Lessons in Treasury Evolution and Innovations with Sassan Parandeh

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 them about how they've built 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, delighted to be joined by Sasan Peranda, the Global Treasurer and head of Insurance, Risk and Properties Department at Child Fund International. Child Fund International is a global child focused development and protection agency and a founding member of the Child Fund Alliance. Child Fund International works throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas, including the United States to connect children with whatever they need to grow up safe, healthy, educated and skilled no matter where they are. Been going ever since 1938 and they're breaking the generational cycle of poverty if you like, and achieving their full potential. Now we're going to deep dive with later on the show with Sussan about that role, but we're going to go back to how we first ever started in finance and then cash management. Susan handing the microphone over to you sir. How did he first get started? How did it all go?

Hi Mike and thank you for having me here. Well, it's interesting because it was totally by the choice of companies. As a university student studying economics, I honestly did not know what a corporate treasury department is. I had gone into the Career department Career center at the university in Cal State Long beach and I saw a posting for a position at Lytton Industries Inc. And I knew they are a company that make Navy ships, cruise missiles, microwave ovens, industrial automation robots that assemble all the Ford factories. I'm like wow, that's a super high tech company. I would love to work for him. Not even paying attention that the posting was for an intern in the corporate treasury department at corporate headquarters. And I interviewed and I got in and it's interesting that ever since that internship to this day I have covered every position in a Treasury department and I'm 100% pure treasury professional. But that's how it started.

By totally by accident as you say, it wasn't a planned move into Treasury. We were just speaking then about your daughter and you know she's got a passion for treasury which we'll explore a bit later. But what was treasury like when you first started way, way back then as it were? And don't worry, I was doing treasury then as well. So. But what was it like?

Yeah, treasury then was very different because a lot of the current technology wasn't there today. When you were talking about Payment systems and payment processing. There's all sorts of things that you have to consider and all sorts of aspects that have to be part of your assessment. But back then it was pretty much credit cards, checks and cash, so it was simpler. And then in terms of investments, which I ended up being in that group, in the company Investments and special project department, we didn't have these online systems like Bloomberg. You actually picked up the phone and called a broker and you talked and you actually would get paper confirmations and that. As an intern, my job was to do some of those confirmations and provide proof and keep backup documents. The entire department only had one computer that. And this was a major corporation. I mean, this was a corporation $4 billion big at that time, in the 80s, with something like 40,000 employees and 10 people in the Treasury Department, one computer. So things have changed quite a bit. It was very manual, but at the same time, they were very focused on quality. So everything we did, we had to go over it again and again and check the numbers using a calculator. So when we turned it in, nobody comes back and says, hey, you know, you made an error. Excel is brand new. It was just when Excel came out and took over Lotus. One, two, three. So I'm going really back over here, back to when I started my career. It was 1991.

So you sort of went from that role. Talk us through some of the next steps you made as an intern.

I did menial jobs and repetitive jobs, data entry kind of things. And then as I graduated, I became a financial analyst, doing really tedious analytical work, mining data, analyzing data, preparing them for presentations by others. And then I worked my way up with Litten Industries, which is now a part of Northrop Grumman. So if someone looks at my resume, they would not see Litten Industry as Northrop Grumman, but back then it was called Lytton. And then I became the corporate cash manager. That was a lot more exciting position. Funding throughout the globe, you know, dealing with foreign currencies, getting into hedging strategies, issuing commercial paper in the actual market, being really excited about it. We had a $700 million shelf registration for Litten Commercial Paper. And you put out the offering, and then you look on a screen and you see people are buying it live. And that was just so incredible at that stage of my career. And that's really when, as a cash manager, I totally fell in love with the treasury side of the business. I always thought treasury is the fun department. Treasury knows the future when they want to build a Factory. They come to treasury and say issue stock or issue bond. And you get to talk to the big names. The Merrill Lynch's and the Goldman Sachs and the underwriters. And it was over there at that stage of my career that I just love this. I want to. I just want to be in Treasury. It's the happy circle of finance, if you will.

Yeah, I love that. The happy circle of finance and Treasury. We'll definitely have that as one of the, the bits on the poster for this episode. That sounds great, but so talk us through the roles that you then were doing because you've got some really interesting companies. What was that like? You know, that stage of your career because. Yeah, the city of Long beach and Dole and interesting moves.

Yeah, it is interesting because I've been exposed to many different types of Treasury. When Lithon Industries was acquired by Northrop Grumman, obviously they already had major corporate treasury department and they already had their own corporate cash manager. So I got a very attractive incentive and so I looked for a job and I went to the city of Long beach, which was in government, but it is the biggest port in the United States. The Long Beach Los Angeles port not only had a giant naval base but were the biggest port of import in the United States. And when I looked outside the window for miles down the ocean I would see ships that were waiting to undock. And that was a very different environment. It was very much like acting inside an aquarium. Because of Freedom of Information act and the public having full access. Everything you did was scrutinized and the political aspect was introduced. For example, if in Lithon I wanted to do a bank rfp we did what was best for our business. In Long beach when I did a bank rfp every county supervisor was fighting with us. Every district supervisor was fighting with us. That no, we have nine bank of America branches in our area. And so I had to learn that before you act in the best financial interest you have to go and prepare all the people who ultimately have to vote and approve your decision. So there was that political aspect in the city of Long beach. And I didn't stay there long. I loved working there. But somehow working for government and dealing with the politics just wasn't for me. And I from there went to Dole Food Company and became the director of International Treasury. I love the international aspect of it. Now working for a city in California, city of Long beach, it was purely domestic. There was no dealing with currencies or fluctuations in the market. I was very excited about that. I went To Dole. And I loved. It's probably the best job that I had and I loved it. I traveled all over Latin America, Europe, Asia. Got exposed to banking in Europe, exposed to banking in Asia. Love the remoteness of some of the operations. Like for example, if you're building a vehicle like let's say you're building Toyotas, you can estimate by the end of the day how many Toyotas you have and you can estimate easily how many Toyotas you're going to sell to your dealership network. With a company like Dole, you had to estimate and get cash flow estimates on how soon do we think these bananas will be ripened? How soon do you think these fields could be picked for their pineapples? It was a very different environment. And then you had the criticality of transporting food that decays, I mean, if you don't get it there in a timely manner. So I had to do fuel hedges, lines of credit. So it was a very different environment. It was in one of these travels that I was doing for adult. I actually had gone to Thailand that on an airplane I met a gentleman who said, what do you do? I shared my business card and he said, treasury. What? What does a Treasury do? And explained that, you know, we make money with the money, we manage the liquidity and everything. And then the next day Head Hunter called and said, do you know who you were sitting next to? That's a billionaire that owns this giant company in Beverly Hills. I'm like, what's the name? He said, that's an amiquity and they want you to come and start a Treasury for them. I'm like, nah, I like Dole. Never heard of Platinum. I'm happy. But every day they kept calling and so finally I made the jump. And I did go over there. That was a mergers and acquisition company. A company that buys companies, turns it around and sells it. So that was a different type of treasury operation over there. I had to deal with all sorts of special financing, bridge financing. Tomorrow we're buying this company. We're $80 million short. Get me $80 million by tomorrow. And here on Christmas Eve, you're with your family, you're picking up the line and calling a non Christian country because they don't have Christmas to arrange some kind of a financial structure. So again, that's also very different type of Treasury. And ultimately I ended up here at TR Fun International, which is a not for profit development organization. And when they called me and said, you know, would you be interested? Once again I had the same attitude that, you know, I actually fine. And I don't know if I want to have a not for profit on my resume, which was a huge mistake when they offered me to go there. I didn't know what to expect from a charity. And then I got there and there's this giant campus, huge buildings, lots of employees. I'm like, oh my God, my impression was so wrong. This is a real company. And their exposure was in places that the closest bank was 200, 300 miles away from where they're running their operations. So I had to deal with learning how to manage the last mile, how to work with non bank entities, how to send out and deploy convoys of vehicles that are taking actual cash to really high risk areas, and how to make sure those cars are not intercepted was just a very creative environment and I just loved it. And it's because of the newness and the differentness of this that, you know, I think I started looking at the world of treasury in a different way. And so far we've won the FP Pinnacle Award. And this year, just a few months ago, we won the 2003 Alexander Hamilton Award gold. And it was just because of the amazing opportunities and environment that we operated at Child Fund International that I was able to do that.

Susanna, I want to get back to those earlier days because someone listening today will say, well, that's all very well, but I'm treasury person in a corporate or anything else, and you're in this international organization being thrown in the deep end, exactly as you say. You know, getting the money from A to B and all these different challenges. There are some people that are out there not doing that, they're doing more siloed role or narrow. You were thrown in at the deep end. What was that like for you? Going crumbs, how do I manage all this stuff? Or how do I do this? Or how did you. Did you just. Are you just one of those people, just takes it all on, off we go or what was it like for you?

I love this question because, you know, in many, many companies, treasury is considered a support unit. In other words, listen, we want to get money from here to there, or we want this currency, just get it there, get it done. And you're not part of the strategy. However, I am now in an environment that we have to be at the table. We have to be able to understand the ground level reality. So it's not a question of can I send Kenyan shillings into Nairobi in the tow bank in Nairobi. You have to take that extra step and you have to understand the ground level realities and be able to innovate and create solutions. And with that, I would say that not only treasury is not a back office, treasury is the go to department. The first thing you want to do is if we're going over here, hey, can we run these operations? You have to fly out there, you have to go over there, you have to look and assess the situation, work with people, come up with strategy. So it's a different beast. I would say then because of the vacuum of banking services or financial services, you're now in an environment that you have to come up with a solution. I don't have to stick just to the old traditional thinking of I need a bank in Kenya. Well, you know, in Kenya we actually connected with Safaricom, which is a mobile phone company and we actually created a payment network off of a complete non banking entity, a telephone company. So you're forced to think strategically out of the box and shatter the walls. A typical corporate treasury. I have to work with banks, I have to have this wall, I have to do things within this box. You actually learn that the box is your best solution. However, it's not always there.

San, I just want to come back to that story. I want you to explain a bit more because we had our pre podcast call and you explained to me that you were needing to secure the, you know, the cash, secure everything. So you gave everyone a phone. Can you explain how that worked? Because I think it was a great story before and, and that actually gave you sort of some of the awards and things like that or just, just for the audience. What was the before? You know, if you like and what did you do to solve the problem? Because it was, it was great. When you told me this before.

Yeah, actually the before was not having mobile systems to deliver cash everywhere. So you then act more like a military strategist. In other words, it's like, okay, so you take the money out of the bank and let's say you're going to Torkana and there are kids that are armed and you know, rebels all around the place. And you don't want to walk with a Toyota with a logo of Child Fund International on the side of it. And you've been profiled and people know that once a week this guy delivers payroll in cash because it's a cash culture. Many places people are in a cash culture and there's no banks in the region that you're operating. So what you would do is you would take and deploy maybe three vehicles. One of the vehicles has the Money in it, they all leave the campus and each of them goes in a different direction. Nobody knows which vehicle has the funds. And then you head out into the field and you never take the same road. You also plan on having safe houses along the way that if somebody got in trouble, they go into a safe house and stay there. And then there may not be good communication. So you have satellite telephones that you could call from anywhere even when there is no network. So if you see that kind of thinking and you know, we are trying to deliver as much of the money to have impact for the goodness and lives of children. But we're wasting a lot of resources trying to secure the money. And to top that, we can't hire an armored card service to take the money out because they use guns. And so if a kid comes and points a gun at the car and they shoot the kid, then it sounds really bad that in defense of money Child fund actually shot a 14 year old. So we don't carry weapons. We are a completely no weapon pro child. And it's better that the money be taken than any kid be hurt. So that was the before, the after was, and this was completely coincidental. It was when the terrorist attack by Al Shabaab happened in Nairobi at the Westgate Mall. Our country director over there left the country and there was this vacuum. And Kenya is one of our biggest operating countries. We have well over a million children that are being served over there. And I actually talked to our CEO and I said I would love to have field experience. And she said, you know, so, so I'm going to let you go as country office director to Kenya, but you have to resign your treasury position. You can't go in Nairobi and be treasurer from Nairobi. You have to go over there and run the operations. But when I was there, I couldn't take this treasury hat off. So I did meet with the banks in Kenya and I did see that people are using this amazing news thing that we didn't have today. We have it in the U.S. we call it VENM, but this was in 2014. And none of this existed in the U.S. but the Kenyans had invented what they called M. Pesa through a telephone company called Safaricom. And I saw that, you know, you go out there and there's a farmer, an illiterate farmer, doesn't even know how to spell his name, but you want to give him a tomato, he's like, I don't take Kenyan shilling. Pretty much impress on me, send me an M. Pesa And I Had to get out a telephone, a mobile phone and text money to them and they would take it. And I'm like, wow, for those areas where there are no banks we could bring financial services. So we actually went into a community and we saw that the closest bank is really far away. But Triathlon has operations and for those operations we have community volunteers, community mobilizers and we have to pay them. And instead of sending convoys that carry cash to pay people and be exposed, why don't we just tell Safaricom to come and erect a cellular phone masked over there. And they said, you know, we will put up a cellular phone mask if there is more than 15 people somewhere that are using mobile services. We bought 15 mobile phones. We hand it out to the people and the community mobilizers. And they were good with their words. They went and they erected the mask over there. And then we started expanding this program. And so what technically happened is we brought financial services to an underserved community where there never was any banking through a cellular and mobile phone company. And not only this became part of our treasury toolbox where we could send money electronically. It was great that USAID and the federal government in the US loved this because now every cent, every shilling that we send was traceable. There was, it was surveyable all the way down to the person who got it. And even if that person went out and bought tomatoes, that was even surveyable. So that was a security thing and a good anti terrorism move with the Exchequers list and the OFAC list in the us. But on the other side, our programming team was using a Treasury mobile system fund transfer system to also send out messages to these community mobile and say, hey listen, on Sunday we're doing vaccines bring the kids. So we were getting the word out and that's why when we submitted this project to the afp, we won the grand Pinnacle award. In fact, tiny little Chapman internationals runner up was Toyota. It was a huge honor for us to be able to win over Toyota. And it was not about spending big money, it was not about putting billions into a system. It was just about thinking creatively and not being locked in a back office situation. Being in a situation where corporate treasury created a system that not only helped cause development, bring financial services to an underserved community, but our treasury systems were being used for humanitarian things like, you know, go to school for free lunch off of Treasury's network, go to get a vaccine off of Treasury's network. So we became not a back office, we were actually a front office. Our systems and Our technology were part of the total strategy of the company.

And Susan, you just talked there about winning the award. You know, I know that it was great for a small company per se, a small team to win this, but you and I talked about the power of these awards before and why you think that was that recognition. And it's not about oh, look at us, look at us. Exactly. You put it there very well. But I think also you, you'd mentioned to me before that it was because there was lots of joined up thinking across your teams and department. You mentioned their it, but that was one of the powerful things that you recognize that it wasn't a Pinnacle award just for that. It was for all of you, wasn't it? That was one of the things you said to me.

Yeah, that's a very good point. It wasn't a corporate treasury recognition alone in any way you look at it. It was good. In treasury we love to be the grand pinnacle company for our programming team. They work very hard. I did this when I was country director of Kenya, not corporate treasurer. So the programming team and the people who go out in the field to help the children worked with me and we went to Safaricom and talked to them. So the programming people were very happy. And on the marketing side and the fundraising side, they love this idea, this award because this shows that, you know, if you are paying your money to this charity, there are actual professionals that are managing your money. There's good stewardship of the funds that are being sent to Child Fund. So it's not a willy nilly, you know, my own impression before going to Child Fund that hey, listen, I don't want to have a charity on my resume. Well, you know, once you have a prestigious award, it gives confidence to the donor base too that you know, this is not a Mickey Mouse place where I send my money and tomorrow they're going to lose my personal information and you know, they're going to get cyber attacked. It actually shows that these people know what they're doing. There are real professionals running this.

And then from there you've continued to develop team and treasury and roles evolve. Talk us through that as well because you've been there number of years so you've seen a lot of changes. What's happened?

Like yeah, I did start out as being 100% pure treasury person. And my treasury department in the beginning, 16 years ago was only doing cash management and banking. But over time we expanded our role. One of the things that happened is I took over the insurance. So taking a perspective of Global risk management and making sure organization is protected in terms of every kind of claim. I mean, you have a tsunami, you have an earthquake, you have a volcano. I mean, I can't tell you how many volcanoes happen that never been getting reported on the news, but do impact the people and the children that we work with. And having solutions and making sure the company doesn't have losses or mitigating situations for families out there, that became part of my portfolio. But the single biggest change that has emerged as a result of me being head of insurance and risk is cyber. And cyber affects every treasury directly. And that is the number one thing that made me stop sleeping about three years ago, especially when Covid came, that everybody had to go home and work remotely. But you know, it's one thing if you live in the UK or the United States and you go home and you work remotely off of a vpn. But you have to understand for a company like us, where we have operations, say in Mozambique, when we tell our staff, you have to go home and work, not everybody has Internet at home. So what happens, they go home and they can't work, so they have to pick up their laptop and go find a hotel and use their unsecure network to ask for payment or send data that has banking and information on it. And so for me, that was the number one worry. And that's where my role went beyond just head of insurance and Treasury. I was actually the number one principal driver of saying we need an incident response plan and an incident response for cyber. So now, and this seems counterintuitive that, you know, everybody thinks it has to be the lead or the principal in a cyber incident response. Look, everybody is surprised how our CIO love the fact that we asked to be the leading role of this because our CIO says, you know, I am responsible to make sure the network is secure. We have antivirus protection, we have multi factor authentication and firewalls where people can't come in. But what I cannot control is, excuse me for saying this, the stupidity of people where somebody downloads tons of personal information into an Excel file and emails it off and it just went on the Internet. That's a cyber incident right there. So I love the fact that one of the business owners wants to take control and assume that responsibility. So now treasury is the go to department every time somebody wants to sign a contract. And if the deal involves managing lots of children's information, lots of donors information, let's say, just to create a mailing list to send to our donors to give updates about what We've done and that going out, how do you control and how do you protect all the information? And so now treasury has become the go to department in the company. So we really have moved out of the back office role to being at the table, strategic, forward looking, defensive organization. And so with all of these three combined, I feel like we have converted our treasury operations into a leading edge, cyber resilient cash fortress, if you would.

You won an award for this. It just getting recognition for the business or for you and the team or qualify this a little bit. I was asked by a global treasurer the other day and they've been through a heck of a year and they've done some amazing stuff. But I got sent through the proposal because, because he's just focused, very, very focused and very successful. But he said, you know what, I, I need the rest of my team to share this as well. Because what we've done, where we've taken it from and to is, is incredible. And we need the rest of the world to give everyone a thumbs up about all the work. Is that, is that why you do it?

You know, the reason why we did it was because we ended up having the opportunity to do something. And when we did it, we thought, we feel that the greater treasury community can also learn about this. I'm very involved with the bigger community. I'm part of the AFP. I've been part of their advisory group for 12 years and now I'm a board member and I've been involved with local groups. But to me it was, we need two mind shifts. One, don't just look inside your company. Look at the grand profession. Look at the treasury world and try to get the word out. So look outside the company and then understand that the world is constantly changing and you cannot be stuck into, well, we process credit cards and checks. That's moved on. Now you have PayPal, Venmo, all of these things and all of those things are great, but all of them come with bigger risks. Now this wasn't something that we did with the intent of winning an Alexander Hamilton Award. We did this and then once we did it, we thought, well this is a big deal, let's apply for the award. But let's also go out and teach treasurers that, hey, listen, you know, as a treasurer, you cannot wait for it to do all the right things. Listen, if you're a company, let's say like utility company, you have millions of people's credit card or banking information for the recurring billings you do every month, you debit their accounts. Well, are you tokenizing your credit cards or just encrypting it? One of the steps is to tokenize. And then on your ach is no bank in the US even offers it. So that to me was we need to inform the banks if Visa, MasterCard and American Express for 30 years have tokenized, why isn't it that one single trillion dollar bank or even a smaller bank has never even thought about offering ACH tokenization? So we went out and created a solution for that and we are now tokenizing our ach. So if someone cyber attacks and takes our data, they've basically stolen nonsense. And if they say, hey listen, you know, if you don't give us the ransom, we're going to go put it in the dark web. Well, you can put garbage in the dark web, you're not putting anything. So that's the difference between encryption and tokenization. So we wanted to get the word out that guys, you know, there are things you can do in Treasury. Do you have papers that have people's information on it? Are you redacting them? Are you storing these papers for 10 years? We just went to our auditors and said, you know, why are we storing everything due to data retention or document retention requirements for eight years after the year end audit is done. And the auditors have said, you know, give me the proof that these 40 people have said you're allowed to debit my account. That's done. After that we have no need for it. We want to purge. So data cleansing, but these things are not being put out. Like I said, you know, you could become an accountant and major in accounting, you could become a marketer and study marketing. But there is no university that offers how to become a treasurer. The only ones who are playing any role in that professionalizing and development is the AFP in the US but then there are areas that are still evolving so fast that it will take a few years for people to catch up. So data cleansing, tokenizing, telling the banks what we want. Those were the things that we wanted to have influence. You know, some people have called Kaufman International the William Tell of Treasury. Why? Because William Tell tells things as a bad joke, as a blabber mouth of Switzerland. So Chart is a tiny company but with a huge voice in the treasury environment and the treasury community of the things that we could do and stop being back office.

Let's just deep dive in for a moment. So talk about token tokenization because you and I discussed this and you'll explain it much better than me that you know the Power in that is that you were saying about the gobbledygook and stuff. I didn't think. I want you to explain that a little bit more for the listeners, because when you explained it to me, it means that you can quickly switch it. You know, there's something. You can cancel them all or you can change it. There was a resilience in there about, you know, stopping all these crimes. And I was just like, wow. And I just remember thinking, and there were so many other things coming, but I remember that sticking my mind. Can you explain that a little bit to the audience?

Yeah. So many organizations, in order to protect sensitive information, PII or pci, personally identifiable information or payment card industry information, bank information, they store the data in the company and they encrypt it, which is okay in my perspective, it's inadequate. I don't even want it stored in my company. So we actually have sent. The only time we have somebody's bank account or credit card information, for example, is when we receive it and are king getting to the computer that night. After all the entries have been done, a batch file goes to an outside company which is a division of Visa International. They take those and they say, sasan, your credit card, which had these 16 digits in the future, will be known as ABCD2. And I store ABCD2. So next month, when I want to charge, somebody wants to charge my credit card account, they need to know that Sasan's account is ABCD2. And they tell this outsourced company, go ahead and process a $40 payment against ABCD2. Now, if somebody breaks into child fund, what they can steal is ABCD2. That's one thing. ABCD2 is completely worthless and meaningless. Two, they don't know the protocols. They don't have the passwords, they don't know the systems and who is processing it down the line. So they are now blocked off. The thing about tokenization is that it goes beyond encryption. It just removes it completely from your systems. And that's what I want. I want to store nothing. So if someone breaks into the company, they are able to steal nothing. Now, if they do steal that, I will now pick up the phone tomorrow and call my tokenizer and say, hey, listen, all of my credit card tokens were stolen. I need a new set. What they do is they cancel and send me brand new. Now I'm going to go from ABCD2 to XJB7. It's cool, brilliant. It's really a creative system.

And then again, you touched on AFP and We're both going to be at AFP in San Diego, so. Looking forward to that.

I look forward seeing you there.

Be great. But again, you and I have talked about getting involved in professional organizations like that and network networking and all the power. Why is that such a strong thing for yourself? Aside from things like the awards and recognize that recognition there? What. What would you say?

I think the AFB is playing an amazing role that no one else has played. Again, my daughter, when she wanted to go to college, she actually did come to me and say, dad, how do I become a treasurer? I mean, accountants go and study accounting, Finance people go study finance. Marketeers go study marketing. But where do you go to become a Treasury person? And looking at my own career, how I actually didn't pursue the treasury job, but I pursued the name of the company, Litton Industries, because I wanted to work for them. I went into treasury by accident. I learned everything on the job. I would say that the main resource, I had to really network, touch base with other professionals and say, hey, how do you do this? How do you do that? It was through the afp. I gotta tell you, there is still not one University. There's 13,000 universities in the United States, not one that even offers one course in treasury operations. You end up learning everything on the job. So to me, the AFB is the only teacher and is the only resource out there that you could really go to and really connect to. And I mean, I may be ignorant, there may be others, but there's nothing on the scale of the afp. So I've really volunteered. And I think, you know, don't like to be locked inside my company. Regardless of which company it is, I like to be connected to the bigger world. And the AFB has facilitated that. And when we talk about how did child fund a tiny little company, win the Pinnacle Award or the Alexander Hamilton Award, let me just tell you this way. Because of the afb, I go to the conferences every year. I don't innovate. I just steal everybody's good idea. I implement.

I get the feedback sometimes, but, like, I'm really busy, everyone's really busy and things. But with networking, with, you know, committing to these professional organizations, giving up your time for free, why, if you look back on it, why would you encourage others to do it? What's it giving you? What can it give them? You know, because they're saying, well, you know, I need to spend more time with my family, we all do, and everything else. But why do you think it's because you've got to give up time you've got to lean into, you've got to commit to it. Why would you say you think that's so powerful?

Because you learn what's changing, what's new, what others are doing, what great ideas other have implemented that could be low hanging fruit. Not everything has to be $1 billion or $20 million investment with five years of implementations. When you pick up all the goodies and you alone cannot generate all the great ideas, you need to go and see who are the people, who are the thought leaders or the best in class and what they're doing and what they're talking. You also need to understand the risks that are emerging. You also need to understand the technologies that are changing constantly. So being in that network and being able to connect makes you a much better treasurer. You know, I listen to your podcasts, Mike, all the time. I listen to a conversation you had with Joel Campbell and Leanne Perkins, and Leanne said something really amazing. She said, your network is your net worth. I love that comment. I love that comment.

I want to steal that. That's, that's mine. I wanted. She did that and I was just like, oh my God, that's so powerful. I hate you, Leanne, because it's such a. You're totally right and I absolutely love that. And big shout out to her, she's a great lady. But, but you're right. It's true though, isn't it?

It is, it is. Your network is what informs you, it's what you can rely on. It's amazing. And you know, Joel in that same podcast also said, you know, he's seen some of his ears where they on their LinkedIn have 50 people and he's exactly the opposite. And you actually mentioned that you had met somebody that every time he got a business card, he would say, give me a minute and he would go right on the back of the card. I saw him at the afp, was wearing a red shirt and has two kids and took the time to actually know the network and know how to connect in the future. These are not Mickey Mouse jokes. These are real practical things you gotta do to remain relevant. And you know, I want to touch on the point of relevancy. If you don't go to these conferences and you think you're busy or let me just tell you, the world is changing so quickly that because you didn't have the time to go anywhere, you have become irrelevant right now. One of your number one strategies in your career is relevancy. Stay on top of it, stay informed, stay Connected and stay relevant.

We could end it there. We're not going to. We've got a couple more nuggets from yourself just on that. That was actually the amazing Chris Fulton Prior Cashman. We'll put a link to him in the show notes. A great guy to have in your network. That's who gave me that networking tip going back to Leanne, just to mention on there. I love that what I did have done is taken from that. And I did this most recently in Chicago was about networking your net worth. And I, I gave her a big shout out. But actually one of the things I made as point to the audience there was the actual word networking. You know, when you and I meet up in Chicago, meet up in San Diego rather. But when I was in Chicago, I was saying to the guys, look at the word. And they were like, right. And I sort of then in bold capitals, put the work piece in there. And I said, it's not easy. I said, it's hard work. And Joel actually has mentioned this and on his original podcast, we'll put a load of links to this. He actually said, no. Remember one of his ex bosses saying, we've had to go through that task and what was that like? And he was like, oh, yeah, it's like this. And his boss went, you know why? He's like, no, what's that? I said, because it's called work. I was like, oh, okay. It's not, not fun. It's not pleasure, leisure. You know, it's like you've got to work, you've got to put in the hard yard sometimes. And then you get the, you know, it's like investing and then you get the, the compound interest back sort of thing. So, hey, God, some great value bombs there right towards the end. So before we wrap up, we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. Suzanne, take us, you know, with yourself. What are the takeaways that you're going to give to people listening today? It's great that you've heard some the previous show. So you know how we wrap up the show each week and I a couple of times we looked at changing it. Just then when I've spoken to people said, oh, we love your wrap up. We love that because it's sort of a nice way to wrap up the episode. A bit like wrapping up a Christmas present. So yourself, what are the takeaways you're going to give for the audience today?

Number one is stay on top of the industry. Don't limit yourself to thinking that everything has to be done through banks. Look at new technology and understand what others are doing. Don't benchmark to common practice, benchmark to best practice and strive to be the best and remain relevant.

Scribbling notes here. Amazing new tech best practice. And don't forget the networking piece. You know, we're going to network together. We're going to get to see San Diego. Can't wait for it. I think that's proven that, you know, you, you're the a great networker and thank you for your time, sir. It's been amazing to chat to you.

Thank you, Mike. It's been a pleasure to be here and I'm honored that you invited me. Thank you.

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