Why Relationships are Key to Treasury Success with Ashish Advani

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 treasurers about how they built their careers, where they are now and where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next in this week's show. Delighted to be joined by Ashish Advani, the treasurer, global head of Tax, Trade enterprise Risk management at Ampere. Ampere is an American semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. They develop ARM based computer processes so they are fundamentally designing the future of hyperscale cloud computing. So you know when you're all seeing the cloud and everything else, these guys are the center of it. Now Ashish can explain that a little bit later in the show. I wanted to jump in to talk about him. He's got a great background, he's worked in 10 countries. Here we go, some numbers for you guys. I know you love them. Spread over four continents during two decades travels of his treasury career. Speaks eight languages, understands a few more. Just showing off there. It's amazing. Qualified accountant in several countries and also collected an MBA from Kansas, worked across the world. Global Treasurer Ashish, enough of extolling the virtues of you, let's go back to how you first ever started and your career to date and how you got started in finance and then came into Treasury. Talk us through your early career because it's amazing. Over to you sir.

Thank you very much, Mike. It's great to be on this show and I'd love to share my experiences to encourage young treasury professionals to emulate some of the things that I've been able to achieve when I started out. Nothing substitutes hard work. Hard work is where I started. I was doing my CPA in India along with my undergraduate degree and I was working 16, 17 hours a day just to get started in life to achieve my CPA diploma. And I wanted to be a top notch accountant. And as I was going through that, there seemed to be a strange vacuum in what I was achieving and that was this is all great, I'm going to be a cpa, I'm going to have a great career. But there was something missing and I was 19 years old at that point, so wasn't quite sure what was missing, but something within me said, this isn't it. Even though I haven't achieved it, this isn't it. So I went on, got my cpa, got started into, you know, a good firm, started my international travels. I've always wanted to be global in my perspective of what I'm able to achieve for the Companies I work for. So was able to really live my dream. And yet I recognize I need to add something to my back as an accountant. So back in 1988 and I'm dating myself when I say that I went and got an MBA when getting an MBA wasn't even in fashion to do, simply because I knew I was looking for something else. And you know, eventually as I matured in life, I realized what that something else was. I wanted to be dynamic. I wanted to be. My personality is I'm an extrovert. And accounting isn't necessarily everything that an extrovert would want for. In that reason I got an MBA and I realized that's what I was missing. So once I achieved the pinnacle of success in the accounting world, I wanted to move myself into an adjacent field and I wanted to get into Treasury.

And you say you wanted to get into Treasury. How would you heard about it or you just been exposed? Because a lot of people get a Treasury by accident, you know, sort of thing. So, you know, how did you hear or know of Treasury?

I had studied and you know, in the early 2000, treasury was a developing field. In the good old days there was the Finance department and there were multiple facets within the Finance department. But treasury was beginning to specialize. And I recognized, you know, what treasurers or what treasury does and that's, you know, being in a global company, it was more to do with foreign exchange. It was to do with banking regulations in multiple countries. It was to do with a field that was dynamic, that was changing. And over my career, as I've done financing in multiple countries in multiple parts of the world, the one thing I've realized is no two deals are the same. No solution is one size fits all. And in order to stay current, in order to get the best solution that's possible in that environment, you got to be flexible, you got to be dynamic. And that's exactly what I want it to be. So to me it became clear, you know, once I was comfortable with my, with my accounting background became clear that could be the natural next extension. Once I completed my CPA in India, I wanted to branch out and become global in my perspective and my work environment. So I moved to Oman and I was working Oman's in the Middle east and I was working for the Ministry of Commerce where I was looking after the accounting for the industrial parks for the which were owned by the Ministry of Commerce. And I grew in that role from a controller all the way to the cfo. It was a great job. I was at one point also impromptu advising the Minister of Commerce for tax strategies, which would attract investments into the country. And that's where I had my first exposure to tax after beginning to solidify my career in accounting. So moving on from there, I decided I wanted to move to the west, help my family grow in the Western culture. So I moved to Canada in 1999 and basically had my first opportunity there to work for a chemical, specialty chemical company. And I got my first break in treasury where I was the global treasurer for the company, which was spread out over multiple countries, all over the world. And I was able to design treasury strategies, you know, freed up the balance sheets of the individual subsidiaries if we ever needed to spin a company off, started working on multiple deals for financing in different countries. Each one was unique, each one had its challenges, but, you know, successfully completed that. And because of my prior exposure to the tax world, I took on an additional responsibility of being responsible for global taxation for the specialty chemical company. And I loved adding on more and more features and more and more facets to my, to my background so that I become more and more well versed. And I realized how entrenched tax and treasury can be. And I was very successful in implementing both sections of work that needed to get done.

You had some really interesting moves and people see this on your LinkedIn profile, but then you were through Western Union, Travelex and Royal Caribbean. Talk us through the moves that you made there.

Yeah, yeah. And that was very interesting. As I started getting more experienced in treasury, what I recognized was treasury is a lot about relationships, treasury is a lot about different strategies, different financial products that are employed to manage treasury risk or to achieve certain treasury results. And you know, from using derivatives, from using, you know, interest rate hedges and so on and so forth. And what I found missing in my background was I'm on the buy side. I'm looking at everything that as a customer, I'm buying from various vendors, but I don't know how the sell side works. Forgive me for saying, in order to become ruthless in execution, I wanted to see what the sell side does, how does the sell side operate, so that when I come back to the buy side, I know exactly what I'm buying, I know what price I'm buying it at, and I know how to implement those strategies.

So gamekeeper turn poacher turn gamekeeper again. So you knew exactly what you were doing.

Right, right. And so that's why I joined Western Union, who wanted me to develop the derivatives market for them and expand their derivatives offering to their Corporate clients. It was within treasury, but it was more from the sell side. And I actually had a sales force of 45 people that I was managing in the ability to place the derivative products and strategies for corporate clients and truly understand the mechanics, the financial aspects. And my background as a CPA helped in understanding the implications of these instruments on the books of the corporate clients and made sure that I holistically designed something that isn't just great works for treasury, but accountants have a problem with it. And I was able to be very successful at looking at the sell side of the treasury products. Did that for several years and it was exciting. Then I was approached by Royal Caribbean because I was living in the U.S. by that time I'd moved from Canada to the U.S. and Royal Caribbean was very attracted to my derivatives background because they have a massive derivatives portfolio of over 11 $12 billion, which is a combination of interest rate derivatives, foreign exchange derivatives, as well as commodity derivatives. Because Royal Caribbean, as you can imagine, buys a lot of fuel for their cruise ships. And to me, that was a great expansion. I was getting back to the buy side and I was looking at a huge portfol manage. So did that for a while and then the financial crisis hit and you know, at that time a lot of companies were undergoing changes. A lot of companies were looking at things differently to say, you know, this, their staffing isn't quite working right and they needed to respond to Wall street and the stock prices by cutting jobs and so on and so forth. Eventually, you know, I had to move because Royal Caribbean had announced they were going to lay off 50% of their corporate staff. I moved to Alaska and that was fascinating from a location point of view.

Yeah, bet.

And again, you know, my wife was absolutely livid with me for saying, like, you seriously think we can survive Alaska? And to me I was like, you know, it's an adventure. I consider life as an adventure. Did fantastic job for the native Alaskan corporation. Worked with them on an acquisition or two, worked with them on. They are in the business of government contracting. So unique challenges. Very interesting. Not much of foreign exchange there, but, you know, at some point you need to develop a lot of different skills. So I started working with government contracts and understanding a new aspect of treasury managing, you know, expense reports, managing cash flow, over 300 different government contracts. And how do you bill for that? How do you manage that? How do you collect your cash? And a whole different skill set. But that was, that was fun. One day I decided I had to move and it's an interesting Story My older daughter, who was in middle school in those days, was walking to her school and came across face to face with a baby bear. And it was very frightening, it was very scary. And that's when my wife said, you know what, enough with your adventure. We gotta move back to where we don't find bears on the street.

Yeah, the bear came after you.

So it was like, what at that point, you know. And also things were calming down. There were a lot more opportunities available in the normal world, if you want to call it that. And so, you know, much that I loved Alaska for its natural beauty. Time to get back. And I was hired away by swm, which is based in Georgia, in Atlanta, Georgia. Again, I was the global treasurer as well as head of global taxation for them. They manufacture paper for the cigarette industry and then they diversified into filtration material. And again, fantastic opportunity. Did great work for them. Doing the same thing I did for the chemical company in the good old days and managed their treasury risk, achieved 4M and A deals for them, increased refinanced each time we did that and increased their portfolio of offerings into the treasury market. Whether it be high yield debt, whether it be bank financing and whatever was needed. Again, each deal was unique and circumstances were different. So the key was going to be make sure that the company achieves what they need to at the best possible execution at that time. From there on then I moved to Aflac Insurance company, highly regulated market. They have three books. They have one book for the regulators which measure their statistics differently. They have one book for US gaap and then they have one book which is based on how the international gap needs to be. Because like many insurance companies, they were international and they had to raise financing in multiple jurisdictions. So you had to have the right set of financial statistics in order to go list your offerings in the public debt market, all over, wherever the need be. It was a shorter stint there. Things had changed at Aflac, so it was time to move on. And I am now working for Ampere Computing. Great opportunity for an exciting company here.

Tell us about Ampere again, perhaps with a description that's a more consumer friendly ampere. I said hyperscale cloud computing. People are listening to, they're going, what.

Is, in simple terms, Ampere designs and markets semiconductor chips. And semiconductor chips are like the CPU in a computer. And so the semiconductor chip will assist the computer in operating and carrying out the functions that it needs to. However, we focus only on the server markets. We don't do personal computers, we don't produce semiconductor Chips for cell phones and other electronic equipments, we focus only on the serv and within the server markets, we are also looking at servers that are corresponding to high speed computing. We are participating in the growth of what we would call cloud computing. So everything that's going into the cloud uses high end servers that need to have massive computing power. And our semiconductor chips go into those servers and assist. Let's say if you're playing a game on your cell phone, it's actually being played on a server somewhere and it's connecting the cell phone to that server. And the exchange rate at which your data moves back and forth is really what drives the experience for the consumer when he's playing the game on the cell phone. So you can imagine how quick the server needs to be in order to capture your move on your phone, react to that in the game and then send that data back to you within microseconds.

You basically are the enabler of all these people playing Candy Crush and wasting their lives. But in a good way. I'm saying this in a good way.

So it means that our servers also are very useful besides just playing games.

Don't worry. I know, I know, but that's how we come down to the consumer and, you know, and, and people, we take this for granted. Of course we do, you know, because it's, it's part of our new culture. And I did a panel discussion with the UK association of Treasurers and Jayesh, he, Jayesh Irani, he did a great bit where he said, you know, children now are growing up and they have only ever had devices in their lives from day one, you know, you and I started, there weren't devices, you know, stuff and you know, in some of the things he listed that, you know, when the dates came out and then the dates of the children that, you know, were related to it was totally true, so. That's exactly right. You're used to this because it's the norm is what you should, you know, it's what you expect. But let's take that into treasury terms and just ask how does that industry, you know, operate for you as treasurer? You know, you've got a Treasury team, what pressures did place. So you cash rich, money's coming in, it's easy, you just sit back, you, you put your feet up as the treasurer, you have another cup of coffee. Yeah, here goes. Another hundred thousand in the bank. That's lovely. Well, what are the challenges that you find for treasury globally? You know, again, for people listening today, the challenge for.

And again, you Know Ampere is still more in a startup phase, so we are in the process of expanding into, into production. So I will enjoy the luxuries of having a lot of cash at some point in the future. Right now, you know, nose to the wheel, driving away, making sure that we have all the funding we need in order to develop these cutting edge new products. Want to make sure that we are offering the absolute cutting edge technology to our customers and that takes money. And my role is to make sure that we have sufficient funding and it's in the right place in the right country when it's needed to ensure that our operations run smoothly and for that being relevant to large banks and making sure they understand the story, they understand the attractiveness of why they should lend to us or why we should be participating or why they should be participating in our growth story is an important facet at this stage.

So as a relatively young startup company, and you talked about that sort of phase of the growth, how have you managed to get through the crisis and come out the other side? What's been the key things for you guys?

Like most treasury departments, whether it be a mature company or a young startup, you have limited resources and you need to get, get more done with less. The traditional mantra to get things done. I hobbled together my treasury requirements. Working with the regional finance teams where the resources are shared with the accounting and finance team jointly and I travel quite a bit, I go to the locations. I'm not the kind of guy who would sit back in his ivy tower and get things and just know, get things done, but I make sure I'm present and you know, it has had tremendous responses when I've traveled. Oftentimes you will discover opportunities within treasury when you're on the ground at the locations. Let me give you an example. When we have an operations in China and while it's not been for Ampere, but when I work with China in the past, there are opportunities to invest cash, there are opportunities to borrow cash for the Chinese operations which may not necessarily be evident if you're a treasurer sitting in the US trying to figure out a traditional approach of let's say investing cash. And one example is you can go do your traditional cash investing and earn very little yield on your cash given that everyone's in a low yield environment or the one thing I discovered as an opportunity back in the day when I did that was if you employed a strategy where you had a no touch derivative attached to your investment, you could get a much higher yield. And I'm talking About if you did a US dollar traditional three month investment, you were looking at 0.8% but if you attached a no touch derivative to it, you could earn as much as 3.5% without taking any significant risk to your cash. But that was an opportunity I discovered when I'm sitting there with the local bankers talking through the state of the markets. That wasn't something I could dream up off when I was sitting in my US office.

Yeah, you're sitting with them face to face. So I've been talking to people about this, about this new way of working, the new norm and people say are people coming back to the office or they're not? And I've said look for interview processes for an example. I've said that what I'm seeing and hearing and I'm talking to clients is they're doing the first, maybe second round on Zoom. Great way of saving time resource. You know, you don't have to get someone dragging out there, you know that you're getting to know the people seeing technically, technically tick, tick, tick. But actually the second or third round, sometimes fourth, you know, depending if you get to know people and more senior and things, it's a more face to face or that we're still, we're going to move back to that socially distanced coffee or whatever. But it's actually to see them face to face and see, you know, is there a connection on a personal level now with Ampere and you're getting out around the world, are you finding what do you think for the future? What do you think is going to happen? You're a very interpersonal guy. I know this, we get on really well. What do you think is going to happen going forward?

Sort of thing, specifically staying with the treasury world. Over the last 20 years that I've been in treasury, the one thing that's become very clear is treasury is more of a people relationship environment. Yes, there are platforms, there are management of treasury derivatives, there are structures that you can manage. But a lot of treasury is still very relationship based and relationships are deeper and well developed when you are face to face. So, you know, I haven't traveled for over six months at this point. But you know, at some point I believe once we have, you know, vaccines or the world goes back to somewhat of a normal environment where people are either back at work or a hybrid model, treasury will have to go back to a little bit more of a personal relationship. As you rightly said, Zoom calls work great. But at some point you need to press the flesh, meet people and get things done in a more efficient fashion.

Funny again, just reflecting on that there. Zoom is about probably the facts and the hard data, if you like, and, and everything else. And actually you only get the softer feelings and, you know, because we're all human, allegedly, we're all people. And actually that sort of softer getting to know people on a social level, that's probably what is missing from those things, from the impersonal zooms and things. But exactly as you say, you've got that and you combine that when you get that example about China, treasury is about so much more. It's about the relationships. And again, we're saying we're going back to it, da, da, da. But I think actually I'm starting to notice, you know, I used to do Thursday drinks with everyone and try and catch up over coffees and the beers and sociable, because all treasury guys I know, yourself included, are sociable people. And we get on well. But, you know, it's been weird that sort of, as we've kicked off September and, you know, we'll move into October, at first people are still, but actually now I'm noticing people are not craving attention, but they're going, yeah, actually, I would like to meet up Mike, and it might not be next week, it might be two, three weeks time. They're going to plan it a bit differently. But people want to meet, you know, people want to use hand sanitizer but shake your hand, they want to bang elbows and things. And I think that's a key fundamental with Treasury. Exactly as you say, Ash. It's about relationships. And that's really got you a long way with your career, wouldn't you say?

Absolutely, absolutely. Some of the best work that I've done in treasury or in Tax has been because of. Of the knowledge that I've developed as I've met people, as I've understood, different cultures, different environments, different market conditions. And that's not something you can sit and learn either in a classroom or by phone calls. Many of my holistic approaches have been designed around, you know, casual conversations where, incidentally, you know, aspects of markets have come up where, you know, I've realized, hey, I could use some of that. It wasn't a planned discussion, it wasn't something that we formally explored, but came out of, you know, conversations. And those have been the best and most successful for me.

No, we're approaching later on the show, there's been some really good, interesting bits about your career. I mean, we'll put your LinkedIn profile in the show. Notes and people can connect to you. And usually I just ask for your last three tips. And we talked about this before the show, but make it a bit wider than that. Are there any particular areas, Ashish, that you think wider than your three tips? Before we get into those, what advice would you give to the listeners today? And we get listeners that are more junior in their career, treasury managers, analysts and things, and wanting to hear how you got there up to the top. And then we also get some other treasurers who want to hear some of your war stories and things. So before we move into your three tips, there any areas that you think are fundamental at the moment or that people should be thinking about in this post Covid or as we move to Post Covid world, I think it was great. As you said, there'll be vaccines and we'll get back to normal next year. But just in general terms, what are your thoughts on the treasury market, you know, globally sort of thing?

The one advice I would give all the listeners, whether they are young and upcoming in the treasury world, or someone who's achieved great success and they would agree with me, is the one thing that, that people in treasury need to embrace with an open heart is the ability to be flexible. And what I mean by that is adapt to market conditions, whether it be Covid and therefore not meeting people, or whether it be the Chinese market, you talk, the US markets, no two solutions are going to look exactly the same, but we need to embrace that rather than consider that as a challenge, saying every time we need to break the mold and come up with something new. That's just the DNA of success in treasury is thinking outside the box, thinking of what could be done given the circumstances you're in. And while you have the wisdom of your previous deals, you should always look for opportunities on how you can even improve on a great deal, which was excellent for last year, but next year could be something different.

I think a lot of modern treasuries, as I reflect, I think they've got that, their background. But perhaps again, you know, post Covid people. Oh, you know, can go back to being not inflexible. That's the wrong way to say it, but you've got to keep embracing this or keep moving forward because, you know, this is a brand new world now. You know, the more flexible you can do this, the only way you're going to achieve it, isn't it? Success.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just, you know, thinking further about, you know, three tips that I would give, you know, the younger, younger generation is don't be afraid to travel again. I'm not saying travel now during COVID but at some point we will be over this. Don't be afraid to travel. Learn and learn and learn. Always be ready to learn, read, study the markets, understand why. Take the time to do your research. And the last thing that I think would apply to all of us is always remain optimistic. Don't let a challenge put you down again. You know, I live my life according to the boxing world and in the boxing world, you know, defeat isn't called when you're knocked down. Defeat is called when you refuse to get up. Yes, you can always be knocked down. But if you don't decide this is a problem that cannot be solved, that's when you're defeated. Yeah, every problem has a solution. Keep an open mind and go forth and conquer the world.

Awesome advice there from Ashish Advani. Again, we'll put Ash's details in the his LinkedIn profile in the show notes so you guys can connect to him. Yeah, great fun, great, great conversation as always. Really enjoyed it. Thank you, sir. It's been great. And again, hopefully this will help your network and build that professional network. Not that you don't need it, but, you know, just in case, it'd be good for you to connect to a few more great people. And thank you for your time today. You've been an absolute superstar as ways.

Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you for the opportunity to allow me to share my story and hopefully it will, you know, it'll be an inspiration for, for younger generations to, to really become successful in Treasury.

Yeah. And hopefully though I know that you and I both, you know, speak on different stages and AFP and various treasury stages, so hopefully people will get to see some more of some of the things you've done in the future. So, yeah, look forward to it, sir.

Great. Thank you so much, Mike.

Thank you.