Weathering Challenges in your Treasury Career with Christopher Corner

With ge. Sorry. From a career point of view, the role of Insurance Solutions was interesting because it was a startup treasury team. It was going to be my first opportunity to have managerial experience. But I also wanted to then think, well, when that role comes to its natural end, your nge, you can work in pretty much any business, in pretty much any sector, in pretty much any country that you want in the world. And so that was really a big part of my decision to move to ge. Of course, what ultimately happened with the acquisition by Swiss Re. The moment that acquisition was announced, employees are prevented from talking to GE about any other roles because they want to retain the talent. So, again, I've been there four years. I was beginning to get a little bit restless and think about the next role, and all of a sudden that avenue was closed off to me, which was a little bit unfortunate. But again, as you say, coming on to my subsequent moves, at that point, it was a question of, well, I need to change company, because I didn't want to be, as I said, I'm an Insurance treasury specialist. I wanted to get out and see another sector. Having been in all these companies that were great businesses, but frankly, they were the more comfortable end of the credit spectrum. You had banks saying, would you like to borrow some money? How much would you like to borrow? It was relatively straightforward from a credit perspective, to then go in somewhere like Thomas Cook, where you really had to fight every last pound that you were getting from the banks. Really tough negotiations around terms on those deals that you were doing. Yeah, that was going to be a complete shift for me and one that I thought would really fill out my cv, because you're going from, as I say, sort of a very comfortable end of the credit spectrum to something that is right on the other, right on the other end. And for the first few years, and I was there, it was just short of five years before the business went under, but we were making progress. It was slower than we wanted, but it was going the right way. And it was only then, summer last year, summer 2018, that things started to unravel. But we'd had a number of years of making some good progress in that business, making the best of whatever role that you're in, whatever situation that you're in. Again, we've touched on some of the issues I've had to face during my career, where my company's been acquired, we've had a restructuring, I've gone insolvent. None of these things I obviously choose to happen, but actually the fact that they did all happen has made me a better treasury professional. And so when there's a situation that's perhaps going a different way to what you wanted, embrace it, see the opportunities in that. It might not be ideal, it might mean that you need to change your approach and move on quickly, more quickly than you'd otherwise have expected to, but you can find the positive in anything. And I think, again, treasury is an area you're not going to have the benefit of just going in and rolling along very comfortably day after day after day. You need to be embracing whatever change is going on around you, these challenges. And I'm going back here, if we go back 10 years, to the global financial crisis and everything that followed from that, with recession, credit crunch, Eurozone crisis, Brexit, Brexit, subsequently, all of these things at the start of my career were almost unimaginable. And yet nowadays we don't necessarily know what's going to be the next one next year. But there is always something new going on. And I think it is about making sure that as a business treasurers, as the risk managers of a business, are thinking that far ahead, thinking about what could be happening further down the line, and perhaps not trying to pretend they've got a crystal ball, but making sure that whatever happens further down the line, because something will, because it has been every year for the last 10, 12 years, we are in a position to be able to deal with that. And again, from a Thomas Cook perspective, we were always aware that we didn't have the level of committed funding that we wanted. It wasn't that we got caught out when things started to unravel, but we just hadn't been able to get to the point where we got all that funding committed. We hadn't got a sufficiently strong credit rating to attract sufficient investment in the business on a committed basis. But we were constantly trying to get there and in the end, we weren't able to get there quickly enough.