Transitioning from Banking to Corporate Treasury with Ben Loper

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. This week's show, delighted to be joined by Ben Loper, the senior vice president, corporate treasurer and head of the 2 billion asset financing business segment at Hilton Grand Vacations. Now, Hilton Grand Vacations is a global timeshare company engaged in developing, marketing, selling and managing timeshare resorts underneath the Hilton Grand Vacations brand. Now, there's lots of other information here on the blurb and everything else. I'm not going to do that. I'll get Ben to describe that because he'll do it much better than me. We won't have to change it after the episode. So I'm going to get Ben to do a, a lot of the chatting in a minute, but Ben and I were just talking before the show about his, the way he started way back when and how he discovered finance and then Treasury. Ben, as I say on each and every week, enough of me. Chan, it's over to you, sir. Take us back to the dim, distant annals, if you will. How did you first discover finance and then Atlas says Treasury. Back to you, sir.

Yeah, perfect. So thanks for having me on. Excited to come on here and speak. Been a big, big listener of the podcast here for a long time. So it's great to be on Finance was kind of new to me. I always liked economics. I started studying economics in high school. I did kind of the AP Econ and was sort of dual enrolled in college classes for econ. And then I went to Auburn University for undergrad to study economics and I just kind of assumed that's what I would do. Went through that process, Took a lot of econ courses. And then my uncle, and never forget, it was like Christmas one year and he was like, you know, there's no jobs in economics. And I was like, what are you talking about? He was like, you have to have a PhD to have an econ job. There's no, there's no econ jobs. And I was like, huh? And I went, you know, there wasn't really Google as much at the time. And I went and did some research. I was like, wow, this guy's right. So I kind of had to pivot. So I started working, graduated college year early, started working at this bank which is now part of pnc. But at the time it was BBVA or Compass Bank. So I worked there for about a year and it was, I loved it. I learned a lot. It was a really bad part of town, so you got to see a lot of just different issues. My parents were like, you know, you really need to go to graduate school. This isn't going to work. And I remember at the time thinking, well, I'll just, I'll just work myself up from here. You know, I'll be one of those stories. You started a branch and then you're a CEO and, you know, it's that easy. And I didn't really realize at the time that it's harder than that. So they're like, you got to go, you know, you got to go get some kind of graduate degree. So I sort of started looking around like, okay, if I want to do banking or investment banking or really, you know, what is finance at the time. Masters of finance are pretty common now. There were really only, I think maybe three of them at the time. I think there was Vanderbilt, Tulane and mit. And they were all sort of varying levels of mathematical rigor. My wife now, but at the time, girlfriend, we've been together for a long time. She was a student in Birmingham. So I kind of drew this three hour circle around Birmingham and it's like, where, where can I go? What can I do? And the two best schools I think in that circle were Emory and Vanderbilt. And Emory had a two year degree and Vanderbilt had a one year degree. And we were talking about it before we got on here today. I actually am not a great student. I just don't like school. The actual studying is not for me.

Sorry. So you were studying that. But did you then know that you were, you went in to do that study as you said. Your parents said, no, you've got to do this. This is the direction. Did you have then? Right. Actually, I'm gonna go the accounting route later. Or CFA or. Because I get asked this by some, you know, more junior candidates, they said, oh, what should I do? Cfa, cpa, or, you know, what do you recommend? Ctp? I said, yeah, they're all great. And they're like, oh, you've got to decide where you want to go or start to sort of direct it. We can't. I can give you some advice. What I've seen and everything else. What, what were your thoughts? Or what, you know, where did you think? Right. Where is it going to go next? I know it's a while ago now, but within recollection as.

Yeah, no, that's, that's exactly right. So at the time, it was 2007. Yeah. And you know, Wall street was booming and that was just, that was going to be awesome. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to Wall Street. So that was what precipitated that. And that seemed like the fastest way to get there. By the time I started graduating in 2009 from graduate school, that was not the time to be going to Wall Street. So that was what drove specifically that finance. I was like, I'm going to go be an investment banker. Clearly that did not happen, which probably for the best. But I ended up doing equity research. And to your point on cfa, I have a CFA that was kind of the, the old bread and butter equity research, cfa. That's the route that you go. It's a very interesting industry today economically and where that sits. I think the death of equity research has been over exaggerated. But it's not like it was in the early 2000s or late 90s after the, I guess it was a Spitzer kind of crack down on them during the tech bubble. So it definitely is a different industry. I would recommend it to anybody to enter a career because it teaches you very quickly how to analyze companies, how to break it down, how to go to SEC filings, how to pull investor relations information, how to build a model on a lot of different companies quickly. So I benefited from the experience. But after three years, the writing on the wall was there for me. In fact, I'll tell you a funny story. Pat Campbell at the time was CFO of 3m. I remember somebody 3m, which you probably see it now with all this inflation. That's like a gross margin story. So people always talk about their pricing power, right? At the time, people were like, well, why can't you grow gross margin? Why can't you do this? And it was me and this guy Ajay, who I work and Pat, and he's like, look, there's not like a dial on my desk where I can just adjust up gross margin, right? I make payroll in 70 different countries. Do you have any idea how complicated just doing that is? And at that moment I thought, yeah, if I walked in his office tomorrow, short of turning on the lights, I wouldn't even know where to start. I mean, I knew nothing about running a business, being in a business, how a business runs accounting. None of it made any sense to me. I remember Honeywell went through the corridor, pension accounting change. There's no change in their pension, no change to the fundedness. They just change the accounting. This is called Corridor accounting and the stocks up. And I'm asking my boss, why is this? And they're like, well, it'll take the noise out of earnings. I'm like, but nothing changed. The economic value of the company is unchanged. He's like, it doesn't matter, it'll clean up the earnings release. And I'm like, it just made no sense to me. So at that point I was like, look, I'm done here. I need to go work for a company. That was really basically my brief three, four year foray into Wall street and back out into actually working for a.

Company and then talk me through. You did that and then, and I was just doing the research, as I said before Wall street and then was it then straight to the move to BBVA or you know, how did it work from there you then discovered the world of treasury or you know, just looking here, I'd seen, you know, Longbow, Billings, Ramsey. How did it sort of flow?

Yeah, so I was looking for different jobs and my wife and I mare at the time was pregnant and we started kind of doing the math and we're like, look, if we, if we go to a suburb, there's no point in being in a suburb next to New York if we're going to go to the suburb and live. I was looking at this job in Princeton, New Jersey and we were sort of just doing the math, like why not just be back close to our family if we're going to be in a suburb anyways, if we're not going to be in the city doing the city life. And so we started looking around and Birmingham actually is a pretty big legacy banking town. In fact, it's coming back a little bit with a couple public companies. But you had a lot of banking in Birmingham. You had like Wachovia, Colonial Regions, AMSouth. All these banks were based and Compass bank was one of them. They were publicly traded, they were acquired by bbva. And what happened during the crisis, which seemed good at the time but ended up not being great, is because they were an fbo, they didn't apply to TARP or TAO for any of that kind of stuff, all those rescue programs. And at the time, if you recall, Europe was actually in stronger footing initially in the crisis. And so BBVA just kicked all this money into what was Compass bank, their US franchise. So they effectively mothballed anything and everything that was going on in their treasury group. They no longer issued bonds, they no longer did repos, reverse repos. There was a little bit of brokered CD activity, maybe not really home loan bank advances. All of the typical funding of a large. This time the bank was probably $40 billion asset bank. All those things just didn't exist. So Spain just sent them money. And that's common for someone like a Deutsche bank or a Barclays. They call it Single Point of Entry Resolution Authority, which is where you have a parent and they just kick money down to the sub so that all these investment banks here that you see are kind of that way what BBVA was. And you've seen now all of the banks that were like bbva. So you saw hsbc, mufg, they've all sold their US franchises from the banking side because what they were called were multiple Point of Entry Resolution authorities. I know that's like super boring, but at the end of the day what it meant was once the Fed put in Capra and ccar, all of these US subs had to have their own funding. They could not rely on the parent for funding. And so this guy, Chris Marshall was a treasurer of bbva. Super sharp guy. I just resonated with him and he was like, look, we need somebody to come in and build up a lot of what doesn't exist. And I always liked building things. So went back and forth a little bit and at the end of the day I was like, this is going to be perfect because I'm going to go work for a company, we're going to be building things. And that's exactly what I wanted to do. So we left, we went back to Birmingham, Alabama, still traveled a good bit to New York, traveled a good bit to Madrid for different things, different points in my career there. But Houston, they had a big presence in Houston that was growing. By the end when I left, I think it was about $120 billion asset bank. So we grew a lot of over those six or seven years. But what was fun about it was the treasury team had really kind of had handcuffs on. We weren't doing bond deals, we weren't doing anything like that. And throughout the years we did all the regulatory things that we had to build, but we did the debt IPOs, we started putting up fixed income investor relations, working with the rating agencies, repos, reverse repos, brokered funding, home loan advances, a lot of that kind of thing. And then in a weird twist, again, this is more like boring banking stuff. But they were the only Section 20, what's called a Section 20 broker dealer, which is something that existed a long, long, long, long time ago. They never got out from that status. So in fact, when BBVA bought them and they went to go sort of set the broker dealer back up. The Fed had to actually rehire people. They cut this entire group because they were the only section 20 in the country. So there were just all these weird things that we had to kind of work through. But it was a lot of fun. That was where I kind of got a taste of like okay, we're managing our own money, we're stewards of our own capital. And I realized too quickly that it was like turning a battleship. It's not like you know, on the street especially when you're doing equity research or investment banking or a hedge fund where the holding periods are real short, it's easy to tell people do this, do that. Oh, EPS was bad. You should sell this segment. Like it's really easy. You don't have to do any of the work. You just say it. That's not to say that bankers, when they actually go to sell it don't do work. But initially, right. You're just kind of coming up with these thesis particularly on the equity research side. You're looking at 20, 25 companies. It's really hard to execute on some of the things that need to be done. And that's what I like. It's no longer two people, three people, four person teams. It's 50, 60, 500, a thousand people to get all of this stuff in order. And so I really enjoyed kind of working for a company and being on the inside there. And at this point I think that's probably a lifelong career track for me because I certainly love my time on Wall Street. We just hired a guy who was an investment bank ammo. So I have ton of respect for how sharp those guys are and we try to bring them on when we can but personally it just wasn't for me. I was happy to get in and sort of work in the company and kind of cut wood that way.

Ben, I want to just dig into this a little bit more but sort of from a separate point of view. And what I mean by that is. So we just spoke briefly before that Summer Simmons, a previous guest at a Treasury over at Victoria's Secret but she was with Morgan Stanley not just similar time actually for eight years and period and she accounting control through to transfer pricing and stuff. And you then were treasury funding strategists through to VP of liability based funding which is. And it's interesting for me because when I first ever started in treasury recruitment many many years ago, I was then asked to recruit the head of alm this was the time semi pre Google. So I was like, here's alm. And I'm like, asset liability what? It was just like, oh my goodness. Now you'd gone into this and this is again for the listeners and they might be going, well, I'll just stick with corporate treasury. What you know, rather than banking treasury. What did banking treasury give you in your back pocket that you've then used as a springboard? Because you have effectively and that's something we're going to come on to shortly. But you know, why go into banking? Surely it narrows your experience. It's going to make it more difficult to go into a corporate role later. How would you answer that?

If you like, from my perspective, if you work for a large bank, you're running a book and I forget the total assets or liabilities I was responsible for. But at the end it was over 10 billion. You doing a lot of these things daily. So at our company we have, we can talk about this, but we have like 6 pay fixed plain vanilla interest rate swaps. Right. That's probably all we'll do on interest rates for a long time. The bank, we were doing it all the time. We were offsetting customer risk, we were offsetting all the deals we were doing. Our whole asset liability picture was changing. We were doing a lot, a lot of that from a size perspective. We did a $500 million bond deal, we did an $850 million bond deal. We would borrow in a day, $2 billion. One time actually I meant to repay $300 million and I borrowed $300 million. I mean that's, that was the scale at which we were operating. So there's definitely benefits to doing it that way and it's helped to see the other side of it. So we were always dealing with large revolver draws or large customer deposit balances or ECRs. And you know, we saw all that. And so when you flip to the corporate side and you're trying to negotiate that, you're negotiating credit agreements, you're sort of sitting on the other side. So it's always been beneficial to me to have done that, just see a different perspective of it, see it from the other side. And I think you're right, you do see a lot of people kind of making that move, whether from a bank, treasury or just the investment banking side. I mean, we have a lot of people. I think two of my bankers, Trey Conkling who was at Bamal, and Naftali Holtz who covered us at Goldman, they have both left. And in fact Naftali is down here in Florida now at Royal Caribbean. So they both left and become cfo. So there's definitely different routes to kind of roll in through Treasury. And I think treasury had rolled up to Naftali prior to the CFO role. You can kind of come in from different ways, but for me liking the operational side, that really helped. And then as we, as we look at now the lending business that we have, which is over 2 billion in assets, right, that's effectively a bank. So we're granting loans to people to purchase fractional vacation ownership. Working at a bank really helped because all of the allowance models, the credit loss models, all that work that we do here now, that was all things that we had experience with at the bank. So it maybe was a little bit more beneficial for me coming to a company that has a large lending practice within it than maybe just pure corporate treasury. But I don't think it would hold you back at all if you really took the time to sort of learn what was going on at the bank.

So you then made the move across to corporate. How did that come about? And again, as I say, I get a number of banking guys go, here's my resume. Can you help me make the move? Unless it's a big role as you've got there, how did you convince them you were the person or what was it they were looking for? Did they come looking for you? How did it happen?

Yeah, so my wife reminds me that she found the job. I knew a few people that sort of worked around the deal. So you got to kind of go, got to go back in time. So Hilton was acquired by Blackstone at the time. Massive lbo. It was thought to be a terrible decision initially it was right at the peak of 07. But it ended up being one of the most profitable deals Blackstone's ever done. So it's worked. I think John Gray is still on the board of Hilton, Nasetta and Kevin Jacobs. And these guys have done a phenomenal job just over the years turning that business around. And one of the things that they did was then they IPO'd it. So Hilton became public again. And then they did what you mentioned, Victoria's Secret. I think Limited Brands is doing the same thing at 355e tax free spend. So you had three distinct companies and you have kind of Hilton, which is the big, the mothership, the hotel business park, which was reit. And then you have Hilton Grand Vacations. And we're the timeshare company. And what we do is we ourselves are fairly Large, but we license a brand from Hilton. So we're similar in the sense to just a regular hotel operator, except we're massive. We have over 100 properties. We all focus on really just this Hilton Grand Vacations brand. There's some sub brand stratification within that brand to hit different price points. But basically it's Hilton Grand Vacations and we ourselves are a public company. So at the time they were spinning out, there wasn't a Treasury Group. There was a lot of things like that that had always been done centralized and then when they spun out, they just didn't have these roles and these groups built. So same thing. I had wanted to kind of go corporate. It was apparent to me at the bank, especially a foreign operation, you were really going to have to go to the risk side to really kind of really make your way up. BBVA was massive. I think they were like 800 billion in assets. For every US they had a bunch of other companies. Turkey, they had Mexico, they had all of Europe, they had a lot of businesses. So it was just, you didn't see things like share repurchases and the equity component. A lot of things that you didn't see being a sub of a public company. So when this came around, I sort of knew the backstory and I'm like, this is building a Treasury Department all over again. But on the corporate side, I'm in. But I was a VP at the bank and remember that Kathy angel, the head of tax at the time, she was like, how do you feel about taking a step down? I was like, look, I don't care if it's senior director, I don't care if it's director. If I'm going to get to really build the Treasury Group, that's all I really care about and I'll come. And so we came over. I came over in July of 18. A lot of things happened in the fall as any time the company spins out, it's just a lot more work than people think. From a stocks control perspective, from an operational perspective, you know, we had a Oracle cloud go live. We had to get on all around systems, just all these kinds of things, put procedures in place, all of that kind of stuff. And within five, six days of joining, our CFO left. So we were allowed to CFO through November. There was just a lot to be done and it was really a sink or swim environment. I, I liked it. I got a lot of exposure to mark our CEO, which has benefited me over the years. Just as we, as we do different things, you Know, I know a lot of the, the people here to kind of get things done, which has really helped. I was all in. That was kind of how I got there. And it's been, you know, non stop ever since. But as you see, I just don't like to be bored. So it was perfect, perfect decision for me.

And when you made the move from Banking treasury, and I know this is highly complex financial environment within treasury for an FMCG might just be one product and one widget or whatever it might be and that's not so different drivers is what I'm saying. But you came in and yes, you were leveraging a lot of your previous expertise that level, but what was it like to move Banking treasury to corporate Treasury? You know, if you can think back to that time, were there different things? Obviously you were the other side of the table, which was, I've heard spoken to a number of candidates and they said when they made that move, it actually makes the conversations with their banking partners that much easier going. Yeah, but I did your job. In fact, I was equivalent to your boss actually. You know, so you know what they're looking for. But what was it like for you making that transition?

Would you say it was very helpful to have that experience to lean back on? At the time it's definitely different but at the time our treasury group was like two people. There was like a manager and an intern. We've grown obviously since then, but. And we'll go through this but. And even in the last 18 months we've done almost everything that a treasurer would do in a career in a lifetime in the last 18 months, just what we've, what we've gone through. And that started frankly that fall of 2018. So we instituted a share repurchase program. We did securitization asset back securitization which we used to do at the bank through indirect auto. So like having that experience, there was no one at the company that had really done securitizations. We had done them. And not only that, we had worked on one that failed, which is exceedingly rare. I didn't lead the team at the time, but that's how I came to take over. Some of that was these guys that had a deal that failed. You learn a lot from that too. So I was actually very fortunate. It was perfect because I got to learn everything, but I wasn't necessarily the one responsible. So those are rare, but when they happen, you can't take advantage. So we did securitization, so I knew how to do that. We upsized our credit facility from 200 million to 800 million. I had done that. Right. So I worked through that on the other side and that that helped. As I mentioned, we did share repurchase program. We did a lot of just what helped is banks are very, very regulated and regimented and that's not always fun. But when you're a new company and you're spinning out and you just simply do not have policies and procedures and you don't have the rigor around these processes that actually really helped to come from a background like that. So we put a lot of procedures, policies in place, SOX controls, we strengthened a lot of things, we reviewed a lot of things and we built a really, really kind of smooth system. So that experience actually really does help. I know that the knock on it is not corporate treasury, it's bank Treasury. If you're really doing it, there's a lot that you can bring to the table on the corporate side as well. And especially if you're coming from a public bank where you're still doing. There's less activism in banks. But apart from that, you're still doing share repurchases and fixed income investor relations and all that kind of stu. We had some bonds that were tied to our spin. We were looking at do we take these out, do we refinance these? And having done a lot of bond deals and looked and traded a lot of bonds, we had about a $14 billion asset portfolio too of Treasuries and Sallie Mae's Jennings and all that kind of stuff. I knew a lot about how bonds were priced, how the convexity worked and all this kind of stuff. So that helped, right? When we're out there looking at pricing bonds or renegotiating bonds that we had from our spin. So it kind of ended up being the perfect experience. And then I wasn't learning a lot of the things. When I first left Wall street and I came to work for the bank, it was totally different. I mean it was just a different pace. People weren't working all night. And that's the same thing here, I think, as it should be. But I had already made that adjustment as well. And sometimes that's hard to come down. Again, I just mentioned we hired a guy to run our asset backed securitizations. We do about three of those on average a year. He worked at bank of America covering us in their investment bank. When he first shows up, he's like, what do you mean we're not working all night and we're Not. I mean, there's a lot to do with. We just complete a big acquisition, so there's definitely late nights, but it's just a different culture. And I had made that transition as well, going to the bank. So a lot of those things were kind of already done, which was helpful.

You talked about being able to make your own policies and create them because you weren't inheriting them. Oh, we've got to change this or, you know, go back to basics, because you didn't have to wind it back to basics because it wasn't there. You were coming in with this new view. That's the right way to put it. And I get a number of listeners to the show where they say, oh, my, I'm. I'm going in there. I'm the first treasurer or I'm the first real treasury professional. What's your ethos? Or you've got your whiteboard there, right? Is it risk, is it cash, is it assets? What's your focus? Because I want to then move on to the future of treasury as we see it. Maybe this is the springboard for it. How do you view treasury fundamentally? Is it that all comes down to cash or other things? What are your thoughts?

Well, I think treasury, you have to have the basics right. You have to have the policies, procedures, the practices. That all has to function perfectly. Right? I mean, there'll be incidences, but that all needs to work. And like Hedge Committee is a good example. We had no hedge committee, we had no hedge policy, we had none of that. And so just literally writing the policy, putting the committees together, chartering the committees, finding someone to take the minutes, all of that stuff started to take place. The reason you want all that stuff and you want people doing that is treasury really should be, particularly in a business that's, that's expanding in the conversation about capital allocation strategy, and in our company, it's that way. That's not always the case if you get mired down into constantly kind of fighting fire. So we spent a lot of time on the front end. You know, we implemented Kyriba, we've, we've done a lot of infrastructure investment, Oracle, Cloud, all of that. So that our processes are fairly smooth. That frees us up to think about things like, you know, we put on almost $750 million of pay fixed hedges over the last, you know, prior to this rate run up during COVID and all that. We were able to take the time and think thematically about where we needed to be from a risk perspective. And that saved us tens of millions of dollars in cash. Right. So you need your treasury team thinking about these things, and they need to be kind of free to do that. So that's, in my mind, the way you think about it. And the other thing I would say is if you go back to when Sarbanes Oxley came out the CFO role, almost immediately, overnight, everybody was a cpa, right? In the US Everybody was pivoting up from cpa and that kind of became the role. I think the mandate now for CFOs has translated back towards a strategic guide or strategic asset. And you see that in our company. I see it in a lot of other companies. You see it whether or not the different groups make it to CFO level. If you just look at our company, our CFO has it, our CFO has development. There's a lot of things like that that aren't just tying, ticking and tying numbers. So you've got to be able to bring to the table some sort of strategic value. And in our case, we do a lot of what we call fee for service. We'll run a property for Blackstone, so Blackstone might own the on the actual building, we'll run it for them. We do asset securitizations with Blackstone. We have joint ventures. We do a lot of very complicated things, and we've got to be able to take the time to think about how to do those properly. So I think having a very regimented process, a lot of systems, a lot of compensating controls in the way you design your process is very helpful. So, you know, in Kyriba, for example, we have a control that just catches any payment above a million dollars. Doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter who it's been approved by. It just catches it for just a second set of eyes. And so there's a lot of things like that that we've built into the, to the piping to just protect us from having to fight fires. And again, things always come up. But that frees us to think about, okay, in this kind of rate environment, in this kind of inflation environment, in this kind of property market, how can we think about partnering? How can we think about whole loan sale maybe? Right? So we deal with a lot of hedge funds that want to buy our loan portfolios, our subprime loan portfolios. There's a lot of things like that that we can be working on. And you've got to have the basics in place to do that other stuff. Well, I mean, it's a lot of fun to go to dinners and travel and do all that. But you've really got to have the basics down. So we've spent a lot of time last four years focusing on that so that we can make sure we're free to really do the work that's value added.

And when you look at the future of treasury, when you're looking over your shoulder, you've touched on there obviously technology, which is great, we covered off there, you know, some of the things that it sort of picks up for you in, in the background, which then enables you to grab that and move on from it. But what are the other things for you as a treasurer that you're thinking about? We're post pandemic. We've done so many shows about the pandemic. Everyone's like bored of it in a way, but it's affect everyone' businesses. But where are you seeing it going to next? What are your thoughts? We're going to be the AFP later this year and you know, hope to see you there and a number of other clients. But what are the things you're thinking? Actually I need to be involved in this, this, this or these are the sessions I should be thinking about. What are your thoughts?

That's exactly right. I'm from Alabama, so you know, I always follow the University of Alabama and Saban says this all the time, right? Like last year was last year and you know, we need to win this year and I think about that all the time. We've got to do our job. I mean everybody's got to do their job. And the pandemic was crazy and it was, it was what it was. We put a plan in place, we responded, we execute on the plan. We were fine and, and that was that. And we've got a playbook now on our shelf. We have another pandemic or another shutdown, but at the end of the day we can't just live on that, right? My CFO always jokes with me, right? We did all these interest rate swaps, they generate a lot of money, they're done, right? We can't, we can't just keep milking them and say, oh look what we did, right? So it's, it's on to like have you done for me lately? And I think that that is any high performing team functions and things like that, right? You and I mentioned the Green Braid tournaments. We do so talking to these guys, right? So whether it's University of Alabama, the Patriots, special forces, everybody focuses on let's do our job and let's do it better than we did it yesterday and yesterday's over. Right. So we've spent a lot of time focusing on like what's next, right. From a fraud perspective, what is going to be the issues that we have to contend with in a remote environment. Right. Because I think we are going to be remote for longer than people anticipate, so not necessarily a pandemic issue going forward. How are we going to train new treasury analysts remotely if that's what we need to do? Right. Inflation, interest rates. Clearly we've not seen inflation like this in decades. Is it transitory? Are we just going to live with higher inflation? There's all these different things that we have to think about. We have to think about how they affect our business. Fortunately for us, we don't have really a lot of exposure to Ukraine or Russia in our business. From an interest coverage perspective, you know, we're in very good shape. I was at a fixed income conference a couple weeks ago on the west coast and there's certainly concern there, right. As interest coverage ratios compress pricing, power and those types of things. I think our business, you know, leisure and hospitality in general is doing fairly well. But we have to think through that, like what is the next step? And then in our case specifically, we made about a $3 billion acquisition last year. So we are in the process of go live retraining, onboarding, synchronizing systems. I just the amount of work and the amount of time we're spending right now just pulling all these things together is enormous. So there's all those kinds of things. I think payments are going to be a big focus for at least if you have a customer centric product. If you're buying steel, you know, you're probably always going to, I don't know, wire the money in or ach it. And if you're consuming a leisure product and you're at the pool or a yacht or whatever, you may want to use your Apple watch and you may want to use Bitcoin or those things are more front and center for us. As you start to define your product in terms of experience, right. What's the comprehensive customer experience? What's the consumer esthetic when you walk into a property? That type of stuff is a big focus for us. And a lot of that has to do with upgrading legacy terminals. Right. If we want to do Apple pay, that can require new terminals, new backend, new PCI compliance work. So payments is a big part for us as well. And I think that that's. People are seeing that. I think Everywhere. We actually just brought on Flywire to do some of our international payments. We have a fairly large post acquisition, a fairly large international business. But even pre acquisition we had a fairly large Japanese business. Capital markets is a focus for us. You've seen deals move a lot slower, particularly on the asset back side. You're seeing spreads widen. I don't think you're going to see some kind of great financial crisis market shut down. We had a very successful deal. We've seen a few other of our peers come in over the last few weeks and have deals go to market and everything's been fine. But again, you have to just kind of think about all those things. What kind of capacity are you keeping? How much dry powder do you have? How do you think about capital allocation in this market? So those are things that just never go away. And to your point, the pandemic is I had an econ professor one time used to say all you need in life is one good excuse. And I think the pandemic has become that for people. Oh well Covid, that's just not the case anymore. We've got to start thinking, okay, where's the future? And, and we need to have a playbook for if things do shut down again. But each time that goes by, I think people just become less and less willing to kind of fully hunker down for four weeks. I'm not sure we'll see that again. So those are kind of the hot button issues for us. And as for how we respond to them, we focus on teamwork, we focus on everybody doing their job. We focus on anticipating what can happen. We focus on a contingency plan. We have planning called pace, Primary auxiliary contingency and emergency. We think through for everything that we're doing. You know, what are those sort of those four levers that we can pull. So that's kind of the way we go through it on it on a day to day basis.

And Ben, I just want to take you back. We're going to, I'm going to ask you to wrap up in a minute but before we get there I just wanted to just go back on one of the areas or one of the questions you talked there about training junior members of staff. Obviously this is Treasure recruitment company. We host the podcast. But I deliberately avoid going on about recruitment all the time because I don't think it's that forum. What I'd rather do is explore with you just briefly and that's. I'm actually speaking about that in a couple of weeks time talking about how people recruit, you know, what treasurers now need to think about. But it's, as you say, it's not just about great. It's getting them on board. But then how do you remotely onboard them? You know, if you're a junior member of staff, I've said this on previous sessions that you can't literally sit next to them and show them which keys to use on the keyboard because they're doing it over zoom. They might be sitting remotely for a period of time and maybe days or weeks. How have you approached that? And then we'll go towards the wrap up of the show. But how do you as a company and you as a treasurer approach that would you say?

Our approach has been to try to get people in the office. I think people have clearly proven that they can do their jobs remotely. I don't have any issue with that. But normally that's their legacy job. Right. Learning things new is different. And so we really try to get people in. We have people remote in different states, we have people in different time zones, Nevada, Texas, and it is challenging and we don't begrudge anybody for being remote at all. But the issue, and it kind of comes down to personal preferences. If you're in the office, if you're around the things going on, you're just more likely to get pulled into something. Right. In 18 months, we've really done almost everything that you could do in a Treasury career. We've done asset backed securitization, we did workout waiver requests on our credit facility. We upsize our credit facility. We did share repurchases, we've done interest rate swaps, we've done just a ton of things that would make a career. And it's tough to get exposure to that if you're not here because you're not going to be like, oh, hey, okay, I got to run up to the CFO's office. Okay, let me call this analyst at their home. And then they're walking their dog. It's not to say people aren't working, but my advice to someone who really wanted to come on would be come in, be present and get exposure to things. But you're right, I mean, it's something I think everybody's going to have to contend with is what is the future of training look like and how do we all approach that? I think in our case, mostly on the treasury side in the office. So that's helped. The company that we acquired had an excellent treasury team. So they know what they're doing. So we go out to Vegas and see them. But that has helped. We've brought in a few new people here in Orlando. They've come into the office. Even if it's just a few days a week, it's not, you know, it doesn't have to be every day, but even a few days a week just to kind of, hey, I need to learn this. And the people that I've seen who have done the best have come in for a few days just to pick up, okay, now I see what you're saying. And the other thing is it's really, really hard for people. I think the job quit rate is like at an all time high. When people don't feel like or understand why they're doing something, it just becomes a job. We were actually just meeting on presentation here in my office before this call and I had asked for something and then something slightly different came across and then they were like, well, why would you want this? And then we were explaining, well, here's the point I want to make and here's the trajectory to how we'll make this point. They're like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Like, yeah, we can. I understand now. So just getting the context around it helps people develop. And at the end of the day, not everybody wants to be the CEO, but if you want to advance in your career, it requires a set of soft skill sets and understanding the details, the context, the exposure, knowing who to go to, that all helps. Right? So I think that that's kind of where we are. Some people will have to, I think AFP puts out some digital training. Some people are going to have to just pay up for digital training because it's just going to be tough to train people fully remotely.

No, I think you're right and I think it's definitely something I've seen. And well, way back when I was talking to the head of the UK association of Treasurers and I said that you guys as treasurers, there's also that need for executive training as well, because you'd gone, you get all this way to be a real specialist in your field and then you're running these teams. And I said, well, how much coaching have you had to run these now? Big, skilled treasury teams? And a lot of the time is like none. A lot of the time. I still see that as an area that could be exploited by people, but I think across the piece it needs a good review for people to pile in there because there's a real opportunity there. You know, I'm not saying we're fitting it, it's just more, I think we're busy enough, but I think that's definitely, you know, you identify there. That's something that is needed sort of thing as well.

That's right. And we have invested, had the turnover where we've had to really contend with this. But I would presume that it's going to be harder to get into these areas that you want to be in because without maybe a certification, I think certifications are kind of falling by the wayside. They may be coming back because now if I'm trying to hire someone who's going to be remote and they have no treasury experience, immediately right in the back of my mind I'm like, okay, well, how's this going to work? They might be smart, they might have financial experience and they, they might in the office become a perfectly fine treasury person. But how do I bridge that gap? If I don't have time to train, I don't have, they're not here. So, you know, if someone gets a CTP or something like that, I think all that education and I'm not huge on certifications, I don't have a ctp. I did the CFA working on a CPA for different reasons, but at the end of the day, I think that they may be having kind of their time in the sun because again, people are looking to minimize risk in this kind of environment. And if you don't have the previous experience, it's really tough to find. I think that's what's driven the wage inflation and the hiring stats, is that if you know how to do something right now and a company needs that role, they used to say, well, we can pay this person 30 grand less and we can train them up. Right? That was the whole thing. We can teach you, it comes down to work ethic and we can teach you what to do. And all this, that doesn't exist anymore. Now in a remote setting, you really can't train them. You're almost, it's almost the inverse. You're really hiring this person to bring in that expertise because you can't train on site. And so I think that has flipped kind of the desirability of certain candidates and then the pricing power of other candidates.

Brilliant summary. I love that. Although we are going to summarize in a moment and we'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes so people can connect to you as well. But as we wrap up today's show, that was a wrap up in itself. So you, at the risk of you repeating any of that in which you might if someone's listening today and maybe earlier on in their careers. So certification is maybe coming back and digital training is, is key. But what advice would you give to those more junior earlier on in their stage in their careers or maybe later on? You know, what are the takeaway tips? You know, we have a number of them. You've heard a few of the podcasts. What are your thoughts? What would you say?

I think definitely be present. Have a personality. I think that's the big misnomer is oh, I got to come in and I got to be straight narrow and I can't talk. You know, have a personality and people are bringing you in to work with them a lot. The people that come in and integrate and talk and joke and all that seem to do a lot better. Certifications, kind of a personal preference. We don't hire. Not hire because previous comments notwithstanding. But they're always helpful. I did them and they probably helped at some point in time, so I would never steer away from them. I think the big thing is you got to enjoy what you do. I love coming and doing what I do. It's been crazy for four years now between Covid and all this, but, but I love what I do. I don't, I don't want to be doing anything else and not everybody's always going to be that way, but I think you definitely got to find a team and a job that you want to do because it just, especially with COVID people have started to become introspective on reassessing work, life balance and what they want to do with their time. Life's just too short to do stuff you don't want to do. And Covid has really illustrated that to people. So I think you really got to find something you want to do. Treasury Committee incredibly rewarding. You see a lot. You're in the middle of everything. You see all the payments. There's nothing that really happens that the treasury group doesn't see or touch or isn't the first to hear about. So if you kind of like being in the flow of information, that's obviously helpful. You learn a lot from a skills perspective, you know, you become exceptionally valuable. I think I don't look at a lot of those compensation surveys, but it seems like analyst wise treasury analysts tend to be a little bit on the higher scale just because of, of what they need. You need the, the fidelity of what they're doing. You know, when it comes to trust and then you know, when it comes to skill sets. And at the end of the day. I mean, in some of these cases, like we're, I don't want to say making bets, but we're moving around or securing funding hundreds of millions of dollars and in some places billions of dollars. And, and we are billions in aggregate. But on, on an individual transaction, yeah, it's a lot of money. And so to be trusted with that, you've got to be trustworthy and people have got to relate to you. So I think that, that, that kind of having a personality helps. And then, you know, the last thing I'd say is just giving back. I know it's not treasury specific information, but if you come in every day and you just think, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna work my way to the top and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do this. You just get burned out. You gotta have fun. That's why we do the golf tournaments we were talking about. You know, you gotta have fun and enjoy what you're doing. And it's a lot of work, especially when you start getting to sort of the middle to the top. There's a lot of travel, there's a lot of, you've gotta always be on, there's always questions coming across you have to know the answer to. A lot's asked of you. But I couldn't think of a better place to be. So I'd recommend to anybody treasury career for sure.

Again, I was just sort of scribbling notes here. I mean, I can do in reverse order there. So giving back key, I think. Exactly. You can do that. As you say, yeah. Salaries. We do our global salary survey. Go to treasurysalary.com and you're exactly right. I think one of the things there, which I certainly notice is that there is a rapidly rising junior market, if you like, as you say, if you secure the treasury analyst or manager you want for an extra 10, 15, $20,000 at the end of the day, you know, as you say, they're gonna, they're gonna de. Risk hundreds of millions maybe worth that investment. I'm not saying all the time, I just think it's there. But as you say, I love that bit which you kicked off with treasury being very much at the heart of things. And that's one of the reasons why we do this podcast, to interview amazing guests like you, sir, to tell people so, you know, spread that I've done it 20 odd years talking to you guys and, and we brought it to life over the podcast over the past year or so, past three years rather. It's been amazing. So just very grateful to you and look forward to, as you say, sort of catching up hopefully this year. Really, I can't wait to see you sort of thing.

Yeah, no, absolutely appreciate it anytime. And schedule permitting, I'll, I'll be at afp, but we'll see. There's a lot of, a lot of moving parts with this integration, so hopefully it works out. But yeah, anytime. I'm looking forward to hearing it.

You're a busy man, but yeah, I hope to see you there, sir. Thanks for your time. We'll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes and look forward to seeing you later in the year.

Sounds good. Appreciate it.

Thanks, sir.

Thanks.

Hello, it's Mike here again. I hope you enjoyed this week's show. If you did, then maybe you want to follow the show or subscribe, depending on where you listen, whether that's itunes, Spotify or another great place to listen to the show from. It's totally free and means that you'll be the first to see each and every week when we release a new show. And maybe whilst you're there, you could even leave a quick review. Reviews and ratings are among the most important metrics for a podcast to effectively rank. And as you can probably appreciate, the podcast is a lot of hard work to produce every week. It'd be amazing. Just take, say, 20 seconds, leave a quick review of my amazing guests and their great career stories. We'd really appreciate it. Thanks very much and I can't wait to see you soon.