Treasury Career Corner LIVE in London with Diane Wilson, Dan Ferguson and Steve Burton

Foreign.

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 build their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. And a special thanks to flywire, our fantastic sponsors. If you've ever wondered whether there was a way to ease your international transaction hassles, they're the guys to talk to. If you follow the link in our show notes, you can see me talking to my mate Greg Levin, their Senior VP of Sales. I get to ask Greg about who are Flywire and how they can help you and your treasury team with your cross border payment headaches. Just follow the link to the interview in today's show notes. And now let's get on with the show. In this week's show we come back to London. We've done Vegas, then we did Texas and then I came straight back to London the night before actually recording this. So it was a little bit broken after it, but it was amazing. Three amazing treasurers, Dan Ferguson from Resolution Life, Diane Wilson from TI Automotive and Steve Burton from icg. Amazing guests. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did there on the night. We had over 100 treasury professionals in the room. We've got another one later this year, so make sure to be there for that. And then next week we have Windy City Summit in Chicago. For my, it was my 14th time, so enjoy this week's show. Welcome to this evening's Treasury Career Corner live in London. This is actually my fifth over the past month or so. I had to take some notes because literally got back from Texas yesterday. So literally one or two beers and I'm asleep in the corner. So did two in New York, couple of Vegas, Texas, now lovely London. Now I usually do. You've seen it in the previous one. I say, oh, you're all asleep. A long day. Good evening. Then you wake up a little bit and we do Come on again, I'm not doing that corny live. So basically I'm gonna go, good evening London. Wait for it. And then you're gonna give me a big bit of energy and you're gonna wake up. Good evening London. You didn't let me down. Thank you very much. Couple of ground rules and actually I broke this in one of the first ones was actually to have your phones switched off. Why? Because you've made the effort to come here. Now I know it's only because of the free booze. And these are three amazing panelists, obviously.

Thanks.

There you go. But the key thing is you've made some time for yourselves. A lot of you work remotely and you've got out of your hybrid offices and you've come here this evening, so make the most of it. I see a few people looking at their phones now going, oh, I'll just check that email. It will wait. When was the last time you got to sit with three amazing treasurers and a great treasury recruiter? Sorry, I've just written that down here. Okay, you haven't. So before I get on to who am I, Treasure Career Corner live in London, some thank yous. Firstly, amazing Herbert Smith re, I think you'll agree. Kristen at the back, put your hand up there, that's our host. Be very nice to him. Be even nicer if you can. Be to the guys at Chatham, Hands up, State street and Kariba, they're paying for the drinks. Be very nice to them, otherwise they will be taking your pink tickets away. So who am I? Bar being an extremely big headed man there. So I established treasury recruitment company 25 years ago. Placed before that the lucky Dan on the end. He still thanks me in Treasury. And I'm telling you that not as a sales pitch, more, it's to explain why we created this event. In fact created the podcast and then this event came out of it. I started talking to treasurers 25 years ago, thought about doing my own podcast at some point, maybe about recruitment. I thought, God, that'll get boring. So I thought, no, I'll talk to treasurers. So five and a half years ago, first ever podcast with Sarah Jane hall from GlaxoSmithKline. Amazing lady thought, we'll do 10 episodes and it didn't stop. Why has it not stopped? Because of all of you. I was at Euro Finance recently and one of the delegates came up and said, look, how have you done 300 odd, now we've done 320. So look, 10ft of me, 10 treasurers, right? They all do exactly the same job. No, not really, Mike. I went, no, they're cash rich, they're debt laden, they're a private company. And I said, all of you have the same tools, but you've all taken different career paths, you made different steps and that's what we're going to talk about with our lovely panelists. As Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues. So if you can learn just one thing from this evening, and I challenge you to learn one thing from Steve, but that's because we're friends. I'm allowed to say that, but they're giving up their time. So listen in and get some good stuff from them. This is a bit more about the podcast itself. Hope you all listen to it every week. You get to hear from amazing treasurers. Got the treasure of Harley Davidson coming up. We had some other New York lives. We had. We've got London will record this as well for any of your friends or colleagues. And that's about it really. I think I want to get on to what we're going to do this evening. We will run to time. So we're going to kick off, we're going to talk about how our panelists have built their careers. It's a bit on education, bit about hybrid. Don't want to do too much about that. Some Q A at the end, takeaways and then free booze. I know a few of you looked up then, didn't you? Oh, I'll let the panelists introduce themselves. Steve Burton, over to you, sir.

Thank you very much. First thing, you will learn one thing from me. Okay. Mike invites you out for a quiet beer. Do not go because you will end up on a panel or on a podcast of some description or both. I'm not doing both. Yeah, so that's if you know nothing else, that's the one. If you've not done the podcast or you don't want to do a panel.

Just avoid this man.

Beer comes up everywhere, doesn't it?

Yeah.

So my name's Steve Burton and you very kindly asked to do this. I'm very old, I've got a very long career, so keep me to time please. And even had to look up what I was doing back in the day. So let's start. I graduated accounting degree, I know, very boring, but didn't know what to do. Ended up in banking, doing accounting.

Which.

Really actually wasn't for me, quite frankly. But I qualified, did my thing and I'm allowed to tell a few of these in light hearted fashion, so I will. One of my roles at Midland bank was to do the finances for the treasury sales team. Now I had no idea what that meant when I started, but after a few months what it seemed to entail was doing a few things in the morning and going out for a long lunch. Fantastic. Like that. So my question was, who are they taking out to lunch? That is a very important question. And after a while I understood that there was this thing called treasury for corporates and other companies where apparently you were quite important and you could also do exciting things like foreign exchange and money market deposits. Because basically I am talking Back in the day, that is what treasury was then and I've now broken the hook thing after a bit of investigation. And this seemed like a great career. But how do you do it? I was very lucky to be offered a role in a nascent Treasury Centre for Merksharp and Dome in central London. And I still had no real clue what treasury was, but this role seemed great. And quite frankly, Midland bank at the time was not a great place to be. So it looked like something to do that was a bit more interesting. And I think that's a kind of theme in my career. If it looks quite interesting and I'm going to be engaged with it, give it a go.

Right.

And you can do that when you're younger. Clearly the decisions become a bit more relevant later on. Joined Merck Shop and Dome, set up a Treasury center and became a treasurer, not an accountant, which was great for.

Some of the audience that don't know who Merck were, a lot of us do. But that stage, what were they as a company?

They're a pharmaceutical company. It was Merck and Co, it was the European subsidiary. They had a lot of subsidiaries around Europe. So first cash management, that sort of. First sort of realization what cash management and foreign exchange related to that was then once you were a treasurer, you're into a different sort of area of recruitment, I would say.

Yeah.

And we're still talking the 80s, I think here. Somewhere like that, early 90s bat industries came along, needed a dealer in their head office. And you may know BAT is tobacco now. Then they were multinational with financial services and tobacco. Another great story, when you have an interview with bat, hr, literally light up a cigarette in the interview, blow it at you and go, have you got a problem with cigarettes? And if you have, you might as well leave now. Obviously I stayed because I then stayed for 19 years at bat. But it was that type of company at the time, a very kind of, I would say, aggressive tobacco type company with what was quite frankly a bit of adult financial services. But that soon span out and became tobacco. Now what I found in BAT was. And I stayed there 19 years, but it's a global. It was in basically every country in the world. It did pretty much everything. And what you found was, if you made the right impression, you had basically three things. You had different product type jobs. So from fx, I ran the fx, I ran dcm, I ran bond issuance, you had geography, you get the chance to move overseas if you're in the right frame. And that was. They basically had a regional treasury structure, you could get into where you go in Hong Kong or Americas and be. So essentially you had an entire spread of jobs that you could do within one company. If you are willing to put yourself out there and basically take risks. There's a lot of. I spent a year or two in Russia, I've been in Vietnam. But if you're willing to be that person and you're willing to do that, you can get those opportunities. And from my perspective, that was what I wanted out of my career as well. I wanted some excitement and not just to be doing treasury, but to be meeting different cultures, meeting different people, and they're the sort of people they wanted in a true multinational. So, again, be very careful who you're going to, because expectations are different.

And Steve, did that accelerate your career by taking that? Because I get asked, should I move overseas in my company if I've offered it? And because a lot of people are saying, do I bother? Do I not do feel that I.

Suppose there's an individual element to this.

Right.

For me, it was a massively exciting. My first posting was Hong Kong. And you get offered this role, which there was two aspects to it. It's in Hong Kong and they said, what's the role? I said, they said, it's regional treasurer. Who's the current regional treasurer? There isn't one. Okay, so what do I do? You're going to go to Hong Kong and I'll give you a phone.

Make it up.

Go make it up. So that's where the risk comes. Are you willing to dive into that and take it on Now? I think I had enough background of treasury and we'll talk about education and what you've done, that you knew more than the other people in Asia. And as long as you're confident enough to do the phone call and get on a plane, you're fine. But if you're not, you know. And also from my perspective, I really wanted to go and do something different outside of London and live somewhere else. But so there's two parts to that. One, they've got to have the confidence in you and you've built that credibility up from where you've come from. And two, you've got to really put yourself out there and make sure that when you get there, you grasp the opportunity. So a lot of that going on at BT and 19 years in, and I did other jobs. I wasn't just in Treasury, I was finance controller for Russia. I did a bit of project work in Vietnam and things like that, which. So you get these opportunities to have different building blocks of skill sets and so don't keep it narrow. I love treasury and treasury is very wide and we'll probably talk about the future treasury and where it's got to. It's got so much broader than literally that first job I had, which was a bit of FX and a depot. Clearly we've all been through this transition the last 20, 30 years, but that doesn't mean being a finance controller in Russia will probably give you skill sets that you're never going to learn in the treasury environment, because it certainly does, if nothing else, about managing different teams and different people. But we maybe talk a bit about that. 19 years in bat, I just ran out of enthusiasm, quite frankly, and I think again, what had always every two years I kind of change role and I got something else. So it became the end of that, that. That time at bat ended up basically doing something completely different. Moving into financial services. I worked for ICG plc. It's now FTSE 100 company. It is a basically, essentially a listed private equity company. Assets under management, 90 billion. And I joined it as a group treasurer and soon found out it was probably the dullest job in the world because there was nothing going on, quite frankly. But what was interesting was the funds were growing and they needed treasury services. So what became my role was my role is now 10% PLC treasurer, 90% managing debt at fund level and managing the risks and funds. So I had no idea this was going to happen to you when I turned up. And it became the important role within a very high growth company in the footsie. So, again, I didn't know that at the time you took a risk. It was something different. I wanted to do something not corporate, not cigarettes, not widgets and financial services with that. And that is, by the way, some people think it's quite transferable. Financial services is a whole different beast once you get into it. I reckon three or four years I got the hang of it. I've been there eight or nine years now and I may be touching the surface of some of it, but it is a completely different way of managing a business with, especially with the regulator. Luckily we don't do retail, but it's still a highly regulated and a very highly managed business compared to the corporate experience.

I'm going to come back in some more questions there. I'm going to pass to Diane as well. Diane, if you would take us back to the beginning for yourself. And I'll give Steve his microphone before he loses it.

Thank you very much. Yeah, I started my Career. I did a degree in engineering, maths actually, at Bristol and left. And I hated it. I want. I loved the maths, hated the rest of it. And the very last term they did this module called the Engineering Society, which had a little bit of law and a little bit of finance and a little bit of business. And I was like, okay, that's where I want to be. And so I left, obviously, left university. I went to London to make my fortune and I applied for a job at the Evening Standard, like you did back in those days. I started at Tate and Lyle in. And my first job, actually, my first title was treasury assistant, but that was actually writing the checks and banking the payments. So I didn't get anywhere near treasury at first. I started doing accounting exams, I did my SEMA exams. I moved around within the company because again, it was the very. A lot of young people there. There was lots of opportunities. I jumped onto their grad scheme because all their grads, graduate trainees had left, which was great way to get my qualifications because they pay for it all. And once I was in T, then you again, you get that opportunity and you see this amazing world of treasury because I was always going down there with my payments and all the rest of it. And I was like, I desperately want to work here. And. And so basically that was what I did. And it's probably almost exactly 30 years ago now when I joined the Technologies as the money market dealer. And, yeah, and I remember saying to everyone, was like, oh, how's it going, Diane? How are you getting on? I was like, I'm getting paid to talk all day. I am nothing. Being the dealer, it was nothing better. I absolutely loved it. I then obviously went and did my treasury exams. I was quite fast tracked through it because of having done all SEMA already and I was on a bit of a roll. I was like, oh, yes, I'm going to be so good at all of this. Didn't do very well in my second phase of the exams and realised then that actually, even if I had the exams, they weren't going to make me the treasurer. And then a few more things happened. I moved on to KingFisher. I did 14 years at Tate in various different roles. I then moved on to Kingfisher, which was three very intense years. I suppose this is that you spend the first five or six years individually learning your skills and then you spend the rest of your life trying to work out how the hell you apply it to what position you're in right now. Yeah, Kingfisher was crazy. We did.

Can you tell me again for the audience what were King?

Because Kingfisher, they were High street when I joined, they still owned Superdrug. They were Woolies, Woolworths on the High street. Comet, it was a general merchandise company that owned an awful lot of retail. And of course they own B and Q. Yeah. And now Screwfix, which is obviously what they're left with now. But for the three years I was there, it was literally first of all, first thing we did was just sold off Superdrug, then we sold off Woolies, which is a multi massive deal. Then we went through this whole other transformation. So it was literally three very intense years and coincided with a period in my life where we actually, within weeks of joining Pinkfisher, I found I was having my third child and we got to that point where more kids than adults and it was all a bit complicated and my husband wasn't happy with what he was doing. So we decided to take the rather radical move and move out to Cheltenham. So left London behind us. So I then, to be fair, he went to university. He decided he'd never gone to university because time he went, he got a proper qualification, changed his career. And so I was then just like jobbing treasurer. I spent three, four years then while he was at university, doing temporary roles, basically, some longer than others. I worked at Vodafone, I worked at Imperial Tobacco, I worked at rhm, I worked at Brambles and I would go into these companies and I ended up again, I didn't expect to do that, but I ended up being the treasury systems expert because they were all putting in the same system that we'd worked with at Kingfisher. So that became quite interesting. And as that what happened at the end of that period of time, if I didn't know was the end of the time was I joined TI Automotive, which is a company in Oxford, completely different organization, privately owned company working in automotive, terribly highly leveraged and completely different to everybody because everywhere else I'd work was always a big plc but they battered a little bit above where they should be. And so then. And I walked in there on a six month contract, I'm still there 17 years later. And a bit like, no, you never know what you're going to get. And very much like Steve having lots of opportunities when he joined vat. What happened with TI was actually all the opportunities landed on us that having. In that, in that time we've had. And I walked in there on a six month contract, I'm still there 17 years later. And a bit like, no, you never know what you're going to get. And very much like Steve having lots of opportunities when he joined. What happened with TI was actually all the opportunities landed on us that having. In that time we've had losing all the banks through refinancing scheme of arrangements, IPO owned by Sponsor Finance, you name it, we've done it. And that was what I had to learn really from that was how to apply what I knew about things like cash management. I never worked in a company that didn't have any, didn't have any money and it was, it was interesting. But you, that's how you learn, isn't it?

That's.

And that's what's made. I suppose to be fair, I would still be there 17 years later if it hadn't have been always something happening.

We're going to dig both into both of some of those elements that I think that these guys want to hear more. Dan, we'll pass to you. Way back when.

Yeah, I think I'm. So I'm the only one who didn't go to university out of your panelists today. And that was really why or where I started in Treasury. I did actually go to university for one day, decided it wasn't for me. In my infinite Wisdom As a 19 year old I didn't like being told what to do and I'd been pushed into it by being told this was what you had to do. And so I left. I got a copy from my dad actually of something called the sort code Handbook which was like an address book for banks with all the sort codes and the addresses written in it. And I wrote a load of letters to banks in London hoping that one of them would pick it up and bank of New York were the only one who got back to me. I'm not sure what that says about bank of New York but there we.

Go, we can talk about that later.

And so I joined bank of New York and this was 97. And so my job title had Clark in the title, which shows you what era it was. My job very broadly was a runner for the treasury back office. So I was absolutely terrified, I'll be honest, running into the dealing room to pick up the executed trade tickets, running back, putting it into a swift VDU to send off the swift message, doing the confirmations and the settlements. But it gave me a good grounding in the immediacy of it all the time criticality. If you make a mistake, you've got to own up to it, you've got to fix these things, whether things are agreed between you and a counterparty were really important. And even in my 19 year old sort of naivety, I recognize those things. What I would say is my friends who went to university had much more money than I did because they all got four or five thousand pound grants every year. And I was sat there for a little while wondering how I couldn't quite manage and my friends who were just studying seemed to have loads of money. So I did regret it for a little bit. Anyway, after that I spent a year at Lloyd's. This was my one and only dalliance with thinking I wanted to be an accountant. I was a trainee accountant for a year. I had my first exam booked and thought actually this isn't for me, I want to get back into more treasury like work. And that was where I ended up at Ernst and Young. Ernst and Young was for a couple of years really treasury fundamentals. Just learning the trade in quite a calm bit of a backwards environment compared to the treasury consultancy that you might expect from Ernst and Young. The internal treasury team was very much under resourced and stuck away in a quiet corner of the office. But I enjoyed my time there for sure. It was while I was at Ernst and Young that I was probably one of the first cohorts for the Certificate of Cash Management from the act. So my first journey of treasury qualifications, I think they or one of the attractions at the time, this probably shows I probably needed to go on vacation more. They sent us to a Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Peterborough for the residential and I thought that was a bit of an adventure. Things have changed a little bit, but yeah, so two years at EY and then I got a job which I thought at the time was going to be my dream job at Thomas Cook, given the amount of time I've spent in financial services since then, which you could say is a little bit, and I thought that was a bit of an adventure. Things have changed a little bit, but yeah, so two years at EY and then I got a job which I thought at the time was going to be my dream job at Thomas Cook, given the amount of time I've spent in financial services since then, which you could say is a little bit dull or a little bit harder to understand. Thomas Cook. We had airplanes, we bought jet fuel, we sold holidays. Every Friday we would get an email with the latest staff offers and discounts on holidays they had a really funky office in a converted warehouse. You didn't have to wear a suit to work, which was quite Unusual at the time, I thought it was fantastic. Really enjoyed my time there. Darwa a little bit harder to understand. Thomas Cook. We had aeroplanes, we bought jet fuel, we sold holidays. Every Friday we would get an email with the latest staff offers and discounts on holidays. They had a really funky office in a converted warehouse. You didn't have to wear a suit to work, which was quite unusual at the time. I thought it was fantastic. Really enjoyed my time there. Unfortunately, 911 occurred a year into my employment there. The bottom fell out of the tourism industry in the uk. Thomas Cook was eventually put up for sale. It was a great experience for me of watching how quickly cash can evaporate and the importance of cash flow forecasting. Ultimately, there was nothing we could do about it. We had to put ourselves. Unfortunately, 911 occurred a year into my employment. There was the bottom fell out of the tourism industry in the uk. Thomas Cook was eventually put up for sale. It was a great experience for me of watching how quickly cash can evaporate and the importance of cash flow forecasting. Ultimately, there was nothing we could do about it. We had to put ourselves up for sale. But watching the numbers slowly trickle down every single day, knowing that you've got nothing that you could do about it, the banks have withdrawn the revolving credit facility, etc. But watching the numbers slowly trickle down every single day, knowing that you've got nothing that you could do about it, the banks have withdrawn the revolving credit facility, etc. It was a good lesson in the importance of cash. So Thomas Cook made redundant. My first time I was made redundant, then I managed. It was a good lesson in the importance of cash. So my first foray into proper financial services, I spent 19 years at RSA and it's quite interesting to hear you both talk about the length of tenure at some of the companies you've worked at. It felt like to me, at the end of it, that I had to justify why I'd spent 19 years. Were you not ambitious? What was possibly going on there to make you want to stay there that long? And the answer is, some of it is, as Steve mentioned, financial services insurance is horrifically impenetrable and complicated from the outside. It takes a long time to come to grips with all of the subtleties, all of the regulations, all of the different bases on which we look at risk and manage Treasury. So it took a long time to get to grips with that. And I don't like doing things superficially. I like to truly understand what I'm doing. So that took a long Time, too. And I guess that was my kind of coming of age in treasury, if you like. I did all of the rest of my qualifications there. I made my way up from a Treasury dealer, so enjoying all the things that you've alluded to in terms of long lunches, et cetera, back when they were allowable. Treasury dealer, treasury manager. And then about 2014, my boss at the time was thinking he might retire and I was told I was in the succession plan for group treasurer. So fantastic opportunity for me. I had three or four years to build myself into that role, to learn everything I could from him, to sit in on every single meeting and. And really immerse myself, particularly in debt capital markets, which are quite unique for treasury companies in terms of the format of debt that we have to issue and dealing with the regulations. So that was a great opportunity for me and a great piece of luck, to be perfectly honest, and gave me my first shot at the group treasurer position, made redundant for the second time in my career because RSA got taken over by a Canadian B and C company. And that was how I ended up at Resolution Life. And Resolution Life, for a slightly unique entity, probably one of the bigger companies that I can guarantee no one's ever heard of. We're a privately owned company, which is quite unusual, but we have a valuation of about $8 billion, so that will put us somewhere in the bottom half of the FTSE 100. We've got a balance sheet of about $100 billion of assets. What we do, and this is where I'll lose most of the room, so I'll try and not spend too long on it. We're a life insurance company, but we don't sell new policies. We help life insurance companies grow by taking books of their old policies and either reinsuring them to us, so we take on the financial risks, the assets and the liabilities, or we buy the company. A bit like a portfolio transfer of life insurance policies. So we specialise in legacy portfolios and run off portfolios for life insurance. We're just starting to expand into other products which have a slightly new business element to them. But fundamentally we help life insurance companies grow because we free up their capital for new business and we take those risks onto our books and manage them in runoff, really. And so it's been hugely interesting, notionally, it's all insurance from the outside. RSA was a general insurer, a PNC insurer, so houses, cars, Resolution is a life insurer, so the liabilities are much longer, which means the assets are much longer. And you need more assets to back those liabilities, the balance sheets, really. And so it's been hugely interesting. Notionally, it's all insurance from the outside. RSA was a general insurer, a PNC insurer, so houses, cars, Resolution is a life insurer. So the liabilities are much longer, which means the assets are much longer, and you need more assets to back those liabilities. So the balance sheet's a lot bigger. Yeah, it's been an interesting journey.

So we're going to go through some of these, not some in different levels. So we've got in the audience.