Navigating Growth Phases in SaaS: Insights from a Treasury Expert with Eugene Spevakov

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. And a special thanks to Flywire, our fantastic sponsors. If you've ever wondered whether there was a way to ease your international transaction hassles, they're the guys to talk to. If you follow the link in our show notes, you can see me talking to my mate Greg Levin, their Senior VP of Sales. I get to ask Greg about who are Flywire and how they can help you and your treasury team with your cross border payment headaches. Just follow the link to the interview in today's show notes. And now let's get on with the show. In this week's show I'm joined by Eugene Speakov, the treasurer at $0.06 Insights, a Series E SAS company where he has been instrumental in steering the company through significant growth phases for the past two years. Eugene manages key financial functions including treasury, corporate FBA and accounts payable. He's got many years of experience. I saw Eugene recently on LinkedIn soon giving an interview. I thought great, let's get this amazing guy on the podcast. So thrilled to be joined by Eugene today. And we were just talking before the show and your interest in Treasury. Sometimes we go back to the beginning of people's careers, but you actually started Eugene, with your interest in Treasury a little bit earlier than most. So over to you sir, maybe your origin story if you would. Over to you.

All right, awesome. Thanks Mike. I'm very excited to be here, very appreciative of you inviting me to this podcast and I look forward to our discussion today. Yeah, I do have a story. I grew up in the Soviet Union and back then the Soviet Union currency, the ruble was not something that was easily convertible. And when I was 13 we traveled abroad. I used to play this game called Go and we traveled to Yugoslavia. Back then it was Yugoslavia. We traveled to a European championship and what the rules of the travel in the Soviet Union were if you do travel, if you legitimate business reason or legitimate purpose to travel once a year you are allowed to exchange your rubles into the foreign currency. Normally the citizens could not exchange the rubles to any currency, but you could exchange it if you had legitimate travel. Very limited amount. I'm guessing the government of Soviet Union didn't want the citizens to starve on the trips, but they did allow them to exchange rubles for hard currency and at the same time, the ruble itself was fairly worthless, but the government did not want to admit it. The government wanted to pretend that the currency was actually worth something. So they set an official exchange rate that was much, much higher than the actual value of the ruble. As a matter of fact, there was a joke going around in old Soviet Union. What's the exchange rate between the ruble, the dollar and the pound? And the answer is $1 is worth £1 of dried rubles. It was not bad, but the government allowed you to exchange your rubles into dollars at a very preferential rate, the rate that they wanted to have officially, but the amount is limited. So I'm 13 years old, we're about to travel, very excited and I know that we can exchange a certain amount of rubles into dollars that can be later exchanged to Yugoslavia and dinars. And I'm trying to figure out how much dollars are you going to get for these rubles. And there was actually an exchange rate published, an official exchange rate published in the newspaper once a week. And I would look it up and I was fascinated. I couldn't quite comprehend why one week you get one amount of dollars for your rubles and that week is a different amount. And amount goes up and down through no fault, the merit of your own. So that's how I got exposure to foreign exchange rates and their fluctuations. And then I try to understand a little bit better plus the various economic drivers. And every at that time I thought everybody wanted to have strong currency because it represented the strength of the economy. But yeah, it's something that I never thought of before. Probably most 13 year olds never thought of give another thought to. But I was so exposed to it and fascinated me. I'd say another lesson that I got in, maybe not treasury, but economics was when we actually went to Yugoslavia. And by the way Yugoslavia was like a commonwealth of several states and republics. Today the main part is Serbia. We go there and the country is going through a period of hyperinflation. And I lived through inflation, but this was very different every day. Yeah, it was like was the period, I don't know how, how long it lasted, but people's behavior changes in hyperinflation environment. First of all we visited some homes there and you have like bags of grains and stuff. Like we asked why do you store so much? Because as soon as somebody gets cash on a few days it loses value so rapidly it's worth to just go out and purchase thing. So it drives consumer behavior in a very different way. Second thing that was Very amazing. You go in a store and you have stickers of how much things cost and for every item, pretty much every item. And it has probably half a dozen to a dozen stickers because the price changes so often. Every day, every day, every other day store clerks need to go in there and put the new sticker on the price. So that was, that was very interesting, the economic dynamics. And I got exposed to it when I was 13. Not exactly maybe treasury, but it shapes my. Shaped my thinking and yeah, yeah, it.

Got you thinking about finance and treasury and at that early stage. So then education wise, what happened with you and what happened from there?

Yeah, so like a lot of folks in my family, I went into engineering. So it's not nothing connected to that previous experience. And I go to engineering and I follow my passion and I wanted to be to do something with environment and that was mid-90s, late-90s. So instead of going into thumbnailconnected.com, i go completely different route and go to civil engineering, which I don't regret by any means. But it was a different path than most kind of folks followed at the time I finished my engineering degree, I the first job I get, I do exactly what I learned in school. A lot of structural design got very boring and very old because I was doing the same design over and over again. The first few times it's great when you do it 10, 20 times, then it gets boring.

It's not. It's lost is lackluster. It's not quite as interesting I think. So yeah, you're doing the engineering design but with that sort of. What's the word? Did you then was it then how come you were starting to think about the next move?

Yeah, so I'm actually after the. The first job I joined t also an engineering capacity, but more in a project management role to where I've managed my projects and I designed my project and I did everything start to finish. I really got very interested and I got this passion for getting things beyond building things, managing things, getting things. Not just hey, I'm just the cog on a machine. I'm actually driving something. I had a responsibility for an area, actually geographic area and functional area within a small area, but within the company to make sure that the outside plan functions well. I really enjoyed that kind of start to finish management part of it, not just the design but also the execution coordination. I worked with with other engineering teams. I work with construction, I work with customers, I work with municipalities. So being in the middle of things and making things happen that Was very rewarding. And you can see things being built. I can drive around town. I can say, I did this project, I did that project. I could see it. But I didn't want to be complacent. I wanted to continue growing and learning things. So I pivoted and I went to business school. And when, while in business school, I really enjoyed a lot of finance courses, especially finance courses that deal with markets. I love my derivatives class. I. It was actually for one quarter. I was in Manchester in the University of Manchester. In business school, I took a class on banking and that was a great class. We did the simulation. So I really liked finance because it was very analytical, similar to engineering. And I thought to myself, this is a very good career path. I can build on the engineering experience and I can carry it on into finance. I was very fortunate at&t hired me back, but into their finance group, into something called Finance Leadership Program. There was a rotational program where you do three rotations in three years. And I started with BU Finance. And my first, very first rotation was an experience that I didn't expect at all. I started with at&t. I'm excited. I'm like, okay, I'm going to figure something out. I'm going to help big company. I'm going to move the needle somewhere and make things better. And then I. I joined a bit a BU that was a sunsetting business. It was long distance business at the time. Everybody was cutting cord and subscribers were going down. Actually the size of the team when I started, we had the 20 people in that group. When I left a year later, I think we had three or four people, including myself. There was a very good exposure to finance, to budgeting. For my second rotation, I got into a growing business unit. It was more exciting. It was u verse things are growing fast. So it was very different. But for my third rotation, and the rule was you have to do one rotation at the headquarters. And I was in California headquarters in Texas. And I say, well, Eugene, you need to come to Texas. I'm like, okay, which rotation do I want? Yeah, I'm thinking maybe I would like a role that's connected to the market, that's more externally focused, that kind of utilizes stomach curriculum that I'm learning here in a CFA institute. And it's not the budgeting part. It's gotta be something that's connected to markets. Treasury was a natural answer. I said, I want Treasury. Let me go to Treasury. And Steve, that's where things happening, like on a grand scale and. And I got to Texas and that that was it. Treasury was this big nerve center. Three months after I got there was 2008, Lehman collapsed and treasury was completely wrong Seed and what.

And you joined obviously you're doing your rotation, you're you know, right at the bottom of the Treasury. How was treasury structured there at AT&T@ the time?

Yeah. So treasury was pretty much mostly in a corporate office. There was a little bit of decentralized part and some be used that would feed in some data. But treasury was mainly in in Texas.

Was that a big team, big group or.

Yeah, so it, it's a big team and it's not that big team the Treasury. If you look at the headcount under treasury it was I think six or seven hundred people. And you said whoa, why so many people in Treasury? And the reason is cash management was part of treasury and part of of cash management was receiving payments, receiving people who mail checks somebody needs to open and process them.

So few hundred people longbox processing it was all any touch point of cash. So what was real corporate treasury as we might know it in there? Roughly, yes.

I want to say it's probably two dozen people or so. There was the capital markets team, slash FX team and there was about five, six people. The core team that was in Dallas. I want to say it's maybe a couple dozen people. So still fairly large Cash management team had several people there. There was within capital markets there was very debt heavy with interest rate hedging. There was person that was doing C.P. for example, C.P. issuance. So there was a specialist in a lot of these roles. It was fairly complex operation and it was very, very, very centralized because everything was happening in and you were there.

It's your first role, you're on that rotation. It was a good thing for you. You're getting that you're treasury specialist right at the bottom of things. But in the big corporate you're getting exposure to lots of stuff. What did that give you that you could use for the future as it were? What were you able to do?

Yeah, let me tell another story. So I get into San Antonio in Texas and there's another person that moved there from California that was a little bit more senior and that my, my role was the extra pair of hands, the rotational guy pick up different tasks. His role was to, to do FX. Now FX was not huge for AT&T, but still there were millions of dollars.

Flowing through various questions.

And after he, he moved with his family to San Antonio, it didn't work out and he decided to move back to California. So that position for fx, not trader may affects analyst, effects manager. It was vacant and because effects was not huge, nobody was panicking. And I asked my manager, can I pick it up like the vacant role? I'm here, I'm very flexible with what I do. Can I step into it? You know, he thought about it and said yeah, sure, why not? So I actually got into a more specialized role right there and then like within a month or two after do my treasure rotation and I became the FX guy and that later helped me do make my next move to be effects manager treasury manager at SanDisk few years later. Which was great. It's a good foray into some kind of a specialty. It's also taught me to that you don't necessarily need to have a background in something in order to be able to pick it up. You can learn things, it's incremental, it's adjacent, you can step into it. If you've done A, you can probably do B. Maybe going from A to Z is difficult, but going from A to B to C is very doable. And I think that's how a lot of folks careers develop. They slowly expand and build on what.

They have and without wishing to advertise too much, you then move to SanDisk. Now for people that don't know AT&T, everyone knows the global name SanDisk, most people might know, but I was actually just looking there. There you go, that's it.

Yeah, there you go.

That's it. They do memory and everything else for your different devices and everything else. And yeah, a very big old customer. So yeah, feel free to send me some stuff. Sandisk is lovely. Yeah, but so how did you make that move or what happened next?

Yeah, so I was, I was living in Texas, made, made that move over to AT&T. I was there for a couple of years. I wanted to come back to California but my one boundary condition was I want to stay in Treasury. I'm like, I love Treasury. I really. This is it. This is what I wanted to do. This is all my kind of interests and training and education. This is what I feel like hardcore finance within a corporation. That's where a lot of it happens. No offense to other areas of finance, but this is what I enjoy.

So we don't need to be offensive. But they're not listening. That's the good thing. Only treasury folk. Yeah, so we're not being offensive to others. And if you are listening from other areas, you're obviously listening because you want to get into treasury. So it's okay. We're all right. Like you can feel the treasury love here on the, on the podcast, so don't worry. So yeah. So yeah.

So I tell people I changed companies but I kept my job. So I, I stayed in Treasury. I was lucky that Sandia School was looking for treasury manager to address some of their FX need. I get in there. Very interesting. The company, if you can do fx then just was the place to be. Right. Because sand just had a joint venture with Toshiba to produce most of the memory chips or to produce most of the memory.

We love them. Great. Thank you.

But for Semicolon company, if you actually have manufacturing, the core is those wafers. And these fabs were in Japan. Toshiba had slight majority ownership, so they were setting. Setting some of the rules. And one of the rules was that the products were denominated in Japanese yen. So SanDisk, a US company that's operating in USD now had to buy its core components, the wafers that made up most of their cogs in Japanese yen. So I think at one point like half, like 50% of the COGS were denominated in Japanese yen. And that created a massive exposure to Japanese yen for sandisk. And at that time the yen was just on a tear. It was just getting stronger and stronger and it would cause a lot of hardship from the financial perspective for Sandias because it put a lot of pressure on the margin. And so the question was, how do you mitigate it? How do you deal with this risk? You can't change what the yen is trading at. Right. But you could lock in and go a little bit further, a little shorter. You could at least give some certainty to the business by hedge as much as you could. Yeah. So I was very, again, very fortunate to be at the right place at the right time. And it was very interesting to set up. I took a fresh look at the hedging program. We presented new proposal. It got, went all the way to CEO, it got approved, we started executing hedges. It was very. Went from somewhat sporadic hedging program to a very programmatic hedging program. And there's always second guessing. Should we bought this, should we bought it this time or that time or trying to take this emotional piece out and just focus on just managing risk. Reduce your risk. If FX is not your core business, don't take the risk there. Take the risk in your manufacturing process because that's where you get offsized return. So that was a great role to get into, leverage FX skills and transition. But I didn't want to do. I didn't want to be a FX scale for the rest of my career. And that was. I started seeing, okay, people look at you like, eugene's very good at fx, but he hasn't done anything else, so we don't know can he do other stuff. But I was fortunate, even with Sandy, just to get into this next adjacent area is investments. So investments for Sandius, we had several billion dollars on the balance sheet, about half a dozen asset managers. So that was also very exciting. Most companies, if they have a lot of money, they might have internal program. If they have very little money, they might have been bothering investments or just have a single asset manager we had right there in between, where we wouldn't. We're not doing it in house, but it's enough to. Where there were a lot of eyes on it. It was a big. It was a big focus for the company and investors would ask us about it. So again, very visible, very interesting and somewhat unique, too, because Danges at the time had very high tax rate. So municipal bonds that are tax exempt were very attractive. Yet most companies don't allocate a lot of municipal bonds. Sandus did, and we always looked at it. It was very interesting to understand the asset classes deeper, talk to the asset managers, understand the dynamics of this corner of the market. It was great going from FX to FX and investment. It was very interesting, but also proved to myself that, okay, you can move from one area to the next and you can pick things up even if you did not know them before. It doesn't require specific training.

And that's also something I think the listeners need to. When you were doing that, were you pushing yourself to do that or were others saying you need to do this or. Where did that come from?

Yeah, I wanted to do this. Yeah. I just. I did not. After doing FX for, I don't know, it's probably three years or so. I don't want to be the FX guy for the rest of my life. Three years is great, but what if it's 5, 6, 7, right. Where do you go from there? So I really wanted to expand again within treasury and something that's also adjacent Investments was a great opportunity because it deals with markets, it deals with risk, different type of risk, but. And it also aligned with a lot of CFA curriculum that I've studied a few years earlier. So it was a perfect fit. So I really wanted to do that.

Yeah. And then you. One of the things that. Technology is a big. What's the word? A backbone of a lot of your Career, if you like. And is that born out of the fact that there is so much technology and too many tech companies on the west coast of the US that then the opportunities come up? Or was that some also driven by your own to get the next role sort of thing, or was that driven by you?

Yeah, it's probably a bit of both. I do want to acknowledge that being a tech company where there are a lot of things happening, a lot of changes happening, is exciting, right? Change brings challenges, but also brings opportunities. And being in treasury, when things are challenging, things are interesting. If things are the same day to day, then it gets boring. I'm the guy who likes the challenge. I'm the guy who likes to solve a problem. Yeah. Being in tech is rewarding from a career perspective. Makes the job interesting. But also being on the west coast, there are a lot of tech companies, there are a lot of semiconductor companies here, there are a lot of SaaS companies now here. Yeah, it's a little bit of both.

So then talk us through the next couple of moves or the next couple of companies if you like, because you did that role for a while and then it was Marvel Semiconductors. Who are they?

Yeah, yeah. So I had an opportunity to join Marvel. It's a broader role. It, it had effects, it had investments. It also also picked up insurance. And there's some. There was a cash management component as well. Picking up insurance was very interesting because going from FX to investments, there are a lot of some commonalities. It's markets, it's risk things, things move with fluctuations of the market. Insurance was very different. And insurance was somewhat daunting because when I first got in there and by the way, that job was not like, hey, Eugene, do you really want insurance? Do you want to take it? It was more like, hey, here's the job and include insurance. And I'm like, that's great because I do want to learn it, but I have no idea about what I'm doing here.

Well, it's insurance.

Yeah. And the daunting part about insurance was it has its own lingo. And when everybody speaks one language and you don't understand the language, it makes things very difficult. The way I did two things to overcome it. One, I basically, given my engineering mindset, I want things to make sense. I that's two. And most times it's correct. The things are done for a reason. There's insurance that's structured a certain way. There's a reason why it's done this way. Just need to understand what the reason is. So getting to the bottom of why things are done the way they're done was easy for me to learn. I had to actually, going back to my undergrad days, I had a engineering professor who said, technician ask how, engineers ask why. So my, my advice, if you want to learn something and really drive things, understand why. Everything has a why. If you know what why it is, then you can make changes, then you can make tweaks, then you can make improvements, and then things make a lot more sense. If you only know how, then yes, you can execute. But it's hard for you to really get out of the boot of things sometimes. Oh, yeah. So one was understanding the why things down in the insurance land the way they were done. Second, I, I wasn't afraid to ask a dumb question. I'm like, hey, I'm new to this insurance thing. Like, why is this done this way? What does this mean? What, like, how come? And I expected, I'll be like, hey, Eugene, this is super simple. Yeah, we understand you knew. So we'll, we'll hear you and answer you. But what I found out that a lot of times you ask a question and, oh, that's interesting. We didn't really think of it this way. This is kind of how it's done. We're not sure exactly why, but it's interesting that you're bringing it up. Other advices to people that new to something, it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to ask maybe even simple questions that maybe you assume that everybody knows. There's a very straightforward answer. Maybe nine times out of ten there is, but there will be times where, yeah, what you bring up is actually very valuable. And you have a different perspective being an outsider. So that's, you have to leverage that. You have to capitalize on being an outsider. And so it's not. Sometimes it's not a detriment. Sometimes it's actually an asset.

So you did that role for a number of years. I don't want to run out of time today. So then you're in one semiconductor company. Well, another one comes along. How you know, what was it like? Did you just, just love the industry? Yeah. Here we go. What happened next?

Yeah, it's good. The industry, it was, it's very interesting industry. Obviously there's drive a lot of things that are happening right now. Our software is driven by the underpinning of semiconductors, but a lot of it is like, hey, Eugene's in the semiconductor world. He's a great fit for semicompany. Right? So A lot of people, they, the recruiters target you, the authorities look at you like, hey, you would be great fit for this company, but you're not in this other type of industry, which to me, actually in treasury and to all the listeners that say we have to resist this to some degree, because I think treasury skills are very transferable from industry to industry. Yes, there's an industry component that's important, but there are other things that might be even more important to treasury from transferability perspective than industry. For example, if your company is cash rich, then the focus is on investment. If you're cash, lean debt is more prevalent. And these are two very different things within treasury that might impact the job a lot more than the actual industry. So we just have to be cognizant. I think the outsiders look at professionals like, you're in this industry. This is what you do. But I think for treasury, it's a little bit different. And I think treasury skills are very transferable. I just want to say that sometimes people might want to pigeonhole specific industry, and that's the treasury professional that's, I think, is unfair. But job with Cypress was there and it was very exciting. It was again, stepping up to a broader role, more responsibility. I gladly took it on. It was a great experience. I got to work with some great people. And then Infineon announced an acquisition of Cypress a couple years into my job at Cypress. So that was actually a very interesting process. First, acquisition itself was very interesting, and we closed it during COVID when Covid just started, it was April 15, 2020. So that in itself was very interesting experience, trying to work through Covid and close this major deal with $10 billion acquisition. The other interesting aspect was dash integration. I stayed for two years after the deal closed. First of all, I really liked Infineon. Very nice company, great people. And second, there were a lot of things to do from an integration perspective. So I stayed and integrated the Americas operations. There were other interesting projects there. They were on my plate. But eventually, yeah, the center of gravity for Infineon is in Munich. So a lot of decisions, a lot of if you want to be in driver's seat, you have to be in Munich or something. I was in Pals A here.

Yeah.

So that was difficult.

And then. So you'd done a lot of, as I say, tech. We'd had sandisk these companies. And then you came along and joined 6th Sense. Can you explain who 6 cents are?

Yeah. So 6Sense is. Is a SaaS company. So software in. It's a B2B software company in RevTech space and what 6Sense does, it leverages its data, it leverages its algorithms and other cool technology including AI to help its customers find their next customer faster and more efficiently. So it's. If you get more precisely it's account based marketing niche of Rev but there are other components as well and it's basically helping sales teams, helping marketing teams and helping some of their operation teams within, within RevTech to get their job done more efficiently, easier and be more focused on the most promising thing.

Yeah, and so a bit of a shift for you in as you talked about there, you had, you have cash rich companies, you have debt laden, you have different things but also now you've done a shift of industry. What's treasury like there or how does it compare if you like from Cyprus and things like that? It's very convenient to. Yeah, quite, quite a shift for you treasury wise, would you say?

Yeah, it's a major shift. It's a major industry shift which in itself you do learn a lot. It's different and it takes time to learn things within the industry. Definitely shift going from public companies that I've been at prior to that to a private company to a crazy private company. Major shift because of the, this exponential high growth even though growth slowed down a little bit in software, but it's still very high compared to what I've been used to in prior roles and also because the company grew so fast, a lot of things just have not been as established as my prior roles where I came in and treasury might have been around for 20 years and their processes, their policies, there are things that certain ways done, you can come in, you can look, you can improve things Here it's more like you build things which is very exciting. It's not just treasury, it's other process too. But because A it's new and B it grew so fast and continues to grow fast. You have completely different sets of challenges and that's challenges makes life interesting. It's getting to treasury. You get to look at hey do we need to do hedging, do we need to do investment, do we need to do this? And you look at it and you start prioritizing and you try to say okay, here's the benefit, here's the cost or the amount of work that's going to go into it, what's the priority? And yeah, you get on the two years I've been there, it was very exciting because I feel like you get to build things. Goes back to my days as an engineer with at building things like, hey.

I've done this project and just with this and just going back to your experience and one of the things I picked down here, and we talked about this in our pre podcast course. So you've gone into a tech company, there's software and everything else, service and everything else. How does that feed into Treasury? We were, we had our pre call. So I mean it's great. You can use AI to do all your treasury for you. That's what it's like, right? That's all you do, you just sit there, feed in some algorithms to your latest AI model, whether that's Clay, whether that's chatgpt, whatever it might be, and then you can just sit back as a treasurer. That right?

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly, exactly like type of way. Yeah. Don't anybody wants to go treasury, don't bother you. It's going to do everything.

No AI does it though. But joking aside, what. How have you used that and leverage that if you like.

You know what, when it comes to AI and automation, we definitely very focused on automation, but again, priorities, automation within treasury hasn't been the top priority. Well, we will be getting to it. Yeah, But I say when you automate and when you invest resources, you have to consider the cost of this automation, the benefit. And it really depends on what scale you're operating at. If you're a smaller scale with maybe fewer entities, you can get a lot of things done in Excel. Up to a point, we're still fairly small where that's not hindering us. At some point it will be more efficient to do more of this automation and maybe leverage some of the systems, some of the AI. The other thing I'd say on AI, everybody's excited about it. It's a great term to throw around because people say, hey, it's just going to do everything for me. Like I said, I'm going to sit back and relax. There are things that AI can do and there's things that AI I don't think will be able to do, at least not our foreseeable future. And AI is very good at automating execution. But somebody needs to set up a process. Somebody needs to know what the inputs are going to be, somebody needs to get those inputs, somebody needs to define what the output should be. AI. I talked about it in other forums, but I see four stages of most processes. First are the inputs. You have to get the data. AI will not do it for you. As a matter of fact, without data, AI is not going to do anything or will not Give you any reasonable value. Right. Second thing, you need to define your output. AI might be able to help you define outputs, but you're going to have to know what you want to get out of things. So you have to drive that part. Then there's the logic. How do you get from inputs to outputs? Can I help you? Maybe, but most likely not because you know your business better than AI would. You know the drivers, you know the. All the dynamic, how the inputs, what the sensitivity of the inputs is. So you need to define the logic of what the system's going to do and then the actual execution. Pulling data, doing the calculations, producing outputs, all that stuff. That's what AI can do. So if you guys in the audience think that my job is going to be replaced with AI, some jobs probably will be, and in treasury, and I think there's room for a lot of automation. So things like pulling reports and putting together cash, positioning and the routine crap.

Basically goes away and.

Exactly.

But as you say. But you put. I know, sorry. I had this session recently with the manufacturer's alliance and they were like, oh, what about this? I said, AI and robots and bots. I said, it's not going to replace us, it's going to make our jobs more interesting. It makes my job as a recruiter more interesting. We. I've automated a lot of our salary survey, but then when I want to do the analysis, I was scribbling notes here, because you're exactly right. When I then had to do the input of the data, getting the data into a proper format to make it, then show ChatGPT and show the engines and, you know, the automation to produce me, then something that. And execute and show me something that made sense to me rather than just all the numbers and everything else. I see. This is great, but what does it mean? That's where we can extract the meaning.

Yeah. Somebody's gonna have to do the thinking. Maybe at some point AI is gonna take over the world and we'll be able to think better than humans. I don't know if it's gonna happen, and I don't think it's gonna happen in any. In the next five to ten years at least. If you. Even though there's a lot of development, I think a lot of AI hype that we're seeing is more on automating. A lot of, like you said, routine tasks that execution, it's. AI can understand things better, what it's taking in and what you want it to do and how you want it to be delivered. Don't worry people find it.

Skynet is not here for anyone.

Yeah. And if it does come, I hope I'm retired by that point.

Okay, so we're not quite at the end, but what the takeaway again with the. We'll give the takeaways in a bit. But now looking back and you're connected to a lot of this and you. I'd seen you on this other thing. What piece? What with yourself and the future of Treasury. We've just touched on that. Or what the things you think you'll talk to other treasurers. You've been on a couple of panel sessions recently and various other bits. What are the things that you think other treasures should be focusing on?

Yeah, definitely the automation piece is very important. My, my caution is just don't overhype it. Um, but there is definitely opportunity to streamline things and yes, it could potentially reduce the need for headcount, but it's the headcount more on the profiting side. I also say that as much as people think things change fast, which they do, but certain things don't change. The nature of risk, I don't think changes. Maybe the drivers of risk change. There's new threats, new opportunities that come up, but the nature doesn't change. In one of the jobs of treasury, right, it's risk management. And I'm not talking just insurance, I'm talking about risk overall, right. Whether it's FX risk, whether it's counterparty risk, whether it's interest rate risk or whether it's some operational risk that you can transfer, that part doesn't change. Understanding how the risk impacts your business, how you can help by reducing risk in one area so your business can focus and allocate more risk in another area, that doesn't change. So when people approach treasury and there's a lot of excitement about automate automation, a lot of has to do with cash management processes. But my, I guess my advice and caution is just don't overlook the risk management part because that's big part of treasury and I think that's not going away by any means. And if anything, the world moves faster, there's more complexity. With more complexity, there's more risk. So definitely need to be focused on the new threats and maybe new opportunities.

Yeah. So we usually we're going to. I'm going to see you at various conferences this year and next year and things. But takeaways for today, we're going to put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. As I said to you before, we. We do this at Typical commuting time. So people will get some of the advice from what the, the moves you made. What takeaways do you have people for today?

The main takeaways, first of all, just because you're not familiar with something or you haven't done particular area, don't let that, don't let it scare you off. Most times, again, going from A to Z is hard. Going from A to B to C or even E or D, that's very doable. As you grow, your careers, do take on new challenges, do take on new areas, even if something that you're not comfortable with. Actually, if you're not comfortable with something, it's probably a good sign to try to take it on because that will help you grow other things. Technology within treasury is important. It'll play a role and play a role up to a certain point, but it does make sense to understand, learn and master technology as much as possible because it will change how treasury operates. It is changing now, it will change more in the future. And third, I'd say there will be things that. And it's not just Treasury. In any profession, anything you do, sometimes things go your way best, things don't go your way. You need to persevere, make sure, just show up, do things, stick with it. And if you don't get the right outcome the first time, keep trying to do what you want to do, pursue your interest, pursue your passion, get, get more education, get more exposure to things and just keep plodding along. Sometimes things go your way, sometimes things don't go your way. But you got to keep pushing the long run if you want to get somewhere. It just requires effort and this perseverance.

And reflecting back as well. Just looking if we. You've touched on it a little bit there. You're now the treasurer at 6 cents. Was that a driver for you? You wanted to always be a treasurer. That was you getting there or what was the sort of driver for yourself? Because I know we spoke about that before the show.

Yeah, probably a lot of folks in treasury, you fall into treasury or you get exposed, you love it. And that happened to me and I've been in treasury for a long time and I loved it. But I also wanted to experience things beyond Treasury. I had some experience with SBU Finance, I had experience or a lot of exposure to Group South Clara, treasury. When I especially as you get to more senior roles, you have to really know how treasury fits in with the rest of the company. But it's also, for me, it's also good to to grow and to learn new things, to get outside of Treasury a little bit. And this is what one of the excitement draws for success for me was to pick up other functions outside of treasury and broaden my scope, broaden my horizon and experience, whether it's pinups and maybe even some exposure on fpa. But yeah, one thing I guess I'd say maybe looking back at my career, you fall into treasury, you love it and you tend to stay a little bit siloed within Treasury. I actually encourage folks that do fall into treasury and fall in love with it to still go beyond treasury and expand and maybe even take on some roles outside of treasury because it's going to, it's going to give you a better perspective on the business, you know, make your career more interesting.

Yeah, and I remember that was why I was coming back to it, because I remember we talked about it as the treasury is part of the company, it's not just treasury as a silo. Amazing. Eugene, thank you very much for your time today. You've been great. Thank you very much, sir.

It was great. I really appreciate it.

Great, sir, thank you.

Looking forward to connecting the future.

See you soon. Thanks very much. So I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast as much as we did making it. If you are one of our listeners, please let me know. Give us a thumbs up on LinkedIn or wherever you might listen to the podcast. But also I'd love to give some shout outs at some stage, something I wanted to do a few times. So please let me know you're listening. Sometimes we record them, we have amazing guests, but I don't know you are listening to us, you are hearing us. Where are you listening to us? Are you walking along the beach or on your commute to work? It's amazing when I do get feedback. So we've got some amazing other events and guests coming up on the show. So we've had Treasure Career Corner Live month which was amazing and we've got series of great guests, Stephanie Custer, Greg Packard, James Kelly, Dave Cable, the Go Brothers, Eugene Speakov and a number of others coming up. So we're also got then the live sessions recorded throughout the rest of the year. We're going to be doing it in Dublin, in New York, then we're going to be doing some other events, maybe Euro Finance, we're going to head off across back to London as well. So yeah, we'll see you at one of those. So but as always, this podcast is, is supplemented, is supported by the Treasury Recruitment company. So go to treasury recruitment.com if you're looking to recruit, call us. If you're looking to find your next role, call us. If you're looking to benchmark your salary, go to treasurysalary.com that's all we do. For recruitment needs. You can, for the us, you can go to Joe Grabowski, supported by me, Mike Richards, joe@treasuryrecruitment.com Katie, who supports us across Europe, K A T I E at treasury rec recruitment.com and me, Mike Richards, mike@treasureincruitment.com as I say, we've got lots more trips. We've done New York, Texas, London, Chicago, Greece coming up. We've got Dublin, New York, New York. Yes, twice. We've got two of them, afp, Nashville, we've got the uk, We've got other events coming up. I can't wait. So keep an eye on our events page and everything else. Do the salary survey. We've got over 1200 people doing it now. We're going to run our next set of results at the end of Q3. In time. Just in time for Euro Finance, actually, in Copenhagen. So looking forward to that. But if you need us, reach out. If you want to connect, just drop me an email, mike treasuryrecruitment.com or find me on LinkedIn and look forward to the next podcast and seeing you soon at a conference. All right, many thanks.