Important Treasury Career Lessons with Karen Molloy

So when I started working for the bank, it was actually a mutual. So again, it was about your depositors, it was about your customers. But then the bank decided to go public and that really changed the focus. It changed the growth strategy for the bank. It was about dividends to the shareholders, which weren't necessarily your depositors and expenses were looked at different. Just all aspects of the business were looked at differently. So given the chance to go back to work for a mutual company was attractive to me. I don't think coming into the job I had an appreciation of how important mutuality was to Northwestern Mutual. But over my 30 year career here it is something we constantly talk about and the importance of being a mutual. And employees know what mutuality means and why that's important. And you hear every employee talk about when they make decisions. You can hear the conversation around how does that affect the policy owner. So it's not. We don't have to have discussions about quarterly earnings. We have a very long range view of things. I think that served us very well in situations like 2008, 2009, where we weren't having to meet quarterly earnings. We could take that long term perspective and maybe make some decisions that we wouldn't have made if we were a publicly traded company. I think what we've understood over time is we believe whole life is a very core and important part of somebody's financial security and it's an important tool to have in your investments amongst the things that you purchase in your life. I think we've taken a broader perspective to say over time you need to have, there's kind of a suite of things that you need to have in order to have that financial security over your entire life. And the way we look at it is kind of there's this foundational piece and we would call that the life insurance and we would call that disability income, right? So at the foundation you're protecting from living too long, dying too soon, you know, you have that foundation protected, then you kind of in life hopefully go through kind of a wealth accumulation stage. So now that's a different set of products that you need more. And that's where our broker dealer comes more into play. And being able to invest those assets and grow those assets put you in a position, right, to put your kids through school, save for retirement. And then after you're, you know, as you're going through that part, then as you get towards the end of, end of life, it's, it's more about estate planning and what are you going to do with these assets that you've now accumulated over time, and how are you going to disperse those? So we've tried to look at it more holistically throughout your life and say, what are the needs? And put this entire package together. And again, it's just with the mindset of we're trying to help people have financial security. So it was, you know, the thought was that we wanted people that wanted to know really more about how the business ran, wanted to understand how investments work, weren't afraid to get in there, be vulnerable, and that they might not have the knowledge, but were willing to figure it out. And, you know, kind of giving everybody that chance to do it. Not pigeonholing, okay, you're just going to do this set of work and really kind of putting everyone through the rotation, the work, and letting them kind of figure out where they felt those skill sets aligned. So the team had really gone through, and at that moment in time, we were going through some turnover anyway. So it allowed us to bring in some different perspectives, some folks with some outside experience, which is always good. And so it just allowed us to kind of go in a different direction. And at that point, the idea was to try to message that treasury is a key strategic partner that needs to be at the table. As you're starting the process, don't wait to include us because you're ready to roll out a product. And now you realize, oops, how are we going to collect premiums on this?