Overcoming Treasury Career Challenges: Real Stories, Real Strategies from NY TCC Live

Foreign.

To this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast, where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to treasurers about how they build their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. Let's get on with the show. Hello, my lovely Treasury Career Corner podcast listeners. Just so I'd hop in before you listen to Treasury Career Corner live in New York, just wanted to let you know. So this was recorded live. We had lots of issues with the sound. Not there in the evening. Everyone could hear, unfortunately. I'm recording. We tried to improve it as best we can. I think it's pretty good. You get to hear from the amazing Frank Barbara, David Viney from Harley Davidson, but Trish Fisher as well. But Trish's sound comes in and out. We've worked on it and everything else, but they all sound great. Just listen to it. Some great value there. Enjoy and look forward to talking to you in 2025. All right, see you soon. Welcome to this evening's Treasury Career Corner live in New York. This is, as I was just saying to the guys, about my 10th this year, so hopefully I'll be getting all right at it soon. Couple of housekeeping things. Firstly, if you've got your phone, switch it off, put it in your pocket. You've made the effort to come all the way here to get some career advice, get some value from talking to three amazing treasurers and a Treasury recruiter. You can't have everything. But joking aside, just put it away. It's still going to be there in a couple of hours. I see some people here just switching off. Great. Do that a bit later on. You're going to get to ask the panel who will introduce themselves in a moment, some questions. When was the last time about March that you got to speak to three amazing treasurers? You, don't you. This is an opportunity for you guys here in the room to actually get some great value and ask the questions you want. And also they're in front of everyone, so they have to answer you. Who am I and how come I did this event? Let's put it up here. You weren't at the last one. Oh, sorry, yeah, no, here we go. First of all, we're gonna thank our amazing host, Prior Cashman. There you go. Got just there. Chatham Financial. Put your hands up, please. The guys there, they are paying for the bar drinks. And be nice to them and be particularly nice to MK at the back. That's it. Because she. Yeah, be very nice to MK Yeah, Kariba, thank you very much. There you go. Very big head who been doing treasury recruitment, moving you guys around the room for the past 25 years. That's my sales pitch. Let's move on. Okay, we've got also the amazing Joe Grabowski. Where are you, Joe? There you go. Joe's over there. So if you're looking for a new role, go talk to him. He's a good recruiter. And then you got me kind of everything. This is how it all started. I love talking to treasurers. I had the amazing Chris Dalton, had David Viney, and we'll get these guys on the podcast a later stage. I thought I'd do 10 podcasts. That's probably what I was gonna do. We're now at over 3t. I talk to a treasurer each and every week and have done for the past six years. Pre covered started to talk. Then Kobe came along. Everyone started doing podcasts. We'd already been doing it and we love it because I talk about how treasurers start their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. Then it started to become a live event and that's where the magic happens because as Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues. So when you're listening to these treasurers, pick out what they've done in their careers that you might want to emulate. And also then again, you can ask questions as well as well a bit later. So actually I'm going to move straight on.

There you go.

You've got some of the structure there, but let's get on to our guests. So we'll actually start with Frank. Frank, you're the first up. If you would introduce yourself and maybe go through your career. Sir, over to you.

Sure. So I'm Frank Barbara, Managing Director, Assistant Treasurer, Global Treasury Operations Control Program Management and have oversight of the treasury management system. Imagine putting that on a business card. Very difficult. Over at Blackstone, I've been in financial services over 30 years. My first 15 years was in the broker dealer world. Was actually a retail broker. The first year out of school to get that out of my system. Then got attracted over to the operations side and in various broker dealer operations was always looking for efficiency and how to do things better. Halfway through my career I started to see alternative asset management. I really got very focused on it and wanted to figure out how do I stay at my level and transition over to it. So I then moved over to a hedge fund administrator and that was a perfect way to transition with the right opportunity, working my network. To have an opportunity to come in and work for Blackstone. Spent my last 14, 15 years there building out the treasury ecosystem. While I was on the broker dealer side, I had various series certifications. 7, 63, 55, 24. There's one other one, but doesn't matter because those certifications don't stay with you. They actually stay with the broker dealer. So once I got out of the broker dealer, I let all those laps. The one certification that I did pick up and find very valuable is the ctp. Did that multiple years ago and go to the conference every year. Find that as just a great way to keep in tune on current trends and things that are happening overall right now. In the middle of. I'll step back. So education. Rutgers University, Bachelor's TP as a certification. And that's pretty much my story.

So Trish, hand over to you.

Great, thank you. My name is Trish Fisher. I'm currently the treasurer of Wafra. I've been mostly in the treasury operations and controls payments space for the entire duration of my 20th career. Started out in residential real estate, I'm sorry, home real estate, commercial real estate. From there went to oil and gas, alternative fuels, and then back over to real estate. I consider myself as having grown up at Tishman's fire for about a decade and then from there after five short slash long years at WeWork. I think WeWork years happen in animal time where they feel a lot. I moved over last year to Wafra as their treasurer. Education actually formally did not have any finance education when I started in Treasury. My undergraduate degree is from Sarah Lawrence College, which is very well known for its art, its artistry, its writing, Jackie Kennedy, J.J. abrams, really talented people, but not so much in finance. And the way that I was lucky enough to fall into treasury was my senior year of college. I was really bored and there was an opening to be the treasurer of the student body. And they said, Trish, you seem like a bad cop and you seem like the only person on campus that knows what Microsoft exists. And I said both of those things are true. And I took the role. It's the only paid role in the student senate. And that was the beginning of it because I just really fell in love with the budgeting and the numbers and the Type A, everything that goes along with Treasury. And that qualified me for that very first entry level treasury clerk job in Central New Jersey. And I think if anyone here has ever been a Treasury clerk before, that's just a nice word for something else. Currently I have two children, my 9 year old daughter Ellie, my 11 year old son Nolan. If you ask them what I do, like when my father was still an electrical Systems engineer for AT&T some 30, 40 years ago and I had no idea what that meant. Now I kind of understand what it means to not be able to explain your job to your children. My daughter tells people that I am the money police. So I've gotten a lot of interesting phone calls about whether or not I'm in forensic account to work for the FBI and I think it's nearly as exciting, but I don't think I'm the two.

If people do look you up on LinkedIn, which I expect them to, you own the phrase. And when I first ever saw this, I thought someone hacked your account. Trish Fisher, the Treasury nerd, you own that?

It's true. Because when I was really falling in love with the technology aspect of treasury, it was a very fortunate thing for me because I was at one location whose treasury management system which was on site, their contract was expiring, they needed to replace it and I was still very young and they needed someone who's very. The younger kids these days know more about the computers. So that's how it all started. And I got the treasury bug and the real technology pitch from there. And people just kept saying, oh, you just need a nerd. You just need a kid and just be a nerd. Like it was something, some sort of bad word. I was like, no, I own that. I'm okay with that. I'm really okay with that. It's what I love to do.

Fantastic. So it's okay, she hasn't been hacked. We'll talk about hacking later in Cyber. David, over to you.

Thank you. Good evening everyone. Just to prove that there are many different pathways to being a treasurer, here's my story. I spent most of my time in corporate banking and abs, so I started my banking career at Barclays on the corporate banking side. So I was effectively a Treasury relationship manager for Barclays in my early days. So interacting with treasurers and CFOs but from the other side of the table. And that was really valuable experience for me very late on in my career because actually understanding the entire banking product suite was really important for me. Later on when I became a treasurer, I then spent 20 years as an ABS banker. So structured finance. So originally on the European side I was running the financing business. First of all I was at Barclays, then I went to bank of America, then Zuho and then spent 13 years of those 20 years at RBS. Or NatWest, as they are now today. First of all, I was running the European business and then I had the opportunity to move to the US in 05 when RBS set up its ABS business for the first time. And I came here to run and create that. Then when I left banking, I went. I went to the Middle East. They sent me to the Middle east for a year. I spent a year as the country head for Qatar and then eventually quit banking and decided I wanted to do something different. I eventually went to Terex Corporation, which is based up in Norwalk, Connecticut. About a $5 billion revenue business. They're a manufacturer, global manufacturer of area work platforms and material processing equipment and utility trucks. Spent three years there running the captive finance business. So mostly the captive capital markets piece of that business. And then three years in the treasurer retired. The president of the finance company retired. They merged the two businesses together and then I took over as treasurer and ran both the treasury and the captive finance business. I felt I'd got to the point where I'd probably done as much as I could there. We'd completely transformed the balance sheet. The captive finance company. We'd outsourced a lot of the functions in the captive. Felt there was nothing more I could give. And I was telling Mike earlier, I went looking for another alternative and literally, I sent my resume out at 7 o' clock on a Tuesday morning and the job description for the Harley Davidson role landed in my inbox at 2:00 that afternoon. Sadly, not from Mike. But those things never happen. Sometimes the stars align and I looked at the resume and it was like, wow, this is abs, it's captive finance, it's treasury, it's all the things I'm familiar with. And it so happened that although they're headquartered in Milwaukee, the company's gone completely remote. So I'm able to do the job from my basement in Connecticut and get out occasionally, but that's what I'm doing today. I'm now the treasurer of Harley Davidson Financial Services and the motor company as well. So that, in a nutshell, is my story.

Thank you. Now, looking up at the board here, you'll see we talk here about what part education qualifications have played for our panelists, but we've got a more senior room, as we've talked about and seen. So actually, what I'm going to do, we'll start with Frank. We'll talk about this. We just talked about this is you guys run teams. You have, you coach and lead people. You also, as you say, very much into afp. And supporting the associations literally. Trish and I have just come from New York Cash Exchange past couple of days. Wanted to explore with you out important you think having treasury qualifications are touched on CTP earlier but then also networking that's played part that's played in your career. So we'll go with Frank and then Patricia and then David. Over to you, Frank.

Yeah. For the certification piece. I'm true believer in ctp. It just ensures that you're keeping current on the treasury landscape and most importantly it connects you into a community and it allows you to try to not have to reinvent the wheel when you have challenges and problems. You could tap your network and or the community on the shoulder and find out just through conversations you could solve things and. Or they might have already solved it. I'm a big believer in that and I think it's an important facet when hiring. But it is by no means the only facet for me. What's very important is I have a really strong team and I put a lot of time making sure we had the right pieces in there. And it's creating, getting people with different opinions that are very passionate about what they do, but they're very respectful of other people's opinions. Right. You gotta create that safe space where, you know, a very junior person feels free to speak up and it could be one of the most wonderful ideas you have or heard. And if you don't create that space, that opportunity never happens. So when looking at networks, key majority of my jobs that I've had on my resume is due to a network and or friend and both of them intertwine very closely. If you're really doing it, you're working with the right people and spending time and adding value. Remember, network isn't always what you get out of it. It's very much what you put into it. And when you do that, you'll see the return come out. If you go back to the educational piece, I'm not overly concerned with that. I really want to have someone who's passionate. I can teach them. We don't split the atom guides, we don't build rock. I can teach them whatever they need to know, but I can't teach them how to work hard. I can't teach them how to be inquisitive. I can't teach them to be respectful of their other team members. So those are the aspects that I generally.

Completely agree with your perspective on the ctp. I'm partial to the HRS Management association, to the afp, but that's because I'm on the board, so I'm biased. Transparency in terms of education, as I mentioned, my undergraduate degree has nothing to do with finance, so I don't think that it makes a difference. Actually. One of my greatest hires was a gentleman who was still working on an undergraduate degree and his resume was just. He ran his own business at one point. He worked in a factory at one point. This guy is a jack of all trades. And if you're in treasury operations, it's exactly what you have to be. You have to know a lot of little things about every little thing and how things fit together in order to really do this job. So I'm not looking at whether or not you can pass a test. I'm looking at whether or not you can make sense of something that doesn't make sense while it's on fire, which was very helpful in a certain role in my past.

And you just touched there on New York cash extract and things like that, the team alley and things.

Why do you think associations still have.

That part to play?

Actually, great example from yesterday, a person who I had met at a role who, prior to my really taking him under my wing, you just saw that he was a good kid. You could just see that he really had the interest and the dedication, the drive. He just needed the guidance. He came to me and he said, don't know, I should take this offer. I wasn't looking. After you got here, it's the usual eco stuff that you're supposed to sit your boss. And he said, no, that's a great opportunity. You really need to take that. And he did. And since then, he's gotten the ctp, he's joined tmed, he's joined the afp, the whole thing. And I ran into him yesterday and I introduced him to the president of the board, and he said, I want to volunteer. I want to grow with this firm, I want to grow with this. This industry. And it's just a matter of networking to get this gentleman to meet this person.

I would say, yes, there are some people in my team who have the CTP qualification, but again, I would agree that it's not a huge differentiator. I think what is a differentiator is being a lifelong learner and having that intellectual curiosity to really dig in and understand all that's going on, especially in a Treasury role. If you think about a Treasury, you're at the crossroads of almost everything in the company. And so having that intellectual curiosity to really dig in and understand what's going on, how to Connect the dots. What's happening strategically across the company I think is way more important than any educational qualification in terms of networking. I've said this before, actually, that I think a couple of the roles that I've had over the years have come from the network that I've developed. But I think it's also important to develop a network as a two way street. You should not be developing a network solely for your own benefit and milking it for your own benefit alone. It's really important that you put the work in to help other people as well as yourself. Because I've said a couple of times before when I talked to Mike that the opportunities that I've had have actually come from me helping other people. Where there was an example of many years ago when I, after I'd left rbs, somebody came to me and said he was a regulatory specialist at RBS. RBS was shrinking after the government bailout in 2009. And he came to me and said, look, I'm going to have to leave at some point, but I just don't know what I'm going to do. Could you meet me for lunch? Because I'd like to understand and get your advice in terms of what I should be thinking about. This was 2012 and I said, you know what? Right now and even today, banking, the one part of banking that was growing at that stage and still is, I think, is regulatory controls. And I said, you're going to be in huge demand for the skill set that you've developed. So anyway, we had the lunch. I gave him the best advice that I could give him. And it was literally, I think four or six weeks later he called me and said, I've just taken a call from a headhunter. Again, he wasn't Mike, I'd just taken a call from. So he got a call from a headhunter and he said, they're looking for an ABS specialist at Terex Financial Services. I've given them your name because I think you'd be a good fit. And then somehow that's how I ended up with Terex. The point I'm making is that, yes, it's important to put the work into the network because eventually there will be opportunities that come from it. But don't think about it in the context solely for your own benefit. Put the work in for others because ultimately things will come back and benefit both of you.

When David was on the podcast, you did this for my map and everything else and actually got some of the stuff up here. We'll come to you and then Trish and then Frank back you as a leader. I know that you're a voracious reader and you've loved that stuff. Why do you think that? Again, maybe is advice for some. We've got a mixed audience here. We've got some senior treasurers, but we've also got some treasury managers, senior treasurers who are wanting to get that next step.

I would say studying is really important. Understanding the wider world, the financial world, and understanding how markets interact, the treasury market, the financial markets, clearly that's really important. So understanding current affairs and current events is critical, I think, for everything that we do. I, as I'm an avid reader and have been most of my career, I think when I was in the ABS world I didn't have time for anything. I was commuting into London, working crazy hours, never had time to read even the Financial Times, let alone books and other things. But for the most part in my career, I've spent a lot of time and still do read a lot of books, and I advocate that in my team as well. So ever since I've been at Harley, every time we do a Treasury town hall, I do a book giveaway. And part of the reason why I've done that is that we are completely remote. Generating some sort of positive interaction with your team when you're all remote and only get together maybe two or three times a year is hard, so it becomes a bit of a joke, but it's also actually a way of finding the group together. I think there are some people in my team who would rather I didn't give the books away, or at least if, if they do, they at least had a choice of the book rather than me giving them the book. But I've actually been doing this now for at least a couple of years where every time we have a town hall I will bring some books along with me. We do the sort of the Wheel of Fortune thing and spin it around and somebody gets a free book. The original idea actually was that we would encourage people to read the book and then come back and tell us what they've learned. That didn't last very long, but the serious thing is that it's a bit of fun, it binds the group together. But I think there's a more important story which is encouraging people to read and understand the outside world and what's going on. The themes of the books for me for the most part are either leadership or strategy, and I've spent a lot of time on both and got a long list of Books that I've read and shared with people and often I think that leadership skills, you can find them all over the place. I talked on the podcast when we met a few months ago about a book about Ernest Shackleton who led the Endeavour attempt to traverse Antarctica over 100 years ago now. And you might think that got to do with Treasury. It's got everything to do with treasury because it's all about leadership. He managed to get 28 men home safely after two years of being stuck on the ice in the Antarctic. It's a crazy story and actually I discovered it for the first time a few years ago. I went to a Harvard Business School reunion where they got a strategist who's like a historian on the faculty and she pulled up this case study about Ernest Shackleton. I'm like, oh God, what am I going to learn about why am I doing history lessons when I'm at Harvard Business School? And my jaw just dropped as she started to explain how Shackleton had used all of his leadership skills to keep this diverse group of very difficult characters together and alive and got them all home safely up to two years of floating around in the Antarctic. So I think there are aspects of leadership that you can pick up from a whole variety of different sources and it doesn't have to be just from your day to day treasury role. There are many things that you can learn from the outside world.

For me to really humanize the folks that are on the team, doesn't matter old, young, what their hobbies are, find something that isn't to do together. A few weeks ago, I learned that there was someone on my team who had never been to a Friendly's before. And I obsessed with Friendly's peanut butter sauce. And I have some in my house that I'll talk about, so I brought it to the office and we had an ice cream party, which sounds trivial and really silly, but that's the point, right, where if you can sit down and really get to know your people and have them get to know you, there's a sense of value when they feel good, that sort of camaraderie, that friendship that you establish. And of course you're at work. So can you be friends with people to work with? Yeah, you can be. And it's important that you are, because you need to know, especially in treasury, that you can trust the people on your team. They're doing important things. Lots of money movements, lots of potential room for error. If you're looking at an I instead of at a we, you're Already failing in this role.

Couldn't agree more. Form personal relationships. It's Kate, you see your co workers as much as you see your family, sometimes more. It's vital to have a personal relationship. Provide transparency. Transparency. Breach trust. It's very simple. People will not follow you if they don't trust you. Provide real time feedback if you're ever in mid year review, quarterly review, year end review. And you are saying something that they're surprised with. You failed as a manager and you did not let them know at the moment. They could have corrected it sometime earlier. That end of year review should really be a reflection of everything that you've already discussed. Put all those together and you get a really cohesive team. You really want to also you are the boss, so you need to make sure things are executed. Be tough but fair. There's nothing wrong with saying let's look at this issue and logically walk me through what you were thinking. And you do that on a one on one setting. Do it with the whole group, of course, and then teach them a better way to do it. And by putting all of those things together, you'll have a team that will run through a wall for you because they trust you and they know that you're not going to lead them.

We'll start again. Actually going to put this question back to you. And an extension of that, Frank, is Covid. We had, you know, Covid, we went through then new ways of working from home hybrid. I just wanted to ask the panel how you were before set up, how you are now and then treasury, by its very nature, I've said to people, is collaborative. So you the sum of the parts and everything else. So how is that for you guys? How do you maintain that as leaders yourselves? So with Frank and then we'll come back through Trish.

So let me first start off with. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. So before we went into COPA in the summers, I tried to have team members, one team member every Friday leave at 4, but they would never leave because the team was getting hammered with just tons of volume coming through the pipes. So I said, all right, we got to change this. You going to work from home on that Friday. So at least even if you stay a little bit later, you close the computer, you're home. And what that did unintentionally was prepared us in two weeks notice to have full functionality at home. And we already had the guidelines and rules by which you could work from home. Number one, you need to be able to do your Job. And believe it or not, you got to walk their own stuff, right? You need full connectivity activity. If you are im, don't disappear. Because next time we do the round robin of someone that's going to be working from home on that Friday, you're going to skip that one. I never had to do that. But that was the threat that was out there, right? Answer your phone, Be available. Every team member of mine has a cell phone. It's a work cell phone. There's no such thing as a free lunch. We give it to you because we expect you to answer it whenever we call you. You put all of that together. And then when we were in a situation of can we operate remotely for an extended period of time, I was able to say unequivocally, yes, we can. There are some check printing issues and stuff like that, but we got through that. And that already put us in the mindset of we need to have the ability to work remotely. Now we're all remote. We know the rules of the road. Be attentive, be online. Nowadays, if you're away from your desk with the little instant messenger, it turns yellow, right? Don't have that yellow all day. That's bad. Stuff like that. Don't break it for everybody else. We now are in a position where we're back to the office. We're a 4:1 schedule. You might have to cut this out, but I see that as horseshoes and hand grenades get close to it. And before we were full suit and tie. Now we do not have to do that. If you would ask me in 2019, will my company ever not be suit and tie, I would laugh. Will we ever have some sort of remote schedule? I would laugh. And it's provided a great amount of flexibility for people to put in the same, if not more effort, but still be able to have some flexibility during the week. And as long as you're doing your job and you're getting things done the way we need them done, I'm not gonna micromanage that aspect of it. Like I said, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. And we put ourselves in a position to succeed in a fully remote environment before we had to. So we, we passed with flying colors.

Similarly, my team and I were very prepared to be fully remote before we needed to be, with the exception, of course, of check printing and switching to virtual lockboxes, a lot of things like that. But it's interesting because I was in a different location, different company at that point. And it was a company whose culture was out of flexibility. Work from wherever you want, wherever you have to. If you need to go somewhere else, we have another location before you, that sort of thing. Now I'm. I've switched over to and post Covid rather. It was mostly a 3, 2 setup. Some folks, as long as you were in any of the locations, they were okay with it. And even prior to Covid, I could show up in pajamas and be taken seriously, which was a really adjustment for me to understand, but okay. Now in the firm I'm at, it's five days. It's very conservative, traditional, and it's the polar opposite of where it was. But on the flip side of that, you have certain days where we can work from home. We certainly holiday. I want this one. You take that one sort of thing. It's not extremely rigid. But I will say that this is quite literally the first time in my life that if I'm not at work, I'm not at work. And I've never experienced that before. From a timing perspective, it's actually quite good because it's nice. My kids are still young enough that they like me. So it's nice to not be at work when I'm not at work. This is someone who, after both my children were born, and they were born when I couldn't meet them yet because you had to wait a couple hours for C sections. I went on my library after C section, still doing things. And people are like, what are you doing? What am I going to do? Oh, I got time to kill. I can't meet the kid yet. Email said, people think I'm crazy, but that's just what I do. The first time, literally ever. Oh, how to work.

When Covid hit, I was at Terex. And I think it was like many corporates in those days, that if you were working from home, it was because you were having a washing machine delivered or something. It just didn't happen. So when Covid hit, I would say we were probably not prepared. And it came as a big surprise to us. I sat down at my dining room table thinking, oh, I'll be back at work in two weeks. I'll just sit here for a while. And two years later, I was still sitting at the same dining room table, driving my wife crazy, and eventually decided it was time to move at least to another part of the house, since I've been at Harley. So during COVID they were all in the office in Milwaukee, so everybody worked together, as was conventional in those days. They chose to go completely remote during COVID and we're still remote today. And I would say, clearly it has some benefits in that we've been able to attract a lot of talent across the US that we wouldn't otherwise have been able to attract, because my team is literally. They're all over the US and overseas as well. But that was always the case before. But they are all over the US we picked up some really good talent as a result of it. The downside is, as I was describing earlier, is keeping that team ethos and that culture together. And it is hard. We are unable to get together as a group maybe two or three times a year in Milwaukee. And so both as a Treasury function and as a wider finance function, it is important that we spend that time wisely when we are together and try to create that culture and maintain that culture so that it doesn't get diluted over time. And the one thing about Harley is that the culture is very strong. As you can imagine. People really believe in this brand. It's one of those brands that people have tattooed on their bodies, which you can't say about many brands. And so people are real believers in it. So the culture holds together very well. But we don't want to dilute that culture because of the remote working that we're going through and have continued to go through since COVID One other thing I wanted to pick up on what Frank was saying earlier about being authentic and honest with your staff. One thing that I did during COVID was I became a certified Red Team thinker. Because there was a book that I read during COVID It's called Red Team Thinking. It's by a guy called Bryce Hoffman, who was the only civilian who spent three months at Fort Leavenworth, which is the military training center for the Red Team thinking in the military. And it has its origins in the Prussian army used to wear blue tunics into battle. And when they did their Spielkrieger, as they were planning to fight Napoleon, they needed a team to come in and challenge their battle plan. And they brought in a team with red tunics, and they were known as the Red Team. And the whole idea was to come in and not destroy the strategy, but really to find holes in the strategy to try and improve it. So it became they were better on the battlefield. And so I spent time during COVID learning how to become a Red Team thinker and then tried to instill that in my team. But the whole idea is to get to the source of the truth. And I think that's really important, both in terms of running a Treasury team, but also trying to understand from a Treasury perspective, where is this business going? What is the one source of the truth that really matters so that we can be honest with our assessment of cash flow forecasting and everything else. When we present to the board, we have one source of the truth that we're presenting as a cohesive group. So I learned something in Covid as well as getting a new washing machine delivered.

I'll start with Trish, then Frank and then David for this one. I was going to give this as a question to you guys planted but I thought, no, it's too good, I'm having it myself. Technology. Don't worry, we're all going to be replaced by robots next week. That's what everyone is telling us. So luckily we're not. I'm going to obviously start with the treasury nerd. She did ask for IT Technology, obviously that's a key thing for yourself. Where do you see it coming in? We've just done the conference and that was different sessions and how we're going to be replaced but how it's going to augment the roles. Yes, it will take away some of the junior processing stuff from. We've been trying to do that for ages anyway for you, Trish and then Frank, because I know that we've all talked about that. The hole in the wall before. Yeah. For the audience nature of the work.

For sure it changes the skill set that's required to do the work. Thinking of an example where I was frustrated by my treasure management system for reading the AI file incorrectly. So I was raping them across the call server for having to fixed this thing and turned out that no, they were right and bi thought it was wrong and it was a big bang and I went to the bank and explains them what was wrong and it's like, wow, this is a really detailed, tiny thing that no one would have caught. Maybe you want to get out of these details if you are leading this team. These are the details that I want to be in. These are the fun stuff. I believe that 10, 20 years ago, treasury was paperwork, treasury was letters of credit, treasury was forecasting. And not to say it's not still that way, but I then and even now looked at it as we start out by looking at paperwork and checking boxes and if you look behind what happens when you check the wrong box, the file goes in the wrong place, the comma is in the wrong place. You need to really appreciate the nuances of that paperwork, the nuances of what's considered to be that junior Work so that when it becomes automated or when someone else or someone different is doing it, there's going to be a problem. And it's going to take that person who's started from the ground up of learning that code, learning that language, being able to translate it over to folks who don't speak treasury and most people don't. It again, it just, it changes that, that skill set of what you need to do and who you see.

Couldn't agree more. The technology aspect of it is going to, should put us in a position to take our team and their most valuable resource and start analyzing instead of and gathering. I feel that we do that way more than we should and we spend this little bit of time analyzing and then you're on to the next thing. The technology of it will get us past that. There's way too many things that we're still manually inputting. And then you have four eyes principle, but you have a human backing up a human, which means there's an error rate. The human element is always going to give you an error rate. With all of that said, when the technology comes in, you still will need that human being making sure that it's properly mapped. Because all we could potentially do if you don't do it right is make errors a lot faster. And being in our world, we're in the money world, we can't, we might not be able to reverse an entry. Money goes out the door, you might not get it back. So we need to be able to ensure that we're putting the right focus in the right places on the technology instead of manually inputting, making sure the mapping is right, understanding how the system is communicating with other systems. So it adds a lot of value to the work which I think will be really beneficial. But there's still so much more to go before we get to that spot.

On top of that, also thinking about the different ways that different organizations and sub functions within that organization are communicating with each other or not. You comment on things having to be mapped accordingly and knowing how things work. I'm thinking about how we know the ins and outs of the regulations and the banking and the rules that need to be followed in order for a payment to get from A to B and not be held in OFAC and what we need to say to OFAC to make it go anyway. But I'm looking at technology is moving so much faster than regulations that can keep up with. And you look at third party servicers who don't have to follow those same exact rules because they're not banks. And then you see tech people who are like, I could just API this from AP and I'm going to be faster than treasury. And then six months later treasury solving the problem because they didn't know the regulations. So it goes, it's more than the mapping, it's the language, it's the internal network within that company. So that when, when the IT team says what is bai? What does that mean? You could sit down and maybe take a drink, depending on what time it is and fix the problem.

Yeah.

And then to add to that, the overarching piece that I think is becoming a much bigger piece of our world is the more connected, the more susceptible you are to it. And the pre validation that's coming in, the different things that are going to replace the callback and the due diligence, like that's fine tuning. A lot of my focus on that right now because I basically took a straight through process of onboarding a counterparty, sending a payment, broke it in half and stuck a human being in the middle. And to combat fraud, well, now I want to get a system in there instead of the human being, but still have it managed by the appropriate people to ensure the system system's doing what we're expecting it to do. And once you feel comfortable with that, all the game's going to change.

I agree with all of that. I would say clearly technology is going to change treasury and is changing Treasury. AI Robotics. I was shocked when Dana was on this panel six months ago and was describing how at NASDAQ they're scraping the balance sheet every day and AI is doing all of the trades and effectively doing all their hedging. But the one thing I would say is that technology will solve a lot of things and it will create the opportunity for us to be, I think, more strategic and more analytical in our day to day jobs. But technology is not an excuse for not understanding the inputs and if it's garbage in, garbage out. As an example, in my previous company, which will remain unnamed, when I was first treasurer, I was trying to understand our hedging strategy because the CFO came to me and said there's something wrong with our hedging strategy because we're creating crazy FX movements, positive and negative every month. One of the first things I want you to do is to dig in and understand what's going on. I dug in and we were going through a huge amount of detail trying to understand what we were doing, why we were doing it, when we were doing it. And I kept being reassured that we are doing all the right things. Strategy is the right strategy. We validated it with external banks that this is absolutely the right thing we should be doing. I said, but surely your hedging strategy is only as good as your inputs. And how good is our forecast? Oh, it's terrible. Okay, so help me understand that. And then they pulled out reams and reams of historical Excel data that showed how inaccurate our forecasts were every month. And I said, I think that's the problem. It's not the strategy that's the issue, it's the inputs. And it was actually we had three business units at that company, one of which was, it was very volatile. We were an industrial, cyclical industrial. But that one segment was cycled within the cycle. When the rental houses stopped buying their work platforms, they stopped buying them immediately. It was as soon as the market turned, the economy turned, they switched their capex off overnight. And so that business could move really dramatically as a result of that. And so we were hedging against the forecast that was very volatile. And so I think the point is that from a technology perspective, yes, it's important, yes, it will create the opportunity for us to be more strategic and more analytical. But we have to beware that the inputs are the right inputs or we're just going to be hedging or doing whatever we're doing incorrectly.

More to that as well is not just the inputs but the gateways and the avenues. Because if you've got technology method A, but you haven't prepared for B, C, D and E, just in case A goes down, then what I'm thinking, just curious of anybody in the room had to to get ripples out of Russia recently and things like that. I am thinking about a real example after that war started when no one could move money, but we got it done because we had a plan B, C, D, E and F and it didn't involve the carrier vision.

I'd like to give a special thanks to flywire, our fantastic sponsors. If ever you've wondered whether there's 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 Greg to explain who Flywire are, how they can help you and your treasury team with your cross border payment headaches. Follow the link in today's show notes. Let's get back on with the show. We're going to come to questions shortly. I've just got One final one before we do questions. Okay, do ask these amazing panelists, looking back at yourselves as treasury professionals, how do you keep yourselves motivated? How do it's we got asked this actually yesterday a little bit from some of the more junior audience members. They said, oh, where do I see myself go? Where do you know you are three successful treasurers you've got there. You've obviously faced some good times and some tough times. How have you kept you going from there, David and then across I come.

Back to what I said earlier about reading. You can never know everything and there's always something to learn. And in fact, if I look back at my career, I think I reinvented myself several times. I went from corporate banking to abs. That wasn't easy. And it all came about because of battling pretty hard to get in front of the people who were recruiting into the ABS group. But then reinventing myself again when I was a country head in the Middle East, I reinvented myself as the head of the the captive finance company, reinvented myself when I became a treasurer. So from my perspective, I think there's always something to learn. That's what keeps me motivated, is that you can't possibly know everything. There's always something that you can learn every day. If one career path comes to the end of the road, there are always other opportunities. You can always find a way to recreate yourself somehow. And so that's how I keep myself motivated is that keep learning. There's always something to learn. And if you hit a dead end, there's always another path.

I don't want to sound negative, but almost conversely to that, it's not a matter of wanting to constantly be learning to stay motivated so much as acknowledging I'm not bored, I'm still interested, I still want to be here. The moment that you're bored, something is wrong when you're not excited anymore. Even if you go to work every day and do the same thing every day, there's always something wrong, different about what you're doing. If you can't find that, think whether or not you still want to be there. As I said earlier, I feel like I grew up at Tishman's Fire and I didn't want to leave, but I knew that I had outgrown it and I was bored. And despite loving my co workers and loving what I was doing and loving my projects, I had gotten all I could get from it. And it was my notice and cried like a child. And as I gave my notice to.

My boss that day, very Fortunate in the position I'm at now, where I have the ability to build something. And I must have done something right, because it's been the treasury ecosystem that we've used for the last 15 years. There is a lot more that needs to be done. And I think every five years I say, ah, it should take another five years. And then there's a lot more that needs to be done. And I have a feeling that it's going to keep going and going. And like you mentioned, there's always something new coming up. There's a new line of business, there's a new way to do things. And we're in the business of saying yes, right? We don't say no, say, yeah, we could do this. Now we might say, yeah, we can do it, but we need to do it this way, not the way that you're saying. But always having those alternative things come up that you have to figure out how to standardize, get into a system, build a new system, expand the system. It just, it makes every day different. And it just keeps me very much involved where I joke with my wife and say, this is my retirement.

I feel the same way. People say to me, what's the craziest thing you would do if you want the water? And I say, go to work, because I can't not. I don't want to not do what I'm doing.

And that's one of the reasons I do the podcast. I do these interviews as well, because the variety of what you do is quite weird. You've all got the title treasurer per se, but you all do it differently. There's a lot of similarities, but lots.

Of differences and things.

Now, again, I was asked by a CE earlier today, she asked me, she said, how come I've done Treasury recruitment? I said, way back when I first, first discovered treasurers and when I started to go out with you guys, I discovered you were the first to go to the bar, usually the last to leave it with me a lot of the time. And so we are approaching drinks time and I. So we always finish on time. Even though it's my session, I don't want to overrun so questions. So I'll come out to the audience, get some hands up. They, oh, they right at the back. And we will have some other good.

Questions, but here you go.

Hi.

Thank you.

This is very helpful.

I have a question.

Years ago, you thought it would be done in the ecosystem. I feel like the role of treasury is expanding and continues to do so. And I'm always a little bit Dumbfounded by a lot of people that go, what do you do? And moreover, when you talk to them about opening bank accounts, they know what goes into it because they have it known. What challenges have you guys come across in your career, communicating the message of what you do and getting back to your organizations, when to engage you and really what role you can play in these conversations? I think that's. I love that question because I've been in a position more than once where I've come into a role and had to take a very decentralized piece, many decentralized pieces of treasury, and centralize it and standardize it, but standardize it in a way that still adds that element of humanity to it, where people feel that warm fuzzy that, oh, even though it's a bank account or even though it's this standardized, streamlined process, there's still enough element to it where folks feel they're receiving that individualized attention. I actually, I hired a gentleman once because, yes, he was qualified and yes, it was great. But the thing that he closed his interview with me with was by saying, there's a person behind each payment. And to see someone look at something that can be perceived as such a binary activity, as something so human, it's more than an ice cream sundae. It's more than things like that. As you're building new processes, you've got to build a relationship. You've got to understand the need, stay quiet and listen, and then take in each individual piece. Standardize the process, but leave room, that flexibility for the individual to feel like they're still individually being heard and individually being treated.

Great. I would say I've worked for CFOs who are real advocates and supporters of treasury, and I've worked for CFOs who are not. And obviously those were not, are far more difficult to deal with. Do you know, there was. When I first became a treasurer, I found a document. You may have seen this before, but I think it's called Treasury Strategies. If you look it up, there's a document that says it's called the First Hundred Days and it's advice for a new treasurer. And that was just a minefield of fantastic information. And there was a lot of really good advice in there as well. I remember the two things that really that I can remember. One was get aligned with your cfo. Get aligned with your boss, because you can't get anything done unless you're on the same page. But then the other thing they said was obviously get aligned and work in conjunction with all the other Finance functions and in fact all of the functions in the company. And so when you're new or even if you're not new and you're trying to advocate with somebody who doesn't necessarily value or understand treasury, it's really important to build those relationships both with the CFO and all of the finance functions and all of the other functions that you interact with on a day to day basis.

A little bit more micro approach. I try to do the good, better, best. So what will happen is someone will come to treasury because there's a problem because that's when everybody, everybody finds out who treasury when something goes sideways, the offensive line of NFL team and then I'll have the good, better, best. It's good that you're coming to me, let me see how I can fix this. It would have been better if you involved me in the first place so we could avoid it and would have been best if I was involved in the planning. And then they start seeing how I'm going to mitigate their risk and they start seeing the value in it. And by constantly repeating and delay delivering, you have to deliver, you start to get that momentum of hey, let's loop in treasury before we commit to something because we want to mitigate as much risk as possible and just keep beating that drum while delivering every time and you'll start to get that reputation where the business is going to turn to you at the appropriate time, which is remember, good is always the appropriate time and you're able to help them mitigate whatever risk that they're dealing with at that time zone.

Hi, thank you Mike for organizing the event. Alexandro Escoliavras. Thanks very much. The three panelists. I have a question for Tris. You mentioned that you're at the board of the Treasury Management Association, New York. What would be your advice for the young treasurers or generally for the treasurers, what the treasury associations can offer to the members? I'm personally, I'm the president of the Greek association and yeah, I would like your perspective.

I thank you particularly coming off of a two day conference which is the C. Manny's annual extravaganza. I really appreciate the question. Typically tell young folks that it's most important not only to attend but to volunteer. Similarly to the gentleman I was referring to earlier introducing him to the president yesterday because he's hungry for more, he wants to do more. We are more advanced in our careers so we're in a very unique position and it's a privilege and a responsibility to make sure that we are making those introductions so that folks continue to grow and continue to expand those networks and really be part of those networks. Actually, we got some really bragging now. Got great feedback yesterday from someone who said it's so nice, nice to see a board who really likes each other. And it's true. Because you can't have success unless you have that humanity and that friendliness and to see other folks and other members see that is really wonderful. So I would absolutely encourage, again, not just membership, but active participation and volunteering. Make yourself known.

So we do have free cold beer out there, so we are going to keep to time, but we've got some great takeaways. So, Frank, we're going to kick off with your maybe just cherry pick some of yours because the panelists will be out there so you can ask them if you've got further questions.

Frank yeah, I'm just going to go back to what I said before. No is not an option. You're going to guide them a different way, but you are going to provide a solution. Otherwise the person who replaces you will always remember that you're here to solve problems.

Trish, My very first one, respond, don't react. And that is something that has taken me a very long time. I still have not mastered that, but that's the greatest advice I think anyone can have. I think it's pretty clear that we are all so heavily invested in what we do because it's to me, an art form. It's not a job. It's a labor of love. It's hard not to. It's hard not to wear your heart up your sleeve. And people say, oh, you have to keep it separate. You have to be okay with that. I don't think you have to keep it separate. I think you need to learn when to respond versus when to react.

Yeah, I'll get through these quickly. First of all, I talked about it earlier, build and maintain a strong network. But think about it in the context of give and take. It's not all about you. It's about your relationship with that network. Be a lifelong learner. I get up every day thinking, what can I learn today? But there is something new that I can learn today. And I think if you have that attitude that gives you a lot of intellectual curiosity to explore the world, get outside of your comfort zone. I've done this many times in my career and I've had probably some of the biggest career breaks because of it. Last year I'd actually been out for a run on a Monday evening and the CFO called and said, I've just resigned. You're going to get a call from the CEO in 30 minutes and they want you to be interim CFO. You've got to decide if you want to do it. Boy, was that the right thing to do. I stepped into that role for a few months knowing it was only an interim role, but I've learned so much from it. I understand the culture company way better than I did before, and I think I'm a lot better treasurer because of it, because I had that experience. But if I hadn't had the confidence to get out of my comfort zone, that would never have happened. Learn to tell a good story. I tell my team this all the time, that sometimes when you present to the board or the CEO, the cfo, sometimes you literally get a couple of minutes to explain something, and you wouldn't believe how difficult that is. Sometimes people just flounder with the detail, but without being able to convey the real message to these very senior people who've got very little time and often very little patience. So learning how to tell a story well is a critical aspect of both the treasury role and any senior role, in my view. And then finally read study and advocate. I think I said on the podcast when we met a few months ago, I don't mean call your boss every Monday morning and say you want promotion, but I think advocating for yourself. I see it all the time where people do a really good job, but they don't actually convey or advocate for themselves and they almost allow it to pass by because people, you've got to advocate for yourself because others won't necessarily do it for you. So don't be afraid to toot your own horn or blow your own trumpet in a nice way. But there are ways to advocate for yourself without coming across as difficult and provocative. So read study, advocate. I think that's the final thing I would say.

And my ones, Carly, my colleague, she asked whether we should change these from yesterday, today, no. And actually I've kept these all the time. First of all, well done getting on the train for coming here this evening. It would have been easier to listen to the podcast, to watch it over video, to be in your corner office. But actually, in a moment, you're going to get to meet some new people. So meet some new people, make a couple of connections. You heard from these three amazing networkers. And I'm going to make him blush, I hope. Connections we're going to. Yeah, we've got that. But taking notes and connecting afterwards. So I interviewed Chris on my. Chris Fulton, wco. He was on the podcast and he explained to me how when he meets someone, he will then make a note about them on his business card and go away and use that and build this network again. I've had words with him and number of these people need to stop networking quite so well because I want them to come to me to get their next job. But it just shows Dana, we had Chris they on the last one that we did in March. They were getting their next roles through the power of their own networks and that and this is why you've come here. So make the most of it. And finally, yeah, I'm following up. So that's the other bit when you do this. And it's funny, I did actually advise some of the people at the cash exchange not just to say, oh, connect to my. Please just at least throw me a bone. Like we met once at a bar. Come on, guys, just personalize any invite. So if you meet someone tonight and you want to connect and expand your network, just take a few seconds, you can go on LinkedIn and just say, oh, we met at this event. It's a great way to do it. And all that remains. But we do actually, I'm going to jump right all the way back. First of all, we're going to go to our sponsors. Can our sponsors put out their hands up once again? We should actually have that there. So we've got those guys. They are what make this happen, as does Chris as well. But more than anything, three incredible treasurers. An even bigger round of applause for these guys.

Thank you.

And the bar's open. Thanks for tuning into another great episode. You really enjoy it. Thank you very much. You make it worthwhile us recording them with these amazing treasury professionals right the way across the world, from the us, across the uk, across Europe, and there's lots more exciting guests to come and lots more live events. We love delivering this content. We get asked now, is this what you do? Do you just do content? You just do. No. The reason we do the content is to get to know you guys, to give you back the tips for success, if you like. But we're here to help you hire someone. If you need to recruit, call us, because at our heart, we are a Treasury recruitment company. That's how we pay the bills, that's how we pay for the podcast and that's what we're passionate about. We hear from you out of the events and things. Can we also help you find your next great role? Can we help you hire the answer is yes, that's exactly what we do. Yes, we do our treasury salary survey@treasurysalary.com that helps us know exactly how to benchmark not only your salary, but also when you're looking to hire. We know exactly what the market is paying. Wherever you might be, whether it's the us, UK or Europe, we want to make sure that we are the best informed, that we're not just finger in the air. We always know. If you want to hire the best in treasury, don't hesitate to contact us. Go onto the website treasuryrecruitment.com or in the US you can contact Joe Grabowski Europe, Contact the lovely Katie for more senior roles and roles across the uk. Reach out and contact me or drop any of us an email Joe at treasuryrecruitment.com Katie at treasuryrecruitment.com or Mike@treasuryrecruitment.com Let us help you make the hiring process as amazingly seamless and easy as our podcasts are to listen to. Thanks for your amazing support and looking forward to seeing you at either an event or a conference very soon. Or just give me a call. Let's help you find the next role or recruit the next treasury professional. All right, until next week, many thanks.