The Importance of People Skills in Treasury with Senne Van Nieuwenborgh

So 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 treasurers about how they've built their careers, where they are now and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession. Going to next. In this week's show, I'm joined by. I'm going to try my hardest here. Sene Van Nievenborg, the Senior VP treasury at SES Satellite. SES are a world leading satellite operator and the first to deliver a differentiated, scalable geo meo offering worldwide. Now, tell you what, I'll get Sunny to actually explain what that is later on in the show and explain exactly what he does and how that impacts on the work of Treasury. But as we said just before we kicked off the show, Sunny actually says in his profile that he started his career as a management consultant. But it's not quite true. When I actually look back and did the research. You originally studied law before then gone in management consulting and finance and Treasury. So take us back to the dim distant past if you would, and how you didn't go into law. What was driving you back in those days. And then we'll go through your treasury career, if you may. Over to you.

Sure. And hi Mike, and hello to everyone. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting one. And somewhat surprisingly, probably to most is that as a kid I actually did want to become a lawyer. So relatively early on that kind of settled itself in my mind and actually drove me to go then to college and take a law degree. Now, as I approached the end of those studies, I became less and less convinced that that was what I really wanted to do. And therefore, right after my college degree I did an MBA in Belgium, which exposed me kind of to a much wider area of fields. And that basically led me to go into consulting right after the mba, something that was on purpose very widespread because quite frankly, I didn't really know what I wanted to do and just wanted to get some, some exposure, wanted to work on some projects and that's what I did basically for the first five years of my career, having worked for Accenture at that time, still Andersen Consulting. And then at some point, basically the opportunity popped up to join Dow Chemical in their Treasury Department in Belgium.

So just to ask you, so you had five years in consulting, which a lot of people do, and there'll be listeners today who are actually in that consulting, what did that give you in terms of exposure and experience and how did that then and why did you make the move to Dow? Was it just, you know, a lot of people say they're tired of traveling four or five days a week or. What was it for you that led to that? You had a good, you know, good run of five years. But then, you know, what did that help you with, as it were, in your career?

Yeah, I must say, you know, I mean, at least for me, you know, you come out of the NBA, you think you know everything. I mean, you think you know, I mean, now it's up to me to kind of go and do it all and for me to go and explain to others how it all works. Well, pretty early on you learned the hard way that you don't know that much and real life is slightly different than what they tell you at the business school. And that's why I was really, I mean, looking back, it was really a good, a good school for me. And I probably learned more in those first few years about business in general than during my entire educational career. And there I think, yeah, it was a good choice with hindsight because I got to work on many different projects. Some more in the finance area, some more process driven, some more it. So there was a broad range of things in different countries. You typically tend to work with a lot of young and bright people in these environments. And that also applies to investment banking. That also applies to the major law firms. And these big consulting firms are a little bit the same. So indeed, like you say, it is tough. They make you work very long hours. I'm sure they still do today, and they make you travel around. But that didn't really put me off. Rather, on the contrary, I felt that was kind of a very energizing environment. Now the company I was working for at that time, it did change over those five years. Not only did it change name because of the whole Enron thing at the time, it also IPO'd and rebranded itself and also kind of started to reposition itself back in the day already so early 2000s, towards becoming more of a large system integrator. So big scale SAP projects, which was a little bit less my cup of tea, to be honest. And more and more you started to kind of be pushed a little bit in that direction, especially if you were unstaffed or on the bench, as they called it. And that was not really my thing. And then you start to kind of keep an eye open for other opportunities. And then there was actually colleague from me with whom I did the MBA who said, look, actually, you know, if you're interested, we have an opening. Why don't you Come and talk to my boss. And that's what I did. And there was this click and decided to go for it. I mean, with hindsight, did I make a deliberate choice to go and work for Treasury Department of a major corporation? No. I mean, it was kind of by chance, it was kind of by accident. It did have a certain appeal to me from day one, but I knew very little about, let's say, the holistic nature and all of the activities of a Treasury Department. So I initially started in the credit risk department of Dow and I could get my head around that and what it means and what it is that they do. But I had only very limited sense of all the other aspects of what the Treasury Department does. And that was kind of. So it was a very good introduction for me into the wider area of Treasury. And then later on, obviously I got introduced more and more into the more technical and deep treasury skills as I moved and progressed my career within Dow.

Chemical and Dow Chemicals itself. A lot of people will know the name, but they might not understand how it operates and things. Obviously, you know, massive chemicals company, you know, headquartered in the US as, you know, looking at a lot of the, you know, the, I mean, they're massive, you know, headquartered in Michigan. But you know, how did it operate within Europe? And when you joined, there was a big team or, you know, again, because lots of listeners will be, oh yeah, I know Dow, they're huge chemicals. That's it. You know, we're doing some work with Saybic, for instance, and I got to understand, understand a lot more about the global nature of a lot of the roles at DAO and Sabic and everything else. How was it for you? Was it real, you know, day one boom, you know, global outlook, or was it a sort of small role and you grew into that. How did it evolve for you?

It started relatively smallish, I would say. I joined in what you could call a relatively local office in Antwerp back then, which was a medium sized office within the Dow family of let's say 100, 200 people. And we had a credit, local credit team there taking care of a region, Benelux, uk, France, Nordics, these kind of countries. And the team was like four or five people. So that was all relatively smallish. But quite early on it became clear that you are part of this massive organization as you've described it. And just within treasury they have teams all over the world, in Asia, in Latin America, of course in the headquarter. They also have a sizable regional office in, in Switzerland, where I then moved to after, after two years where they have 5, 600 people, of which 30, 40 were treasury, and you start to become part of a much bigger organization with a much broader scope. But initially it was fairly small. But what was beneficial for me is that indeed you can kind of start quite small and then grow into the role. And typically, I mean career wise, you are then better off in larger organizations because they have typically larger treasury functions which enable you to move around more swiftly and get exposed to more of the, of the sub domains and acquire basically the technical skill set. I would say that's, that's quite key early on, that you acquire those basic treasury skills and that you acquire them fast but still thoroughly enough so not just, I mean you can't just scratch the surface and then say, oh yeah, now I'm a specialist.

So you.

The good thing with DAO is they left you in credit for two, three years and then you went on and you went to do financial planning for two, three years and then you could go to Risk and then you could go to Pensions. And after Having spent between five and 10 years, you knew how it all worked. And you could say that I know a thing or two about treasury that's, let's say, an advantage. The disadvantage is sometimes that you kind of, you could see the road ahead of you for the next 10 years as well, which was appealing to some and then less appealing to others, and was perhaps also a reason why I left dow, because indeed at some point you knew where you were, you knew kind of where you were heading and what the road was going to look like, more or less, at least that was my perception. Others might disagree, but that was one of the reasons why I left after having spent seven years at dow. Great, seven years. I'd recommend it to all great employer.

Great people are the employer bit. Why would you recommend it in treasury terms? Because you came with credit risk and then into the more Main Street. Why would you recommend that? Again, people listening and going, not sure. What about global, multinational, like that? I'm just a little person in it, surely.

No, no, not really. I'd say it is quite human. And it used to have a campaign where we had T shirts with like the human element, like, you know, as a tabel, you know, this Mendeleyev table, you know, like a new element, human element. I'm not sure that applies still today because I left quite some time ago and I understand from the people that I'm still in touch with that a lot has changed with the merger of the ball and all. Of these things. But I think in general, great people, and I can generally say also in terms of quality, if I can say it in soccer terms, it is truly the Champions League that you're playing in. Really amazing people with amazing skills. And if you come into such an organization relatively early on and young, you know, you just have to look around and learn and absorb as much as you can. And that, I must say, even to date, I've benefited hugely from having worked in such an environment. And Dao is one of those. I'm sure there are others like, you know, who are in this camp, whether it's Nestle or other large corporations with sizable treasury operations. I definitely don't regret that part of my career, let's put it like that.

And so it came to an end, if you like, or it was time for a move on from dow. How did you know what came next? Because he went treasury manager to group treasurer. That's pretty much a step a lot of people would like that what came about. Describe that.

Yeah, that came as a surprise to me, to be honest, that I was contacted through a headhunter, as it sometimes goes. They kind of approached me and I was based in Switzerland at the time. The company that wanted to hire me was also headquartered in Switzerland, but was listed in Belgium. I'm a Belgian national. Not sure that played a role. It might have. It might not have, but it seemed to be a match. And they basically, after a few rounds of interviews and discussions with the CFO at the time, who was then going to be my boss, we had again, a click. And I think that's very important because ultimately you work for a company, but you work for people and with people. And we got along. And he had the same feeling, apparently, and he decided to basically give me this opportunity knowing that I had no group treasure experience, which was kind of a bit of a risk for them and for me because could have well been that after three months, you know, I failed miserably and they had to fire me. I mean, that risk was then on me. But it worked out just fine. And it was for me, the key reason also to leave Dao, because at that time I started to become involved in the project financing of what is now the Sadara project, which was a, and still is like a $20 billion project financing that they were establishing at the time. So hugely, hugely important, incredibly interesting. And I had started to find my way also in the Middle east, which is kind of a very interesting region. Started to do some, you know, sukuk financing and all of these interesting things. Would have loved to complete that. But then the opportunity came. Yeah, I mean, just decided to go for it. It was an amazing opportunity to jump from. Call it training.