Mike Richards from a treasury recruitment company shares what makes treasury teams work: complementary skills among members, diversity in backgrounds, and careful vetting of both people and IT systems.
Foreign.
It's Mike Richards from the treasury recruitment company here. This article, video blog, all came actually from a speech I gave a number of years ago in Copenhagen for Euro Finance. As a Treasury recruiter, I'm usually advising clients about ineffective teams because they probably lost someone as they've ineffectively manage them. This was quite a nice change for me to actually discuss and see some successful teams and assess what clients were getting right. It means less work for me. And I was interviewing two of my clients and summarising their ideas to help form the speech. A bit frustrating. Damn it, why are you keeping all these people? But actually people want to join those teams and actually I was saying that when I did recruit for them, people tend to stay for a long time, five, ten plus years. The first thing that they said was, you know, with a successful team was he said, look Mike, we have a system, what we call swear he just did this, I'll get it out my mouth. Complementarity, that's it. And what that is is that each of the people in the team, the front, the middle and the back office, they complement each other. Not saying, oh, you look great today, but actually the skill sets they have, it makes it a seamless process. They all work together, everyone helps each other, makes their jobs a lot easier. And it means that when they pass work between each other, it goes through seamlessly. There's less errors. Six sigma, like, if you like. The other part they talked a lot about was diversity. Because if you just clone one person and then in three years time you recruit a clone of that person again, there's no change, there's no variety. If you like, good example, you don't keep the same old model of a car and then three, five years later buy the same, improve by the improved version, don't you? You just don't want the same thing again and again. So again, when you're hiring, ask yourself what's changed over the past three years when you're wanting to recruit the other part of the team. The final part, if you like, was the non human element of the team. And that's where we talked about having an IT system could be a real game changer because an IT system, you know, or treasury management system if you like, works 24, seven fees and electricity, churns out numbers, delivers everything. But one of the things he mentioned that all of them mentioned actually was that there are hidden dangers when you get a new member of staff, human member, staff, you reference, check them, background check them, speak to previous bosses. But do you do the same for your ITTMs. Do you background reference check with loads of different customers? Maybe did it deliver on its promise in the rfp, RFI and everything else? Are they cyber secure? Big thing? Basically make sure that when you are referencing check the semi human or the non human employees as much as you would with the real human employees. That's enough. Read the rest of the article, hope it helps. Thanks for your time.
