Timeless Skills in Treasury with Group Treasurer, Adam Richford

There's definitely a big commitment for the mct, but I think it's certainly been worth it in my mind. So when I read the materials that said you were going to spend 10 to 15 hours a week studying for a period of 15 months, I thought, that can't possibly be true, it can't take that much time at all. But they were absolutely right, of course. And thankfully my wife was very supportive and so was able to do that at a more senior point in my career. And actually doing that, having had a lot of experience at that point, was really good because it sort of helped solidify some of the things that I had seen and put a bit more theory around some of those things, and actually was well positioned in anticipation of some of the future things that I've done since then, actually to think more strategically about the funding of the organization and how to practically think about those funding decisions and how to manage the strategic treasury questions, which a lot are oriented around the funding and financing decisions. In that context, it was a very valuable experience, I thought. Also the content was useful, but also the approach was really useful. And working closely with a cohort of other treasurers, a lot of the material was done online and interactive, giving feedback to each other on our responses to case studies, which was really an interesting way to learn from other people's experience and exposure. But to your original question, you're obviously quite challenging to fit in in the context of a busy job and a busy family life. I think for me diversity is really important. So a carbon copy of myself is not going to be a good team mix at all. So rarely do I look to recruit in my own mold and if I get biased towards that direction, I normally come back from it quite quickly, actually. But that said, I think there's components that are relevant. I think having appropriate qualifications for the role that you're doing, whilst it doesn't necessarily help you to do the day job, it also does show that you have a commitment to continuous education and to learning and to trying new things and to learn from those experiences, which I think is an important characteristic. So that's certainly important. And then I think there's obviously different roles within treasury that require different sorts of skills. So making sure that the people that we're hiring have the right sort of skill set for the role that we want. And sometimes that's going to be a very detail oriented and routine processing activity, and sometimes that's going to be a more expensive role where people can run out big projects and make them their own and deliver them. So we very much a sort of horses for courses approach to recruitment and making sure that we get the right people for the right situation. I haven't grown up in a Treasury function in the same way as some of the other people that you may have interviewed have, but I think certainly in the current context, looking at process improvement, but the use of systems and automation within that context is a valuable part of what we're doing at the moment. But some of the skills in treasury are timeless. They don't change in terms of looking at the capital structure and managing the cash flows carefully and projecting that as best you can, and managing the relationships with the banking group or developing relationships with the advisors, the lawyers, the corporate finance advisors, the risk management advisors, et cetera, I think are fairly timeless and unchanging. And it's perhaps just a little bit more in terms of the sophistication of how we do that and progressively making each of the treasury functions that we work in progressively more sophisticated over time and more efficient over time as well.