Treasury Career Corner LIVE in Texas with Tamara Saront-Eiser and Fred Schacknies

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. I hope you listened to last week's.

Show where we had a Kyriba Live.

In Vegas with three amazing treasury professionals. This week we head off to text boat in Houston. It was amazing. Met with Tamara and Fred. You're going to get a great podcast.

Front of the room.

And again we got another great one.

Next week in London and then we've got the follow up with Windy City Summit in Chicago.

So enjoy this week's show and looking.

Forward to the next few weeks as well.

Good afternoon, Houston.

Oh, we are awake.

Thank goodness for that. So welcome to this afternoon's Treasury Career Corner Live. We've got an amazing panel for you. You see them here? Well, see them sitting here, but you'll see them big on the screen in a moment. Go through the structure of this afternoon's session. First of all, we have a few house rules. You're all very busy and I'm not picking on you. But you will see in a minute. Anyone with a phone, you've made the trip here. I've come a few thousand miles to do it. So stick your phones on silent, put them away, give yourself an hour for your careers because you've got two amazing panelists and a crazy English recruiter.

Sorry about that.

So who am I? Someone who can't pick up a microphone. So I'm Mike Richards. Sorry about the big head, but you can't have everything. So I've been a Treasury recruiter for 25 years. I recruit all levels from Treasury Analyst.

To Global Treasurer globally.

That literally is West Coast. So last week was in Vegas for Kyriba Live. Yeah, didn't go to the slots. Don't worry, my risk management's better than that. But good conference the Treasury Career called Alive. We're doing it this week and then do it on Thursday back in London. How did I come about doing this? That's the team. They're a lot prettier than me and less big heads. So I started a podcast back before COVID and these are two amazing of my amazing guests of mine. So I thought let's talk to some treasurers about their treasure careers. I thought we'd do 10 episodes. We're now at 320. Yes, it's on those little known platforms called Apple, it's on Spotify. Everyone was asking me last week, 320 episodes, 150,000 downloads. Some of the best treasurers you'll get to meet. And we talk about their treasure careers, how they started, just like many of you here, the choices they made and then they talk about some of the.

Issues they see coming with Treasury.

That's exactly what we've got here with Tamara and Fred. We're going to talk through their careers, some of the choices they've made. And as Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues. So try and pick up some clues from these very successful treasurers. This is how we're going to do it. They're both going to introduce themselves. I'll then quiz them a little bit more. There will be Q and A later on about 10, 15 minutes from the.

End and then we'll give you some takeaways.

So without further ado, I'll let my first guest Tamara, explain who she is and what she does over to you.

It's a pleasure for me to be here sharing my career with you all. So I started my career as a really corporate finance analyst. I first did some FP&A. I did my post graduation in the UK. I'm originally from Argentina, that's where I was born and raised. I did my postgrad abroad, Argentina. Came back and I started working in a very, very large company and from day one, and I cannot thank you enough, my manager at the time and mentor, but she exposed me to very senior management from the very beginning. I work in capital markets, long term financing, structured finance, hedging and I really enjoyed and with that company I came to the US essentially as a CFO of our subsidiaries. Here the companies grew. I was doing with as a CFO, investor relations, project financing, CFO, implementing ERPs, overseeing and that was the ERP systems. It was a real stretch. Our company was a European company, oil and gas company headquartered in Europe. So it was a stretch from every angle that, that you can imagine. And I again cannot thank for that opportunity to the group CFO that promoted to that role. As the role and the companies and the businesses here expanded, I became the regional treasurer and I continued growing, setting up, I mean a trading floor, natural gas trading floor, power trading floor, which was really very, very interesting. I then moved to Elikid, which is my current employer. And with them I grew geographically, I overseas I'm the regional Treasurer and the VP of M& A. So I oversee both functions for all of the Americas, which means from Canada to Argentina, 11 countries. The Americas hubs represent around 40% of the group revenue, the US 38%. And in that journey we did career implementations, very large integrations of treasury integration, change management. And now two years ago I was promoted to also oversee M and A, which is finance, but more business like. And I'm enjoying it very, very much so. Really looking forward to the conversation and to Fred and really to your questions as well.

Fred, over to you. Fred, over to you.

Brilliant, Fred Shackney. It's nice to be here with you all. My treasury career started in high school. I was the class treasurer of my sophomore year in high school. I don't think I knew what treasurer meant at the time, but my good friend was running for president. He said, you should run for something. I said, what's left, there's treasures left. So I in, in college I was interested in economics, not because I knew what economics was prior to taking economics class, but it seemed kind of nice. I liked the graphs, the charts and all of that and it seemed cool. So I knew I wanted to go into finance, economics, markets. I had an international background which led me to a bank trading floor overseas. And so I spent the first five years of my career in a trading room and a couple of years trading Spot fx, which was exciting, like bids and asks and you know, all day all along, but kind of monolithic, kind of narrow in scope. And I also spent two years on corporate sales, so talking with treasurers and I thought it was really interesting all the different things that they were doing. And so that prompted my interest in kind of moving from the banking world to the practitioner world. And so after graduate school, mba, I shifted over into corporate treasury and I worked for various companies and different industries. Lucent Technologies, formerly Bell Labs, then Alcatel, now Nokia, and was there for kind of the top and the bottom of the roller coaster and lived through another roller coaster, another company, another industry. Constellation Energy went to Hilton after that and spent 11 years there. And it was a fantastic stretch of time which ended rather abruptly with COVID and now with Technip. FMC here in Houston. So I've never gotten, I would say, any level of depth in, in this, in the industry knowledge of any company that I've been a part of, you should say like for 11 years, you should know something. But I bounced around industries a lot, however, and that has its positives and negatives. I thankfully have seen companies that are private and public companies that are high yield and investment grade companies that are going through M&As and going through spinoffs. And so coming away from all of that, I take away that the fundamentals across the treasury principles across all these companies is exactly the same. Also, every company that I've ever worked for has the exact same snowflake syndrome of thinking we are so unique, no one else can possibly have the challenges we have. And what I also have taken away is that the. Well, if I look at my career in context of going from sort of trading floor to Treasury, I went into the trading floor because I didn't want to have to deal with people. I just, I am an introvert. I like numbers. I wanted to only work at numbers. And I realized that like, you can get some success out of just learning how to manage positions, data, numbers. It took about three, four, five years to realize that just managing the results wasn't going to get you everywhere. I had to understand the process, what was upstream and downstream, how to manage the information flow and how to optimize all of that. And if you do that, you can kind of like every, you know, carry everyone up and down with you. And that worked out kind of nicely for a couple years as well. And then I realized eventually that that's only getting you so far as well. And that to really succeed in this game is about managing people. And that's. It took me a while to appreciate the importance of communication and the importance of culture and all the other things that kind of make for a successful team. And that's kind of where I've kind of come full circle in realizing, like, I don't want to spend my time looking at numbers and spreadsheets. I'd rather, you know, but I'd much rather have the opportunity to kind of like give others that opportunity and bring the team together.

So I'm going to say both of you heavily involved in AFP and education. We're going to just explore that. But before we do that, I wanted to come back to something you said, Fred, because I know that you did this when we spoke on the podcast and then I'll pass it to tomorrow as well. You said you bounce through industries, you know, and some of the people in this room will go, is it time for me to make a move? Should I go somewhere different or should I see out a role a bit longer? I know you've made those move quite deliberately in a positive way throughout your career. How would you, what recommendations would you give to the people in this room? And then we'll ask tomorrow?

Yeah, absolutely. Do it. I mean, it's literally not that hard at all to shift from a Treasury job in one industry company to another. Again, the rules, the fundamentals of the principles of managing cash and debt and liquidity and risk are all exactly the same. They've been the same for hundreds of years and they will remain the same. You just need to under, you need to go into it understanding how to, how to appreciate the circumstantial differences. Is it a B2B or a B2C type of a business model as well as is it a high yield or investment grade balance sheet that affects how you think about managing liquidity? So understanding the circumstances is the key. But when you can, when you can, when you can understand that you can apply the exact same set of rules.

Same, I think, I mean, if you have the opportunity to bounce industries, and this is one of the beauties of Treasury, I mean, you need to understand the underlying of the industry. But you know, we are agnostics in terms of how we manage cash, how we have visibility over cash, what we streamline working capital, how we issue a bond. I mean really the process and the expertise is the same. The underlying business will be different. But that's, and that's what you need to learn, I mean, how to grasp that underlying industries. And then there are easier move. I mean, if you are in oil and gas, petrochemical is not that different. I move from oil and gas in general to oil and gas upstream to then, you know, industrial gases to understand the cycle. I mean, it's capital intensive. If you go to petrochemicals or chemicals, it's not that different. So, so that's the beauty of treasury. Absolutely bouncing. It's great.

And if I can add one other thing on the back of that is that's the upside is it's, it's, it's not that hard. The downside is you still at some point need to understand the business and if you've grown up in that industry, that can be a lot easier. It's, I still wouldn't go so far as to say that I am an expert in what technip FMC does I still have a lot to learn. It's highly complex and the markets are complex. But the other as a strategy for coping with that, you have so not only, you know, note yourself but surround yourself with people, people who do. And so as one example, my assistant treasurer came in from FP&A and from financial Operations and he has spent his entire career in the company and the industry and he does have that knowledge. So and yet he's coming in treasury fresh. So it's a sort of a complimentary skill set.

And just on that about we talked thereabouts, we've got a room full of people who are getting CTP credits for coming along here. I know you're both very pro afp. You've been on the board, you are on the board and everything else. Looking back at your younger selves, obviously a couple of days ago, not very longer, but joking aside, your successful treasurers and that this is all very well for you guys to say. Well, your treasurers. Yeah, pro ctp, pro study, education, qualifications. I'll go tomorrow first and then Fred, you know, why do you think so powerful with maybe your more junior members.

Of your teams as well?

I am very much pro ctp. I took it when I just arrived to the us it was a way also to certify my knowledge here and besides getting to know people and to network. But in the universities, in the school there is not a Treasury. So really, I mean CTP in this case, it is a way to get more hands on really the technical knowledge. So I think it is important. I think I did my career very conscious of the north that I wanted to have and it was a very much vertical specializing, specializing and getting seniority in that today I might say move around, get out of Treasury. Treasury can be very highly dependent. You want to be in treasury first and you stay in treasury for all your life. But I think that kind of moving around, getting into sales, getting into FP and A for example, it's really good, you know, having the north and coming back to treasury or moving around. I think it adds to the wealth of your treasurer profile.

Yeah, also very much pro ctp. I will admit that I took the CTP myself after joining the board of the AFP and I was sort of nudged and saying hey, you probably should should look into taking this. And I did. And through a misfortune of bad planning, I had about two days to cram to take this thing, which just a bad planning on my part. But what I look, I learned from it is there was A What we.

Will say, Fred, is we're not recommending.

That to the room.

Yes, that's a, that's, that's not a recommended strategy. Yes, definitely do not do that. Thank you for the clarification. The. But what? But I learned there's a hell of a lot I didn't know I had spent at that point, I don't know, 20 something years in treasury myself. And there was a lot that I'd never even heard of before, frankly. And there's a. One of the big advantages of learning is learning what you don't know. And you don't have to know everything, you don't have to be an expert in all aspects of training treasury, but the more that you know about, you know, what kind of questions to ask and to be aware of and to go to someone who does have the expertise is very, very essential in terms of being able to rise up the ladder.

And I think for recruiting as well, I mean, I, you know, somebody. I'm looking into, treasury, somebody that has the certification to me, you know, it's a differentiator.

Yeah. Up on the list here, we've got from education, what's been key to your success? Mistakes, challenges. One of the key things. Not an advertorial, but for the podcast. Someone asked me the other day, they said, look, you interview, you know, you were going to do 10 episodes, you're on 320. How do you keep it fresh? And I said, I don't need to, you guys, as treasurers do, because each of you. And we were. I was at Euro Finance a couple of years ago and someone said, well, how do you. I said, look, we've got 10 treasurers within 10ft of me. Oh, yeah. I said, they're all the same, right? Well, no.

So no.

Said, one's debt laid and one's cash rich. One's a private company, one's a different. And you've all taken different routes to success as it is. Now, I'll come to Fred first and then through Tamara, looking back over your careers, any points that you would, you know, bring up that you think that this audience, you know, maybe mistakes you made or things you wouldn't want to repeat again, and maybe recommendations you've given to your team.

Fred, first, me, the one thing I would not recommend from my own past is being as. As sort of narrowly planted as I have been. So, So I started out, I mentioned, on a trading floor. I have never, with the exception of maybe a year, not had some association with foreign exchange. I would recommend to Anybody, at any stage in their career, bounce around back and forth, you know, spend a year or two here and then there and then there. Learn enough that you can speak with some authority on it. But I would recommend, unless you're super dedicated to it, don't get planted into one single thing.

Over to you, Tamara.

A little bit the same. A little bit. What I said I would recommend to move around, even get out of the functions. And the earliest you do it in your career, the less costly it is. If you made a mistake, you know, to move to another function. When you are a senior manager or an assistant treasurer and you cannot handle it or you don't like it, I mean, to come back, it might be more difficult instead, I mean, when you are starting your career, really, you can move, understand, understand. I mean, get connected and then bring all of that to your treasury career. I walk it through. Like, I mean, okay, you have to be analyst, manager, director, vp. That career trend, I think in today's world is less usual. You don't want to be just identified that you can only do treasury and then you cannot move and you are locked in. And the treasury profession is smaller, so it's getting really, really tight. So you need to find a way. You need to show your companies that you have the flexibility to handle different problems from different angles.

And if I could add one other point to that is there's something to be said for knowing a little bit about different functions. I think there's also something to be said for being able to operate in different types of teams and for different leaders and overseeing different teams, as I'm sure many of you, I have worked for people who knew how to do my job better than me and who didn't, had never done my job, and likewise have had peers and teams with different levels. And being able to adapt to those different environments is. Is. Is very key because as a matter of career progression, sooner or later you're going to be in charge of stuff that you've never done before, never heard of before. And having that ability to react and flex to. To oversee somebody who's done something that you've never done before and be able to add some value to what they do is an important skill.

Thank you. I could come to Tamara about this. We've talked about you've embedded your treasury team members across different regions. We actually have one of your. Please, Vivian, here today. I know we talked about this on the podcast as well. How have you made that work? And again, this might be any of the treasury people here, practitioners Thinking, oh, should I put my hand up for that move?

What should I do?

Should I be open to it? What would you recommend? And then again we'll go to Fred after.

And I think, I mean nowadays with all shared service centers being located in different geographies, it's something that it will happen. I mean the matter is when being able to work with your team all located in one place and directed what is going to happen if you're working on a global company or even if you are in the US that it's becoming more difficult. So on one end it was a global initiative to create the shared service centers. But I took it to the point I took the opportunity to go even further than what the company was really looking for. And we generated essentially two different teams. One center of excellence, more for advisory corporate finance matters. And we have our Pure Cash management is located now in Argentina. The teams are now in Colombia, in Argentina, in the U.S. certainly. And you have to manage that. It's interesting, it's exhilarating. It's very challenging because obviously you are adding to cultural differences. I don't think that anybody here working in the US Will have a challenge necessarily to do that. But obviously you need patience, you need to communication To Fred's earliest part point, communication is essential and misunderstanding are more frequent. But I think that setting and guiding, setting the goals, guiding the conversation, setting the level of expectations so everybody really can be up to that is the same whether you are working with one team located in one geography or you have your team spread out. Fred?

Yeah, we have a very geographically dispersed team in 12 or so locations in just the treasury piece and is part of the evolution that we're going through right now. And as a takeaway and every treasurer I've been in has had some level of that, but as a general takeaway, I would say your people largely are going to be where they are. That's the decentralized piece. Your financial positions, your money, your debt needs to be as centralized as you possibly can be for a financial efficiency. What holds all that together is your information and your data. Your information has to be ubiquitous, global, you know, omnipresent all the time so that everybody knows what's going on all the time. And that's just a system problem to solve. What we are doing in right now is going. So we're coming from a very decentralized approach to a. What we're evolving towards is really five global functional themes. Capital, liquidity, financial market, risk, credit, insurance and infrastructure. And so the end state is that We've got people, all different countries who need to be able to act globally. And that presents, as you all know, a bunch of challenges. So policy is the easy thing to fix. Then you've got legal entity authorizations to map through. Then you've got tax substance presence questions to sort out as well, as well as just kind of what you can do with one banking environment or another. So there's, there's, there's a lot of complexity to that puzzle. But the goal is to get to an environment in which you can operate globally. I mean it's, it's kind of suffice to say it's not a scalable model to have every, everything fully decent, centralized at the country level, nor is it efficient or nor is it in the benefit of everybody's career interest as well. So we're trying to build something that's better for our employees and that more career opportunities to kind of act on a global basis and get involved in stuff. But there is a lot of tax, legal, government, you know, regulatory puzzles to figure out on the way.

So you are both treasury leaders, but who has had an impact on you? Again, we'll go to tomorrow. First I've again I had Karen van der Drisha, amazing treasurer over in Belgium. Many years ago she said to me we're going to have it back on the podcast about having a mentor. Now for her it was one of her ex bosses and the thing that she loved about it was her words, not mine. She could be crazy. She can come up with what felt like a crazy idea but in a safe environment. And it was, you know, I remember doing that podcast and just thinking, wow, this is great. That's one of the things she found with having a mentor. She could then rehearse different things. She come up with crazy, what seemed like crazy ideas, but actually underneath that they weren't stupid ideas. They were just like if we were to do this, you know, we've got AI coming along lots of different things. Have you had that experience yourself? And maybe then also the second part of that and you as mentors. So maybe reflect on both, you know, split it up maybe.

So my mentors from my first manager that she did it without really explicitly understanding or really saying, you know, this is something important for your career. But she, she really realized that I have the technical expertise, I come in young, it was a company that was just privatized. So she came from the old state owned environment, I came fresh from, you know, college, etc. So we have a good blend and she could really read the tea leaves of the changing times. At that time, my former bosses, most of them, have been my mentors and they have pushed me to come here. And I reach out to them, even if they are in Argentina or in Spain. I sometimes, I mean, keep in touch with them. So I have been able to find mentors in my current working company.