Successfully Transitioning Through Treasury Roles with Summa Simmons

Foreign.

Welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner podcast where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to them about how they 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. In this week's show, delighted to be joined by Summer Simmons, Director of Treasury at Victoria's Secret now Victoria's Secret and co. Through the Victoria's Secret and Victoria's Secret Pink, one of the world's most recognizable retailers with unparalleled brand awareness. 72 countries, 1400 store locations globally. Exactly as I just said to some of their 80 million followers on Instagram. Just a little bit ahead. Me, I don't really do Instagram. We know this, but we're going to come back to that. It's an amazing brand which we'll explore a little bit later on the show. As I say each and every week, I'm going to shut up. It's summer show. Summer. If you would perhaps take us back to the beginning of your career, how you first got into finance and then developed the wonderful world of Treasury. Over to you.

Absolutely. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. So my story of getting into finance, I think I've always known that I wanted to be in the finance space as young as elementary school, went through college, had a bit of a circumstance that required me to transfer back to a school in New York State, ultimately New York City. And so I worked full time overnight at an emergency room as an ER registrar while I finished up my last two years of my accounting degree. And so as luck would have it, I was wrapping up just in time to coincide with 9 11, which quite impacted my ability to step into a job in New York City as I intended given the current circumstances. So wound up taking a job at a regional accounting office for enterprise rent a car. Just a lot of nuances came out of that that I didn't quite anticipate. So as I mentioned, expected to work in New York City, live in New York City, take public transportation here. I am now traveling out of state from a suburb of New York to a suburb of New Jersey and having to purchase my first car earlier than planned. The work experience was just fine. It was a great introduction to being a staff accountant. I think I started to learn the importance of evaluating commute as it pertains to job opportunity. If anyone is from the New York tri state area, they're very well aware of George Washington Bridge traffic. And so Friday nights took forever to get home So I eventually transitioned to a role in a suburb of New York where I was working for a company that owned and managed skilled nursing facilities and assisted living facilities. So all this time I'm in a month and closed traditional accounting role. Again, great experience at this company. But I felt like I wanted more. I really wanted to step into a bigger organization and see the broader picture of accounting. As again a Follow up from 911 Morgan Stanley was expanding their footprint into the suburbs and opened up a huge office. They actually took over Chevron Texaco's headquarters in Purchase, New York and they were expanding their footprint there. So they were looking for finance associates to join them. Great opportunity. This is circa 2004. I joined Morgan Stanley and I'm supporting products that you can walk in, retail products. So anything that you and I could walk into a Morgan Stanley branch and invest in and or buy into if you will.

So let me jump in there because I just wanted. We went through that which is fantastic. But you made that move from accounting within a corporate enterprise and Cypress and things like that to then the move into financial services. I know we discussed this the other day when we had our call, but what was that like for you? That sort of transition? And I will come on to Chuck and a couple of other people later on but the transition between corporate world if you like and versus financial services, how did that feel?

Sure. So I would say that the biggest impact of the transition was just the sheer size of the organization. It went from a very small family owned company to a publicly traded company, obviously Fortune 500 global footprint. And my immediate role was supporting a global role and just the infrastructure within the organization having defined HR and defined teams to improve or not necessarily improve but to support the employees experience. So that's the first difference from going from these smaller operations and shops to a very well established and highly regarded organization. And then there was the interaction appreciating that people are in different countries and we all have these roles that fit into the broader picture. And at the time I was supporting a product that was roughly $100 million per quarter in terms of just service fees as it pertained to asset management and just the sheer volume in dollars was light years from where I was coming. And so that took my breath away. And I started to really appreciate and understand this idea of ultra high net worth as a retail institute, a retail financial service versus an institutional which obviously bigger dollars, billions of dollars at that point. And my eyes opened up to this new dimension of wow, this is where it is. I definitely see that I have a budding career here.

And did you find again, I spoke to someone actually just this morning where they were talking about being actually they were in the oil and gas industry and they were a small exploration company and then they went to Shell like a mega major and things like that. And I said, oh, how did you find that transition? They made few that they were one stage team of five and they were quite a big. There was suddenly this tiny cog in this global machine. Now more sounding slightly different. But how was that for you, that sort of step up, if you like, in terms of scale?

That's a great question because it was two part. So I did feel like I certainly was in a smaller role, but I felt like I had access to so much more. Even though I was coming from a mom and pop shop, it felt like I had access to to so much more by way of the Internet so I could navigate the company essentially virtually and understand the remit. I think when my eyes really opened, Mike, was when I moved from the retail side of Morgan Stanley to the institutional side. Retail is small in the grand scheme of things. At an investment bank, once you get on the institutional platform and you have access to this broader view and all of the different products and services and ways in which the company shows up, that's when I feel like the real transition happened. Like that first step felt like a. It was like a half step and something that I was anticipating. Switching over to the institutional side, where I stepped into more of the unique disciplines of finance and accounting is really when my eyes opened up and I thought, wow, from a professional experience, I had no idea that these were options for roles. And I'll talk a little bit about what those roles entailed. And then from a service provider, what Morgan Stanley offers the globe. I couldn't appreciate it being on the retail side, even navigating the organization through its intranet, there's a separate intranet for the institutional side of it.

Just as you grew your roles and people can see this on LinkedIn, they'll see you moving up through Morgan Stanley and then county controls and then transfer pricing before then you transition into treasury and started to get that. But I know that you and I had spoken about some of the internal challenges and things like that, but talk us through your progression there if you would.

Sure. So as I mentioned, supported retail products for maybe 18 months or so. Then I switched over to the institutional side of the house and I stepped into the more unique discipline. So I started working on things like parent company accounting, where you are responsible for managing investment in sub and equity at the subsidiary level. That then nicely dovetailed into a role in Treasury Controllers, which admittedly, I did love that role. It was probably one of my least favorite from a work experience perspective. I didn't feel like I understood the why behind what I was doing and the timing behind that was really interesting as well. Like, we were unbeknownst to the world, we were about to step into a financial crisis and I had what felt like an incredibly mechanical and mundane job that I just couldn't wait for my next rotation and I made the best of it. I didn't necessarily understand the why, as I mentioned, and so it was important for me to, while I spent time in that space, to go and engage with the folks that we were supporting in the role. So I reached out to our traders and got a better appreciation for why what we did mattered and how it impacted their day job. And that was incredibly helpful in shifting how I thought about the role. The other part of this role, before we get to the financial crisis, was the opportunity to watch deployment happen. So this role wound up being deployed to colleagues in Glasgow and I had the opportunity to take my first business trip and transition work and really meet my global colleagues in person and spend time with them and be in their space and hang out where they hang out after work. And I think all of that really made that experience, looking back on it, so precious and so different and gave me this really different perspective for a job that I loathed. Like my first three weeks in that role, I was like, when can I go do something else? Fast forward, financial crisis occurs and socks become this huge thing. It blows up and everything requires a litany of documentation. And it's interesting to watch this happen real time in a job. It was fascinating to see that and understand how that could happen. And again, really started to take a ton of inventory and appreciation of this opportunity to serve in this capacity. Fast forward and mentioned that the role was deployed to colleagues in Glasgow, Scotland went on to take a role in transfer pricing controllership. So I've. I'm still in the related party space, but I'm now focused directly on ensuring that all of our cost and revenue sharing agreements are aligned with what our tax colleagues have implemented and documented and that they're showing up in our books and records accordingly. That role was interesting. Again, very global reach. A lot of the stakeholders that I worked with were sitting in the business in different countries and engaging with them to understand whether or not the revenue sharing is happening as we intended, but also understanding what their local holidays were and just what was going on in their lives. And as an accountant, that's important, right? Because we live and die by the close calendar. Had to schedule my whole wedding plans around year end. Close calendar. And so I began to realize that I loved that vibe of being in a global space and enjoying the benefit of living in New York City and what happens locally in the Northeast, but being very much tied in to what my colleagues in Dublin and Asia and Budapest were celebrating and or what was important to them from a work perspective, a cultural perspective, and how we all work together to make sure that Morgan Stanley's work got done. So the transfer pricing gig was pretty cool. Life changed for me a little bit. I went ahead and got married. At the time I was back to a crazy commute. And I thought, all right, given the financial crisis and just the scrutiny that banks are under, it doesn't feel that fulfilling to work back office in a bank anymore. I want to try something new. I really want to take this experience and move it forward. And so I traded a 75 mile commute via public transportation to a 75 mile commute drive and took a role with GE Capital that was based in Stamford, Connecticut. And so I step into GE and I'm excited. I am just hitting the ground running. Most of us grew up using GE appliances and light bulbs and so this felt like the Mecca. I remember going into GE and thinking, I'm going to retire here. This is where I'm going to work for the rest of my career. And the first role that I had at GE quickly made me rethink that. So I'd stepped into a very neat treasury specific role. It was hedge accounting. And the work was fine, but my stakeholders were super limited. Mike. Like GE had over 100,000 employees at that time. And I literally worked with four people that sat within feet of me. And I was like, this is not going to be the way that I network and figure out what I want to do next. My goal was to ultimately, ultimately get to a business, one of GE's many businesses, learn that business from the ground up and really grow in said business. Back then I thought it would be like aviation, maybe healthcare. I was open. At the same time GE was deciding they wanted to become a bank. So here I am running from a bank and have jumped right into the fire of we are gung ho to become a bank. And so they were seeking a SIFI designation. Sifi, Significant influence in financial institution, which made sense because at the time they had over $70 billion in commercial paper portfolio. That put a little bit of a damper on things for me because I truly thought I was escaping a banking environment. But the banking environment that we were creating was not an investment bank environment. It was very different. It was quite nuanced. But more importantly, the work that came out of creating that is invaluable. Like there. There's no way that I would have known to ask for this experience. There's no way that I would have been able to ask for. How do you reorganize a company of GE Capital's status and structure and esteem and complexity? How do you unwind that? Essentially get rid of GE Capital and go back to an industrial model? What does that look like? What does it entail?

Someone, we've skipped a tiny bit there because some of the. You and I both know this. I and somewhere we'd had this chat before that with ge. The old catchphrase used to be, in two years you'll be in a different job. In four years you'll be in a different country. A lot of the time that was changing. But then we also talked about the fact that there was GE and GE Capital, and you were in this. Well, as you put here on some of the notes, and I.