Managing Treasury FX & Automation with Michael Bradley

I think automation is going to continue to be the main driving force. And whether you say automation, I heard a lot of people talk about AI and how that's going to change things, I don't know. To me that's more automation as well. But it's true, it's going to, you're going to need less worker bees and more people that, that can take the data and interpret it and run with it and less people just, you know, doing the rote work, that, that work's going to go away. You know, more straight through processing, less keying in of things, but more analysis and understanding what it means to your company and how to manage that. To me, that's the biggest trend. One of the things that I thought was interesting is I've been since I was at Merck and then at Celgene, I was a member of the NOI group and I heard a lot of companies talk about that one of the things they were looking for in new employees was coding experience. And they were, and this is mostly like tech companies that were part numbers in my group. And I had never given this much thought, but they were saying how they, they wanted employees that could do right algorithms and do some coding to help streamline some of their operations that they were doing. And to me, I thought it was interesting, but I felt like that's really the job of your vendors to do that sort of stuff. I. It's not really where I would necessarily want to direct my resources, but it might be like the direction that we're going and we might just be a late adopter or something like that. You know, I think that's interesting, but I think it's really more of the automation. It's going to eliminate the mundane task and make the group a much more of an analytical group. I think with things like Brexit. And this has been going on for a while because there was the sort of the euro crisis with Greece possibly. And I was worried that Greece or Italy or one of these countries going to leave the euro that predated Brexit. But these are the things that are really worrying CFOs. You know, those are big picture problems and they want to make sure that they understand how it's going to impact their business. And really that means you've got to reach out to the operations groups and understand what their footprint is in those markets. And I think you're viewed as, even though it's maybe a more of an operational thing, having a backup plan to maybe move some stuff out of those markets. Or find a way to just work around the issue when it comes, you know, you're the advisor to the CFO or to the, you know, if you're, if you're assistant treasurer to the assistant treasurer on how to handle that sort of thing. Well, I just think that these sort of big global flare ups are not going to go away, you know, they're going to continue to happen, I think so. It's funny because when I first started everything in FX was based on interest rates, differentials between markets and stuff. And then we got down to close to zero or negative rates and now everything is political changes, you know, in different countries. That's what really moves the FX rates and stuff. So it's interesting, it's, it's a very interesting cycle to be going through right now. As you're working your way up. Take note of who you work for and their management style. Are they, do you think they're a good manager or a bad manager? Because you can learn from both. And I've been fortunate. I've worked for some really great people over the years and I work for a couple of kind of averages to mediocre managers as well and better managers heard of lately and I've taken learnings from each of those and I really try to emulate when I'm managing someone, you know, like how would, how would this person have handled the situation? You know, I find that really helpful.