form of debt and I'd never taken on debt as well. So it was a brand new experience for me and the business. So blind leading the blind somewhat. The lawyers were very helpful, the banks were very helpful. But suddenly it became apparent I really enjoy this. I really enjoy talking to the banks, working with the lawyers, getting this cash in to buy this head office building. And that was fantastic. The finance director then had a big reorganization of the business and it was. So if you walked into his office and he went, these are the roles I've got. I'm putting people into different roles. Would you like to take on Treasury? And I thought, why not? It's always interested me.

Yeah.

So I wish I could say I had this dream of becoming a treasurer. It was going to be my career. I fell into it just from how. Yeah, yeah. And I said, yep, I'll do that. And that was around 2011. I decided to do treasury and I told the FD that I would do it for 18 months. I saw it as an 18 month project. Get out there now. What? 14 years later I'm still doing Treasury. So it really did suck you in. Yeah, very much.

And we talked before the show that you'd then did some interesting projects, like you did stuff with China. Talk us through that project. It's quite an interesting one.

Yeah, the China one's a really cool one. We were struggling to get cash out of China. Very difficult place. It will resonate with lots of people. Yeah, people hope that it's such a difficult place to get cash out of. And we were getting to the stage where between 25 and 30% of our cash, so Arup, apart from this debt for its building, is cash rich. And we thought, how do we get cash out of China? And we worked with HSBC to try and put in this sort of the world's first REMI automated sweep. And it was a very interesting project. Trying to do something that was really on the vanguard of Treasury. Cross border suites are now de all the time. But at that point trying to negotiate our way through PBOC approvals to get this sweep in place was quite cool. It was quite a tricky structure. It was nice to just put something in brand new and leading edge.

And how did you do it? What I mean by that is I don't need right down to the detail, but for someone listening today, as you approach a project like that, is it just sort of sitting down with the bank and saying, this is what we want to achieve, how can you help us? Or do you go in there again, it's an advice show for other people.

Yeah, it was very much sitting down with the bank and setting out our problem. We've got too much cash in China. What can you do to help? But there was this new Regulation so long ago, I can't remember what the. What it was, but a new regulation has allowed us to sweep money out and we literally had to work through with HSBC UK and HSBC China, all the processes. Yeah. It wasn't too difficult to do on the tech side of things. It was all the regulatory side of it. And also trying to convince our board that we weren't doing something that would get the authorities in China coming to look at our business.

Yeah, above board and everything else.

Yeah. And then later on, when China had one of its financial problems, they banned that route. So we moved to a standby letter of credit process. We put deposits in. In China, the bank issued standby letters of credit and then in the uk, those left credit were used to draw down on debt security for debt drawings. That was great. And then we moved, we started a tech business, arup, not only did the consultant engineering part, but they also had software to. To allow consultant engine engineers to work and they were selling that in China. So we set up a Shanghai Free Trade Zone company to do that and it allowed us then to sweep money out through the Shanghai Free Trade Zone. So we, we actually had three bites of the cherry in my time at Arab and getting cash out. Just adapting to the regulations as they.

Each time. Yeah, yeah. And then, as you say, throughout your time there, you went through some real, just quiet times. Just had the euro crisis, Brexit and all the regulation going on. What was that like for you as a treasurer?

I think it was enjoyable in one part. It got the gray matter working, but in other stages, some of the regulation was tedious. A mere FBAR in the States, that was pretty boring. Regulation. But things like the financial crisis, where we thought Greece was going to fall out of the euro, problems with that. We thought, sorry, someone just caught me. I thought I'd put that on block.

So it's like. That's what I thought. I was like, go away. Do you want to.

It was on block, but someone came through. So, yeah, just talking about the financial crisis. So, yeah, in Greece, when they were about to drop out of the Eurozone, or we all thought they were, what impact would it have?

Yeah.

Doing strange things. Like the definition of a euro might be different between a euro based in the UK and the euro based in the Eurozone. What would all that mean for us? So spend a lot of time doing risk management. And this is when I started doing my exams. So the ACT exams were around that time as well. And the risk management paper really helped understand sort of financial risks. Of a business, of a Treasury, of a sort of a company turning over nearly £2 billion in those days. So it was an enjoyable time, but a stressful time as well.

And you've gone through all these refinancing, restructuring. What would you say is the most complex deal you've done and what lessons did you get from that sort of thing?

I think it was one of the refinances we did. So, as I said, we bought our head office building, we had a second building on the same sort of campus in, near the BT Tower in London. We decided to sell the building we were resident in or the one we owned and buy the other one.

Yeah.

So we had a buy and sale of properties going on and then we had to flip the financing by that stage. We've moved from a term debt since we got it initially to an RCF that was a very complex deal to buy, sell and refinance at the same time. Just getting all the timings right, the actual debt products weren't too difficult, but it was quite a complicated deal. It was a twin rcf, two of them at once. I won't bore the listeners with the detail why we needed two of them back. It was. That was probably the most complex deal we did. I don't think it was the most enjoyable, to be honest. I think overall my. My sort of thing I enjoyed the most at my time at ARUP was actually changing the culture of the business towards cash. When we started off, about 5% of the cash in the group was available to group treasury and by the end of it we were over 90%. So it really changed the way the business looked at cash. We did that through putting in a cash pool, a single global cash pool. I quite liked at Arab that we had a complete greenfield site. We didn't have any cash pools in. I know a lot of treasurers come in to new roles and they look at it and go, oh, God, I've got all this legacy I have to work with, I can't rip it out and start again. I was in a really lucky position that we had virtually nothing, so I could start afresh. But this cash pool allowed me to go out and travel globally, literally flying from Sydney in the east all the way through to New York where our America's business was based. Working with the guys, understanding their cash needs and explaining what we needed. An example of that is when we started the Americas said we need at least £10 million on our account at any one time. For just in case. Yeah, just in case. By the End of it, we had them sitting on zero cash intraday limits, sweeps coming with money, moving the cash backwards and forwards. And in the group, we sat on about a million outside of or sitting in the pool as residual and everything else was invested. So we increased our sort of returns massively. We had cash available and that came to real. The benefit we found came from it when we had an opportunity during the financial. During a merger with our Irish firm. They. They own their head office building and we were able to just pay off their debt because we had the surplus cash sit in the pool. We'd never been able to do that previously, but I could just dip into the cash pool and bring that cash out. We owned, I think we bought it for something like 10 million. Last time I saw, before I left Arup, the building was valued at sort of 30 million. So that was a phenomenal deal that we did, being able to buy that head office building for our Dublin business.

And then the transition, if you like, to this new role and things. Talk us through how that you and I know about it and things like that. How did it come about the move to Night Frank and I gave a bit of a headline about Knight Frank. It's all right, I'll do your pr, don't worry. Talk us through.

Yeah. So I was getting a bit bored of Tara. As I said at the beginning, I was going to do it for 18 months and I think I was coming up to my fourth or fifth refinancing.

Yeah. And Ford was 13 and a half years.

Yeah. I can't face doing another refinancing. And then at the same time as your personal life and your work life sometimes intermingle and it helps you make a decision. But my son was transitioning from primary school to secondary school and I thought, I'll take the summer off. I'm a bit bored. I need to find a new job, I need to reinvigorate myself. But this is a perfect time, that transition. I can do loads of stuff with my son during the summer. We can go traveling. It will be wonderful. Sadly, that period was 2020, so as I was leaving Arup, I think I had a week left when lock. The first lockdown started. So that just obliterated all idea of.

You got back to the garden.

Yeah, yeah. And I got a phone call from the finance director at Harrop saying, look, we just don't know what's going to happen. You're leaving. Do you want to just come back as a consultancy? You won't be taking your son on A road trip to Prague, which is one of the ideas we had. You'll be sitting around in your house. Why don't you stay and do that? And at the same time the finance, the old finance director at ARUP had left and joined Knight Frank and he gave me a call at the same time, said, I hear you're not doing anything this summer. I'm a bit worried that we're going to really struggle. The property market is just going to shut down. Can you come and help? Just an extra pair of hands at Night Frank and see if we need to raise debt. Night Frank had never raised debt and see if you can help out on that. So I had this twin consultancy role almost immediately thinking I was going to spend the time lying around doing nothing all summer to actually now working for two paymasters. Absolutely full on. And it became a really bizarre concept. Many treasurers in the UK will know of a program called the CCFF program. This was for sort of credit rated or companies that may not have a credit rating but could get one to sell commercial paper. So it was an accelerated program to get commercial paper. And the British government was going to be the purchase. Yeah. And they would purchase the commercial paper. So both ARUP and Knight Frank decided they want to go into this plan. And I was asked to run both programs in Knight Frank pretty much by myself in Arab with the person who replaced me as group treasurer, who, you know, Mike, who's, I think he's just recently placed a new role. So I was having a bizarre conversations of running two identical programs with the same set of lawyers, same set of advisors, coming off one call with ARUP and going on to exactly the same call with Knight Frank. We got those two programs in place. Luckily both firms didn't need to use them at all. And in fact, in Knight Frank the property markets boomed during COVID which sounds absolutely bizarre, but in the UK we have stamp duty on properties, on residential properties. And the British government waved that to try and invigorate the market and it did. And Knight Frank had one of the best years ever during those Covid periods, especially as people in the UK wanted to move out of London, as we saw Worldwide wanted to move out of London and move to the countryside, get more space.

Yeah.

And it really drove the property markets. So that sort of took me to this hybrid period. And I continued being a consultant for both of them for a while. So at arup I helped upgrade their treasury management system. I actually did help do the refund financing during COVID which was an interesting Period. And then at Knight Frank it was clear that they didn't have a individual treasury function. It was on the side desk of one of the sort of senior finance people. So I did a review for the Finance Director of what the treasury function would look like at night Frank. And basically created myself a job. Not purposely.

You wrote it.

Yeah, but I scoped out what a Treasury function would look like within the finance function and cutting a long story short, I came on as a partner because it is a partnership mount. Frank came on as a junior partner, a salaried member as we call them and have been there ever since.

And when you were doing that, just as you were writing that job description out, if you like, how did write, where did you position Treasury? Because some people go and say oh, treasury is all about the cash first of all and everything else and. But you'd been through this and a very interesting situation to write your own job description as well.

Yeah. And it, it's quite an interesting one. It came right down from. Right, probably a better way of saying right up from have we got the right bank accounts, have we got the right structure in place? But it came once again from having lots of surplus cash. And when I came in they had all their cash, virtually all their cash in the UK at least sitting in one overnight deposit account. So the counterparty risk was extreme, the return was very poor. They hadn't termed anything out the rates the bank was giving us. So it really went back to being a Noddy Treasury 101 style of work. Conclusion out of that though was that treasury in 9th Franc was going to be relatively simple. We have, it's a consultancy so very simple, easy working capital cycles needing no debt. So spoke with the Finance Director and realized the treasury would only take 20, 30% of my time. So how could we carve out a role? So not only was I carving out the treasury function and creating that from building block upwards from bank account upwards, but also trying to create a role that would fill a full time role for me. And that's where I started moving into the sort of corporate finance thing again.

Yeah.

Picking up on my itouch days from 20 years previously and bringing that into to this new role. And Nike Frank has an interesting structure that we own or the llp the partnership owns a sway the countries around the world but it goes all the way down to where we franchise and license our name in certain territories. So Ireland for example, they're an independent firm but they license our name. So the way we position the firm, the internal structuring and how do we. How do we decide that we want to own Australia but we don't want to own Ireland? What are the parameters around that? So that. That was interesting. The other areas that have been interesting from a Treasury perspective is it's a partnership, as I said, so therefore we have partner capital loans. So working with the bank, so we don't have any corporate debt as such, but every partner takes out a loan, depending on their seniority from one of two banks. So renegotiated those facilities, reduced the loans, we're trying to convert those into a sustainable loan. The sustainable wrapper around RCFS is just the thing. No one really has put a sustainable wrapper around a partner capital loan yet and we're still trying to do that with the banks. It's at the wrong time as the banks rolling back their sustainability initiatives and things because of the greenwashing.

Yeah.

That they're being accused of. So that's somewhat on hold at the moment. But it's still a goal of mine to try and get a sustainable part of capital loan where the rate each partner pays on their loan will depend on meeting our sustainability targets. So that was one of them. The other thing that was brand new in Knight Frank that's taken some time is client monies. So we manage properties on behalf of people, we hold their deposits or their tenants deposits. We have a big lump of cash where we run their service charges. So we have hundreds of millions, far more than we have of our own cash of client funds. And I've never done client fund monies.

Yeah.

Part of me on some days wishes I'd never done client fund. It is a pain. The regulations are tough. We're regulated by Ricks, the Roll Institute of Charter Surveyors. So they have very set rules, just as cast does FCA for financial services, just as the solicitors do under their regulations. But that was new and novel as well for me, but I'd never done that. So trying to expand my range of knowledge in treasury and Knight Frank ticked all the boxes. Really friendly place to work, great atmosphere. Some of the properties it sells are actually mad. At the moment we're trying to sell Freddie Mercury's house in London, which is fabulous if you want to buy it. It's about £30 million.

Just tomorrow.

Yeah, tomorrow, selling Audrey Hepburn's house in Switzerland. At the moment we really specialize in the top end of the market. Our sweet spot is £2,000,000 plus and preferably £10,000,000 plus is the type of properties we do. So a really interesting, really Great place to work with a lot of. I wouldn't say huge challenges but setting up a Treasury function again learning about client monies, learning about how a partnership operates were all sort of things that hit and then being able to get back into the corporate finance world again.

Yeah. I mean you touched on their sustainability obviously that's one of the. What's the word? That's one of the key things coming down the line if you like. What other things do you see for Treasury? Because we've got technology, we've got all the different other things. What are you as a treasurer? You know you like what you know.

Yeah. And I might have a slightly different view from many treasurers because technology and modern technology. I think I'm so old and wizened these days that I've seen these big data is going to be the thing that helps and then it blocks blockchain.

Yeah.

And now it's AI and I I always feel that we get a little bit too hyped up about these things then when reality comes So I try and position myself in treasury in sort of two ways. One is a fast follower so I'm not on the cutting edge of tech developments. Yeah But I try and follow quickly afterwards people get it right. We're not the biggest organization. The banks quite like us because we're. And this was in the Arab days and night Brian days I like to do things. I like to put technology in but we're small enough for them to get the head round. If it was a multi billion billion pound company like a shell. Yeah. This is going to be an awful metaphor but they're like an oil tanker. They're very slow to move because I'm smaller. I can move. Yeah and we can get things in and that's exactly what we did with the cash bill and things like the China sweeps in Arab days and it's same with Knight Frank so I try and fast follow I also my mantra is system heavy people light. I think rather than having junior analysts downloading statements from banking portals and uploading them doing cash report Everything I want is automated. I want as fewer people as physically possible and everything pushing a system. So even though I do think I like treasury technology I think at the moment we've got hype in the AI space so I think it'll die down and then we'll really find out the.

Elements what difference and yeah I totally agree and that's actually one of the things that yeah we try and automate with our salary survey we automate with everything else because you can, you know what, why do this? Oh, people are trying to sell me this system. I'm like, no, I've got it, it's all right system, we don't need it.

Yeah. And it's. And I find things I'm learning in treasury because I. My role's wider than Treasury. Now a good example is AI in our mortgage broken business. So buying a house, you need to get a mortgage, you go to a mortgage broker. Night Frank has Nightfront Finance, one of the leaders, so that top end big mortgages for very nice flashy houses. They're looking at AI at the moment and it's interesting that I can have a very informed decision in a business I haven't got a clue about, to be honest, which is mortgage broken. But I can talk to them about where they're positioning themselves on their AI journey. So it's. They don't want to have, they still want to have the face to face contact. If you're going to borrow a couple of hundred or a couple of hundred thousand pounds, if not more into the millions, you want to talk to a person. So the chatbot side of AI to replace the broker is just a no, no for us. However, using the, using AI with the banks to fill out all the mortgage application forms to do all that. So that's where they see the sweet spot. And that's one of the things I see with treasury at the moment, AI, I think it's going to work better, at least initially in the back end of the system. So being able to take that sort of treasury mindset into a completely different business that I know nothing about, still have that informed conversation and be able to say, this is what I'm seeing in my space. What have you seen in yours? It's one of those nice times where you go, yeah, treasurers do know about business. We're not sitting in the back office, we're at the forefront of it. So that's been quite interesting conversations with our mortgage broking business.

And if you reflect back, I know that you've been in the Treasurer magazine. They've seen you in the past and they've said, you've got this. Your career has been award winning so far and everything else with that. If someone's listening today, what advice would you give to those people?

I think it's twofold. One is the exams. I'm an old stickler for the exams. My father used to say to me, you are tainted by your parents attitudes no matter how, how much you try and fight against it. He Said to me, get it, get a profession. You can always fall back on it. So I'm a chartered accountant my PWC days, I know FCT with the ACT in the UK and did their exams. I think those exams are brilliant. They do give you a great base level knowledge and then they allow you to sell yourself in the market. It does, it is a differentiator. I think you have to keep your education going. So I spent. I did a course with the CISL in Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Learning and did sustainable finance course which was fantastic. It was giving me the academic rigor whilst sustainability was blowing up a few years ago. This is going to be the future. It actually allowed me to focus on just that and that course was fantastic. So that formal education I think is one one thing. I also think you need to understand your business. As a treasurer. I do talk to a number of treasurers who oh, cash is cash. I can go from business to business and put in a cash pool, I can negotiate debt. But I think you for me anyway personally, you get the reward knowing how your business operates, knowing the culture of this, knowing all that. So I would say to a treasurer, don't, no matter how junior you are, understand how your business operates, learn about your business. Don't just sit there as I see in finance functions, people going, I'm in ap, I just want to do ap. I don't care, no Knight Frank or ARUP or whoever has really great business models, go out there and learn, just understand the business. You become far more rounded, you understand your position in it. So formal education on one hand and also really understand your business on the other. For the junior treasurers, love it.

And anything else for the future of treasury if you like, as you say. I like the fact that I agree with you the sort of. I think also a lot of treasurer late adopters, they actually say let them all. We'll watch from the sidelines.

Yep.

Then when we need to sweep in we'll come in and pick up the good bits or people make mistakes on it and any other areas as well.

I think technology becoming more and more the ability to converse in a technology where. Yeah and by that is the banks now are tech players. You've got the TMS providers that are in my view anyway seem to be fragmenting. You've got the big players, the ions and the fiscal they're still around but all these smaller players being able to plug in the likes of an FX all or a 360T or Reuters with Bloomberg being able to understand that text, there Then being able to communicate with the lawyers because everything has to produce a rating. So the skill set of a treasurer seems to be widening as I've gone through it. It's no longer having a lunch with a bank and saying, can you give me an rcf? You actually need to then be able to plug it into multinational businesses. So tech, legal and then just the financial acumen that sort of is the base level of everything we do. So I think that's where we're going to skill set getting wider and wider. And then my example with knife Frank finance and AI, being able to actually people to see yourself, see a treasure in the businesses. Oh, hang on. They understand this stuff, they know what's happening, they're using it themselves, but they can give me advice and help in their business model. So, yeah, that's the future treasurer. It's going to be wider and wider and the skills you need are going to be broader and broader.

Yeah, cool. And we're going to, as I say, was approaching the end, so we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. But I was about to say what advice you've actually given some said do your exams, get yourself integrated with the business on a wider sense. Any other takeaways or any other thoughts as you've reflected?

No, they were my main two points, to be honest. I went out, yeah, treasury can be really simple or as difficult as you want to make it, I think. And if you get out there and really understand your business, the problems that you can solve as a treasurer just leap out at you and you can grab them and run with them, from the boring, tedious how to open a bank account all the way up to as I'm doing structuring licenses for businesses around the globe. On the corporate finance side, I think treasury is there as long as you're willing to step outside what is seen as the natural treasury box.

Yeah, great. Final words, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you very much for your time today, sir.

Thank you. Thanks. It's been great. Thanks.

I hope you enjoyed listening to this week's podcast just as much as I did recording it with another amazing guest. Now, don't forget to subscribe on your usual platform, whether that's Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you listen, so you never miss a future episode whilst you're there. If you're listening on Apple podcasts, maybe give us a five star review. Why? Because it helps other treasury professionals find the show, join the conversation and get even more value now. Also, we're helping you guys in treasury, if you are thinking about studying for your CTP or FP and a qualification, then listen up. We partnered with the AFP to offer a discount on study, both for the studying and for the preparation platform as well. So you can get through us. $150 discount? Yes, $150 for each. My goodness. Yeah, we. We're here to help. So it's a great step for your career and always good to save where you can. So all you need to do is go to treasure recruitment.com forward/partners. You got the codes there, then you head across to their website and you get the discount. You also as well, if it wasn't enough, we're going to be heading to AFP Boston later on in the fall, as the Americans call it in October. And we also offer 150 discount off your registration. So wherever you might be, it's a great conference, whether you're in UK and Europe, you should go. I'm going. It's going to be amazing. So incredible few days, great insights, proper networking, great conversations with lots and lots of treasures. Last time in Nashville, 8, 000 + one of their biggest ones ever. It was amazing. So just go to the show Notes and you'll find the link or treasure recruitment.com forward/partners and get it all from there. Remember, if you're looking for a role, visit treasure recruitment.com if you need some advice, reach out mike@treasuryrecruitment.com or come and meet us in person. We've got our sessions coming up. We've got sessions throughout this year in Texas. Then we've got London, we've got Dublin, then we're back to the US for Chicago, then New York. Crumbs everywhere, Euro finance, the lot. And then AFP and then back to London and then we'll do Netherlands as well. So it'll be great to see you. We're going to be everywhere, so looking forward to it. Thanks very much and until next week, enjoy the show. Sam.