Why Treasury and Tax Must Work Together, Not Stay Siloed

In this week's podcast, you're going to hear from Rob Westreich from Newell Brands. Rob explains why in treasury you can't afford to get things wrong, if you like, or make a mistake. Hang on, have a listen.

My experience, because we have a very large AI initiative in our company.

Yeah.

It's being led from the CEO. And I think that at the executive level, they have great expectations for productivity opportunities. With AI, not doing the work to understand how you exactly apply it in a particular situation. And what we've noticed is that in our world, AI is amazing in places like marketing and customer service and, and those places where it's a little more, uh, the challenge is in taking, saying the financing. And what does that mean? In the finance area, particularly in treasury and tax as well, and frankly all of it, in my opinion, you cannot be wrong. You're dealing with the company's money, you're dealing with the company's capital, and you can't be wrong because your error can cost the company, depending on the size of the company, millions and millions of, of, of dollars, euro, whatever. And if you do that and you're not, um, responsible enough to understand what the output is, then frankly you should be in that position. Yeah, it's just like when someone puts together a presentation and they hand it to you for review, it should be near than done, right? And I shouldn't have to tell you I don't like the font and, you know, and all this other thing. But again, the same thing with AI. It's a matter of you have to understand what your level of risk is with AI. If you want to create an agent that says, okay, uh, do my cash forecast But there's cash forecasting can be the 12-month rolling forecast, which you don't have to be particularly right on 'cause you don't really know the answer. But the 1-day to 30-day you have to be precise on because that's how you're managing your short-term cash. So can you afford to not be responsible for the results in the 1 to 30 cash forecast? The other thing about AI is that particularly in the finance space is that it's a productivity enhancement tool.

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've built 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. In this week's show, delighted to be joined by Rob Westreich, the Senior Vice President, Treasurer, and Chief Tax Officer of Newell Brands, where he leads the company's global tax, treasury, and global business services organizations. Newell Brands is a leading consumer products company with a portfolio of iconic brands including Rayco, I think I say it, Coleman, Oster, Rubbermaid, Sharpie, and 24,000 talented employees around the world. They're focused on delighting consumers by lighting up everyday moments. There you go. But we're gonna go right back to the beginning, how Rob first started started his career, how you then discovered the world of Treasury, because I know you were over in tax and things. Rob, I hand the microphone over to you, sir. Take us back to the distant past.

Over to you. Great, thanks Mike, and thanks for inviting me to the podcast. Um, thank you, appreciate, uh, having the conversation. Um, you know, funny enough, I've been a treasurer now for, oh gosh, easily close to 20 years, but I didn't start out this way when I started my career back. And I don't even want to say how many years I've been there, but, uh, well, let's just say it's been quite some time. Yeah, actually I started as a tax professional. So when I got out of school, I got my degree in accounting and I was recruited into KPMG, which is one of the Big Four firms in New York. And we started in tax. And what was interesting is that the practice that I was in was not really that specific. It was much more of a middle market type of practice where we got to see a lot of different companies in a lot of different industries. And with that meant that the work itself was much more diverse much more across where you would have clients like law firms to manufacturing companies, distributors. And that gives you a lot of perspective because you begin to see a lot of things you wouldn't otherwise see. But, um, I think what happened was after about, uh, uh, you know, 3 or 4 years, I realized that client service was not my particular cup of tea. Um, it's a very different, uh, approach, and I wanted to, uh, see what it was like in the corporate world. And, um, I ended up joining Philips Electronics. And Philips Electronics is, you know, large company. They had their, uh, US business called North American Philips, which was a very large company, one of these old-time conglomerates. And they had businesses like the, uh, Magnavox television business, the lighting business, the medical business. They had a piece of Polygram Records, so you had a lot of that. And again, a lot of diverse things But what was interesting about Philips was that it was such a long-time tax function where everything was kind of set up and it was really, you know, done well. And they set things up where they learned how to use technology to be able to get the work done. So even before all of this automation and AI and everything else, they were probably one of the premier companies that used the old AS/400, the old IBM mainframes, to really create apps to be able to automate. Yeah, I was doing tax work and then I got involved in actually computer coding. And it was really interesting because, uh, you were able to take what you knew and do that. And the beauty of that was they gave you the opportunity to increase your desire to do other things, right? And that's kind of what started with me, was this kind of curiosity about things. Well, you know, from there I ended up going to a company called American Standard. American Standard was, again, first US-based multinational I worked for, and they were in the world for, for 100 years before. So in Europe, it would have been Ideal Standard, or Trane Air Conditioning, or Webco Truck Brakes, or what have you. And that was my first touch to, uh, international tax planning. And, and for me, and I was very lucky in my career that I was able to do a lot of different things. I was in every aspect of the tax function because again, there was a vacuum.

Some—

nobody was doing it. I asked if I was able to do it and they said, sure, go ahead. And then the thing with American Standard was we began to learn and appreciate the concept of repatriation. So what does it mean when you have all this cash that's sitting outside your own country? Well, how do you repatriate the cash? At the time, we were dealing very much with the treasury function and very much with the, uh, legal function because the company was the result of a leveraged buyout. So I had a large debt portfolio and because of that they had to report to the bank every quarter, every transaction that they did that impacted the company's capital. So now you began to appreciate as a tax person, instead of sitting there just doing tax stuff, you began to appreciate more of this kind of interconnectivity between the treasury function, between the legal function. How do you actually move money? How do things actually get done?

Yeah.

And again, you know, from a theme perspective, this is all about nobody was really focused on this. I got, you know, they, they were welcoming me to get involved and I got more involved from there. I had an opportunity to go into the pharmaceutical business. And so now I went from the client service and accounting to, you know, uh, uh, call it industrial manufacturing and consumer electronics. Then I went to, you know, plumbing and truck brakes and air conditioning. And now I'm in the pharmaceutical business, right? And the pharmaceutical business was a company that was called at the time Pharmacia and Upjohn. It was a merger between the Swedish company Pharmacia and the US company Upjohn. And they decided to change our headquarters to the US, and that's when I was hired. And again, that was again another interesting experience. And the thing with that company was that part of what my job was, was that I was interacting much more with the treasury function again on How do you make changes to the international capital structure and how do you grab cash? Yeah. So for us, from a tax point of view, we would look to see where were the inefficiencies in the effective tax rate, and then we would try to create transactions to mitigate that. But of course, because you're moving capital, you have to partner with the treasury function. And again, now you're doing that at a little more of a higher level. You begin to really appreciate and understand what was happening. It was so much so I was fascinated by what was going on in the, in, in that large of a treasury function. And I was actually having conversations with the treasurer to see if maybe I would transfer from the tax function into the treasury function. That ended up not happening because we got— ended up getting acquired, as was happening in that space over in that period of time. So I left there and, um, and then I went to another pharma company in New York called Forest Laboratories. And Forest was a smaller company was primarily focused on the US market, had manufacturing outside in Ireland and UK and other parts of Europe. And it was a much smaller situation, which meant that you had a lot more access to the type of activities and work that you wanted to do. So being at Forrest again, what was fascinating was that the company was just a cash machine. They had a couple of blockbusters that had very low cost structure. And what do you do with the cash? So all they were doing was really just taking the cash, you know, buying back their shares because they were just making a lot of money. And I had noticed that they didn't even have a treasury function. Oh, they just had the controller team moving cash through a bunch of bank accounts. And I said, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Why aren't we sophisticated a little more? Because I had seen this in my prior life, in my prior experience. And I went to the CFO and I said, listen, I said, why don't I take over the treasury function? And then we'll consider this and that. And he said, yeah, I mean, nobody's doing it and you have the interest. And, uh, and again, and again, it goes back to the idea when I was saying before about intellectual curiosity. I was fascinated by the idea of creating the plan, then executing the plan, and then what happens after execute the plan, and how do you get to do this all again, and how this is all kind of interrelated to each other.

Let's jump in there. The, the— when you, uh, saying, look, let's kick off treasury, if you like. As you say, there wasn't much there. Well, how did you— did you do it? And you— were you driven by tax and saying, right, this will be efficient for our treasury purposes, or, right, this is how an efficient treasury works? And, you know, was it which way around was it? How did you start to make it work?

Well, to tell you the truth, I was very fortunate because I ended up connecting with bankers who were very good to me, and they really taught me. And I had two particular bankers This was, we were actually at the time was JP Morgan. And one gentleman, he was a lead at the asset management group and they were managing a lot of our cash. So billions of dollars of cash managing for us. And on the other side we had the person that was the commercial banker that was helping us move money through bank accounts and what had. So the asset manager guy, and again, this was, I will tell you around just before the fiscal crisis. And he says to me, he says, you know what? "We have these investments in auction rate securities that I'm a little concerned about." So my first question is, "What's an auction rate security?" And this is way before the whole market exploded. And he said to me and explained it to me what it was. I said, "Well, that's kind of interesting." But I go, "What's the risk?" And he said, "Well, the risk is that if the bank decides not to support the auction, because it's never happened." I said, "Okay." I said, "Look, I'll tell you what." I said, "What you say makes sense." Let's take our position down from, say, $200 million down to $50 million.

Yeah.

Which was an unbelievable success because who knew that the market would explode on that case, right? So I learned a lot just from asking that question. On the other side, obviously the commercial banker wanted to sell a lot of business, so she was explaining to me about all the things we could do. And one of the things that we didn't have is we didn't have a credit revolver because we had so much cash. And I remember at the time, the CEO was very interested. He was also, he was a deal guy and he was fascinated with the tax world and he was fascinated with capital and moving money around. And he would call me into his office periodically to say, hey, listen, we're looking at this transaction and how would you structure it? And we would have this interesting conversation. Then the conversation started adding more, okay, well let's see foreign exchange rates and how do we think about mitigating the exposure So it was a lot more questions that I really did not answer yet. And then I would go to the banker and the banker would help me understand that a little better. So I was kind of in school while I was doing this. And then the banker said to me, she said, well, you should be thinking about a credit revolver. And she explained to me the process and what was involved. And I went back with the CEO and I said, listen, I said, we should be thinking at a minimum, a $500 million credit revolver given as a just-in-case for the company. He said, well, he said, well, I can just call Jamie Dimon and he'll just send me, write me a check because he was part of this whole New York, you know, you know, elite financial group. And I said to him, I said, well, what happens if Jamie can't get to the phone that day? And he said, okay, good point. And we ended up at— we started a revolver from scratch, which is really interesting because it's this huge document and usually you pick up a document that's already been written and you just kind of look at the changes. But to understand how it's created and all the affirmative and the negative covenants and the restrictions, it really gets you to really understand. So again, I was fascinated by this stuff. So I was there for quite some time and it was a smaller company and did everything that I could do. And then I was recruited into Ralph Lauren as the head of tax and treasurer. And it was a large company. And at the time, Ralph Lauren was buying back all its licenses from around the world. And so there was the opportunity was not to just manage the functions, but now you're, you're doing a lot of acquisitions, you're a lot of M&A stuff, and now you're responsible for structuring the deal and then creating a situation that you can service the businesses in the region, which meant creating a whole cash management structure as well. Again, super great stuff to do. I mean, to have the opportunity to be involved in something like this and then to have your plan become reality. Is fascinating. But of course, while this was going on, when I got hired, the first week, the person who was the treasurer at the time quit. Right. So now I'm like, oh my God, what do you do? Right? And just by sheer, you know, sometimes when there's a vacuum, you realize it's all on your responsibility and you have to kind of think on your feet. And again, utilize your network, utilize the people that you've known in the past, um, that they'll help you. And we ended up creating a really terrific group Sometimes you find people in the company that have been there that haven't really been recognized and identified. It's kind of like you never know when you turn over a rock, you can have gold and sometimes not gold. Yeah. So we did— was a bit of that and there was a bit of bringing in some new people, bringing in some new capabilities. Like for instance, we brought in someone that was an expert at foreign exchange and derivatives, which was critical being an international company. And then I learned in that situation, because we were doing such complex things, that there was now this interesting interrelationship between tax and treasury. So you, you have the cash side, you have the planning side, and then of course the interesting thing is that the two situations, the tax and the treasury, in my opinion, are somewhat diametrically opposed. So what does that mean? That means, uh, normally tax folks will say keep the cash outside the home country. Yeah, keep it offshore. Yeah, but offshore you don't want to pay the tax on. Yeah, treasury folks will say, I need the cash now because I need to service that, run the business, and so on and so forth. So now you have two competing strategic issues, and how do you deal with that? The good thing is that if you're the one person owning both functions, there's no fighting going on. There's just whatever's going on in your head. Yeah. And the answer is you have to realize, instead of trying to protect the tax or the treasury function, you have to think, what's the best for the company?

But how do you determine that? What's your— obviously, what is best? What does best look like?

Best looks like, uh, what is the— there's a cost-benefit analysis, right? So am I making a better savings opportunity on the tax or on the Treasury side? Number 2, what's the right strategic position for the company? Are you building out a situation? Do you building out, or is the— are these discrete transactions? That just happened once and then that's that. So there's a lot of factors. Also, frankly, you have to talk to your management and find out what is the corporate objective or strategy that they're trying to employ. And then from that, you have to take that and then you have to ascertain what you think is the best and frankly be a lot more objective. You like— it's sort of being an umpire in a game. You have to be objective. You can't really side on with it with any particular team.

Yeah.

So that was really, you know, interesting and fascinating. And then, and then we had gone through 9 years of acquisitions in Europe and Asia and Latin America, um, and did it all. And it was— and again, in the situation that I had, we kind of did everything that we could do, right? You know, fortunately, I ended up, uh, getting recruited for Newell Brands. Newell Brands— this was in the middle of 2016. Newell Brands was a company that just merged. Newell Rubbermaid merged with Jarden Corporation to create a $16 billion top line company with 16 business divisions, and they were in all kinds of spaces and whatnot. And they were a very, uh, they were a very M&A oriented type of company, and they wanted someone to come in to, to manage that. And I ended up getting recruited to come in and again, take what I said on the Ralph Lauren experience and then triple that in complexity and, and volume. So now you're dealing with huge amounts of money. And we started there, uh, we had about $12 billion of debt. We had— and then of course the, the worst thing, and it is the interesting dichotomy here, in Ralph Lauren, the company increasingly, uh, was doing better. Their credit rating was improving, you know, they were A-rated. It was easy to get money, easy to get credit. The situation in Newell was the complete opposite. As time was going along, the businesses started deteriorating. And it turns out that the merger itself was not a really a well-thought-out merger and it didn't really work out well. And then what happened was at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, there was a corporate proxy fight. We ended up having activist investors. There was some challenges in the, you know, in, in the, in the economic space and the company's fortune started going in a different direction. So now you have to take everything that you learned and apply that into a company that's going in a different direction. So now credit ratings matter more, provisions in, in, in, uh, your revolver matter, you know, matter more. Your indenture agreements matter more. Do you have cross-default provisions between your indentures? And at the same time, the company decided to go into a divestiture program and sell off 40% of its business. So our job as the tax and treasury group was to structure the transactions, make them as efficient as possible from a tax point of view, grab the cash, bring the cash to be able to do tender offers and redemptions to bring the debt down. And we did that for a number of years, and it was fascinating work. I mean, it was tough work, it was hard work. Because of the quality of the work, I was able to build really good solid teams, much like colleague that you'd spoken to before and to get people that were real professionals that understood how to do that. So we're, and each time we're taking it up a notch and taking it up a notch. And I guess I could say that, so now we are, it's 9 years later at Newell and we're still doing a lot of things. Now we went from an investment grade to a non-investment grade company. Um, our debt profile has gone down dramatically, but now we're a smaller company. So now with that comes different challenges and, And I will say, so it's fascinating stuff, but I will tell you this from my perspective is that I've been very fortunate to have people that recognize when someone has intellectual curiosity about an area and to be able to put them in there. And we've done that internally where we've given our people the opportunity to do either expatriate assignments or transfer them from the tax function to the treasury function. Or what have you, and it seems to be working. So that's, you know, my story of how I got to where I am.

But there is— but it's also, I'd, you know, I came across you, I saw, and we have people in common with Julia Donegan, who'd been previously on the, the podcast, uh, our live session and stuff. But I actually saw this really great article from yourself about the— within Treasury Today magazine, really great piece that actually talked about tax and treasury coming together and the common things, but then the the conflict points as well. It was really well written as well. So, you know, shout out to those guys. But your point in there, that was treasury professionals who have that understanding of tax become that much more valuable when they understand it and vice versa. Do you think that treasury professionals now should— that's another thing that they should be adding. We've got all this technology coming along. We'll come back to that in a minute. But, you know, this understanding the broader business and then getting an idea for tax, you said you've just moved them across. Quite an unusual thing to do, but a great thing to do, I think. But, you know, what have you seen?

Well, I think what I've been trying to do with my teams is that because there's so much interconnectivity, I can't be the only one that understands that interconnectivity, and I need them to be educated, need them to understand. So we used to set up— and I've been doing this now from the prior company and the current company— we would set up what we call tax treasury meetings, right? And we get the two groups together Funny enough, one will call them T squared, you know, just for fun, right? But the reality is, so give you a perfect example, right? So we want to do in treasury a cross-currency swap, right, which requires us to designate equity as a net investment hedge without getting into all the specifics. But then the tax team wants to move companies around to get a tax advantage within the group, which would effectively break the net investment hedge, would then kill the accounting and the whole purpose of the transaction. So why would I let the tax folks go through all that time and effort to tell them no, because it would disrupt this? So instead what we do is that we create these situations where the tax folks will say, we're thinking of this and that and this. The Treasury folks will come in and say, here's what's going on in our world. And at least, so number one, there's understanding of activity. The second thing is when we do repatriation strategies, we purposely pair tax and treasury people together. Okay? So this way, so for instance, you know, Julia, uh, as a perfect example, she runs our treasury operations on a global basis. She's responsible for moving the cash in the right place. She needs to know what the plans are to know how to anticipate that and plan for that over the next number of months. So I think that I don't need treasury people to know tax, and I don't need tax people to know treasury. But they need to have an appreciation and an understanding of maybe a little more than they would otherwise know. And I think that that makes them super qualified and super knowledgeable. And, and I've been fortunate is that a lot of people that have gone on to other things have usually gone on to higher positions because of the training that we gave them in the group.

And as you say, you oversee treasury, tax, risk management, business services across all these countries, hundreds of team members. How do you then personally stay in contact with that without getting buried? Because there is a— again, you're going to be drawn down into the detail, which you need to have an eye on the detail, but you don't want to be buried in it sort of thing. How do you keep that, you know, if someone's listening today and they're going, this sounds very well, but I'm being drawn down, how do you rise above it without being too top level? What's the balance? How do you get the balance right?

Well, I think the balance really, it comes down to communication, right? And it's my communication with my team and then their intercommunication. So for example, the way that I structure my groups is that I have, I'll call 'em key lieutenants in each particular function. So again, we'll use Julia as an example. Julia is a key lieutenant running treasury operations. She's the expert. Then I have a key lieutenant in the tax function that runs the effective tax rate and controversy and whatnot. And so I have put one-on-one meetings with these people. Whether it's a formal meeting or, hey, listen, what's going on type of meeting. So I understand what's happening between them and I individually. And then what we try to do is that we try to have staff meetings where we're all together and we say, okay, what are you working on? What are you working on? What are you working on? To give everyone an appreciation. Then when we have transaction-specific, they now understand how to get the group together of the lieutenants and maybe the sublieutenants to hash out the problem because they're saying, okay, Rob says that the objective is X, okay, we have to meet X. Here's all the things that we need to be thinking about. Here's the things that we don't know yet that we have to solve for. And they are trying to anticipate how to respond to me, but they all know how to respond to me because I have direct communication with them. So they can do a lot of work on their own without me being overwhelmed, as you say, in this, because in my role I, you know, I, as you say, I wear a lot of hats and I have to be able to get into the moment in each particular. And, and the, what was able to let, allow me to do that was when I started my, my, my education, I started as an accountant and I went from accounting, I got my CPA, you know, you know, me, nice in New York. And then, um, I ended up getting a master's degree in taxation.

Right.

And then when I was in my mid-30s, I ended up going to law school. And I went to law school at night because someone— I had a conversation with someone that really was impactful in my life, and I decided to do that. And what law school taught me was how to do effective time management, to be in the moment, understand, listen what's happening, be able to assess the situation, and then, you know, create conclusions or solutions or questions and then move on. So there's a little bit of the training, you know, the intellectual training, and then— but it comes down to the people, you know, the people. And they have to feel empowered, and each one has a level of autonomy that's provided to them that makes them feel like, okay, this is my space, and they know how to manage that particular space.

This podcast, as you may have worked out, has no sponsors, has no ads. Nobody pays me to record these episodes. I make it because I love corporate treasury and I want to help treasury professionals just like you. If you're getting value from this, there's a couple of things I'd ask. Share it with your friends, tell them about it, how you've enjoyed it. If it's helping you in your treasury career, fantastic. But then maybe connect with me on LinkedIn. Mike Richards, I'm there. You can actually look me up. My URL is actually linkedin.com/mrtreasury. Or Mr. Treasury if you want to call it that. Hit connect, drop me a quick note, say you found me through the podcast on Apple or Spotify. I read every single message and yes, I will reply. There's no funnel, no sales pitch. It's just a chance to say hello, stay in touch and see what I can do to help. So anyway, let's get back to the episode. And obviously overwhelm, as you say, you actively manage that, but how do you avoid that without when you, you've got to push a lot of changes through, and you talked about it, some of the stuff you've been through in recent years, that, you know, there's lots of stuff coming down the line. How do you control the flow, or do you do it, or do you let them do it, or how does it work? Again, this is an advice show. If someone's listening going, oh wow, okay, this might be a problem they're facing, you know, it's, um, it's just managing work streams.

I mean, any, any person that continues on in their career and gets to an executive level you begin to understand is you have to manage work streams. So the question is, how do you manage a work stream? Are you the one managing it, or do you empower people to manage it? And the way that I do it is that I empower people to manage the work stream. So you can have 1 person or 3 people running it. Uh, I, I'm not a, I'm not a big fan of overly structured steering committees and so on and so forth, right? And I want to give them the autonomy and let them anticipate what the question is, and then they're gonna come back to me to say, okay, researched this, you've done this, there's problem 1, 2, and 3. However, we have solution 1, 2, and 3. And then we have a conversation about it and we say, okay, either adjust the work stream this way, or you got the answer and let's execute, or some other solution. So again, it goes back to that you have to have strong people and give them the opportunity to be strong people, just like I was given the opportunity to, to pursue my curiosity. I'm giving them the opportunity to own their space so that they can feel much more empowered. And frankly, you're building, you're doing great development, you're building executives. I mean, that's kind of what, what you're doing.

And we had our pre-chat the other day, which was great as well. And you know, I, you and I were talking about the, all this new technology coming along, whether it's AI automation, we've got all these different things. And I, you know, I was talking about my session in the ACT conference where I talked to the audience about saying, It is AI, artificial intelligence, not RI, real intelligence, making sure that, you know, you and I both got into that, just saying that Victoria, you know, was interpreting about knowing behind the figures. You know, we were talking about this and Victoria, one of the panelists, was saying she put some stuff in there, it came out with completely wrong answers, but she luckily had the bedrock of knowledge to go, no, that's wrong. And actually come back. Do you think some companies are, and individuals, maybe over— overestimating what it can do and or what it will be able to do? Where are you in that thought process?

My experience, because we have a very large AI initiative in our company. Yeah, we led from the CEO, and I think that at the executive level they have great expectations for productivity opportunities. With AI, not doing the work to understand how you exactly apply it in a particular situation. And what we've noticed is that in our world, AI is amazing in places like marketing and customer service and, and those places where it's a little more, uh, a challenge is in taking, say, the financing. And what does that mean? In the finance area, particularly in treasury and tax as well, and frankly all of it, in my opinion, you cannot be wrong. You're dealing with the company's money, you're dealing with the company's capital, and you can't be wrong because your error can cost the company, depending on the size of the company, millions and millions of, of, of dollars, euro, whatever. And if you do that and you're not, um, responsible enough to understand what the output is, then frankly, you should be in that position. Yeah, it's just like when someone puts together a presentation and they hand it to you for review, it should be near and done, right? And I shouldn't have to tell you I don't like the font and, you know, and all this other thing. But again, the same thing with AI. It's a matter of you have to understand what your level of risk is with AI. If you want to create an agent that says, okay, uh, do my cash forecast But there's— cash forecasting can be the, the 12-month rolling forecast, which you don't have to be particularly right on because you don't really know the answer. But the 1-day to 30-day, you have to be precise on because that's how you're managing your short-term cash. So can you afford to not be responsible for the results in the 1 to 30 cash forecast? The other thing about AI is that, particularly in the finance space, is that it's a, it's a productivity enhancement tool. People should not say, oh my, I'm running out of a job. Think about all the things that are not getting done because you don't have this productivity accelerator at your hands. I have people, they spend time putting, uh, so for instance, we like to, uh, have a report every day that, uh, has our cash balances in, in our foreign country. But someone actually puts that together and puts it in a PowerPoint and then emails it. Why can't I just have an agent to do that. And now that person's gonna say, well, now, you know, I don't have that job anymore. I said, well, first of all, that's not a job you want really. And there's all these more interesting things that you can do. So I think that, you know, people need to appreciate that. The other thing too is that when you look at AI agents or AI utilization, what's the value that you're getting for it?

Yeah.

So we are, we are doing is that we are applying AI in our cash forecasting process. Number 1, right? Number 2, what we're doing is that in the global business services, particularly in the, in the, well, account receivable section or at a cash, we're looking at our claims and deductions and we're using the, the platform that we have, which is called HighRadius, and there's an AI built into it that's using predictive AI that's saying, you know, you know what? 80% of the claims on this customer are usually good claims. So then you can put in a rule that says, all right, anything that's below $1,000, I'm just gonna let pass. And I'm gonna say that's good because my probability of error is so much lower.

Yeah.

Okay. And that is a big productivity enhancer that allows you not to have to stand up for more things if that's a concern for you, or to be able to give people the opportunity to do a lot more work than they would otherwise do. It's just a tool. It's just like anything else. Like when someone learns how to use the Treasury Workstation, It's a tool to use. You become a super user. Now you are a much more critical player, but in 10 years or maybe less, there's gonna be a new thing that's gonna supplant this. So you just have to be nimble. You have to be agile. Make sure you understand the risk profile that what you're allowing to pass, and then, uh, and then move on to the next interesting project.

And I had it on my notes here actually, and I, I was, it was great. So as you said, wrong cost money. This is your phrase, not mine. You know, this is Nick, but how do you avoid having the wrong people? Costing money? How do you avoid having, you know, how do you make sure you get the A-players and how do you focus on that within your, your recruitment ethos or whatever?

Um, first of all, it's making sure you have the right relationships with the right recruiters. Yep. I think that's important, right? Uh, because those are the people that have access to the population that you don't. And even though that there's a lot more easier and cheaper ways to do it, I think that there's the old saying, you get what you pay for, right? And I think that if you're looking for value, you need to invest to get value, number one. Number two is, for instance, when we decided to reorganize our treasury function outside the United States, we purposely chose Dublin because Dublin was a center where multinational companies would have treasury functions because there was a tax deal back in the day, 15, 20 years ago.

Yeah.

And knowing that there was this concentration of treasury professionals, it made sense to locate there. And as a result, we had Julia, who's, you know, who's got a great background and she's terrific at it. We were able to recruit people like her, and she has her network of people and so on and so forth. So it's a— you, you need to focus on the right people, and frankly, you also need to assess your people well and hold them accountable because, you know, sometimes you make a mistake.

Yeah.

And if you make a mistake, you have to action that mistake. You can't simply just accept the situation.

Yeah.

And that's tough. That's really tough because you're impacting people's lives and that's terrible. But if you get the right person and you can build upon that person and that situation, again, like I said to you before, you can bring them along. I mean, Julia wasn't hired to do what she's doing now. She has grown into that role.

Yeah, very much so.

But we saw the capability and the opportunity and the, you know, her skill set. And we also coached her along. So it's a two-way street. I mean, you know, they have to— the employee's got to come and give you what they have. But as the employer, you need to be able to provide them opportunity to be able to do the standard 6-week job.

Yeah. And to your point about locations, as we were talking before, I've literally done back to back. We did Dublin and then straight to Amsterdam, and people were like, how come you're out there? And I went, because in, in and around Europe, you've got UK, you've got Dublin, you've got Amsterdam, and a couple of others. But, you know, that's where over time there's been really great levels of treasury talent. So that's why we operate in those markets. Oh, it's an upgrader..

I mean, my, my prior company, my prior company would set up a treasury function in Amsterdam and this time it's the one in Ireland. So, and again, both situations was incorporating tax-related planning.

Yeah. And so for the younger, you know, earlier, or not younger, for the treasury professionals earlier in their careers, perhaps, you know, we've got all this new stuff coming along, but then there's you've got curiosity versus technical knowledge. It was something that we've talked about on some of the live events we've done recently. Where do you see them fitting? Are they equal? You know, you, you're technically obviously very strong and everything else, but are you saying that— where do we see it going in the future? What do you think, you know, as we reflect towards this brave new world?

Well, I would say for the folks that are earlier in their career, right, first of all, If you're given work that seems like a drudgery, first of all, you're not appreciating the fact that repetition creates knowledge.

Yeah.

So if I'm doing my daily cash report every day, which can be kind of a cumbersome issue, right? You, after 100 times doing it, you begin to understand a little more of the nuances, number one. Number two is because you're earlier in your career and you're much more technologically oriented than I am, you are much more comfortable in saying, okay, you know what, I'm gonna go into, uh, some AI technology and how do I not do the drudgery myself, but how can I automate that drudgery? And how can I do that in a way that I can manage the risk so that it's always right? That's a tremendous value. So now you know what happens. So now you've taken a pro— a, a process that you've taken a lot of your time. You now have freed yourself up from that time. That gives you an opportunity to go into another area and learn that other area. So for Treasury professionals, in my opinion, you have to learn the basics. You have to learn cash management, you have to learn Treasury operations and how all that stuff works. That will then lay the foundation for you to get into the next phase, which is derivatives or capital markets or some other, uh, you know, more sophisticated type of things. Once you understand the basics, you can get to that. We have, you know, and we We have experience where people have done that. So invest in yourself by taking the time to learn something, apply the technology to be able to make it much more efficient, cuz that serves you and that serves the organization. And then number 3 is, uh, make yourself, make people know that you've done this so that they can provide you with the opportunity to go, hey, here's an area that no one's looking at, or we need help in, and make yourself available and ask for it. Be proactive because we can't, you know, as the manager, we can't always know what's going on in the person's mind of what their career situation is. Because you don't want to wait for that once every, every other, you know, a year or, or 3 years or whatever it might be. Performance appraisals. Forget about the— I mean, not forget it, I should say, you know, don't rely upon the formal process. Make yourself informal and say, hey, listen, I'm interested in this, I'm interested in that. How can we do that? And you know something, most times they'll say, okay, let's find out a way how to make this a better situation for all. So I think it's an investment on both sides.

And we've had that on a few of the podcasts with the guests where, as you say, don't wait for your review, put your hand up if you're interested in something or you can help out. The more you help out, the more invaluable you become to an organization, to your boss, to your team, to everything else. Just get stuck in sort of thing.

Yeah. And I would say one more thing too, which people don't people, you know, maybe have an issue with is that if you are earlier in your career, you know, lower on the food chain, so to speak, don't worry about going to the treasurer. You know, you're allowed to talk to anyone that you want to talk to. And most times the treasurer will be very happy to have a conversation. Yeah. But you have to prove— but the treasurer's gotta create the environment to make the person feel comfortable enough because there's nothing more impactful for a young professional to be able to have access to the treasurer in that particular case, because then they can ask a lot of questions. They can talk about themselves, they can talk about the situation at work, and then they create that relationship. And then the treasurer has that person in their head because now they know, okay, that person made an effort to talk to me, to ask about getting involved in something. And that is a great way for them to move their career on as well.

So final takeaways for today, we're going to— I'm going to put your LinkedIn details in the show notes so people can connect to you and you'll, you know, expand the LinkedIn network. But just in general for yourself or for those guys out there listening, you've given already some takeaways for the junior guys, I think, but, you know, whether they— we summarize them or whatever, but what are the takeaways from today's show? Or someone sitting there with a coffee, whatever level they're— junior, mid-level, senior— what are the takeaways for each of them subgroups, if you like, before we finish up?

I would say, first of all, be curious, right? Um, you— what you do is not a science. What you do impacts a lot of other parts of the organization, and you need to have a better appreciation of how that works. And once you have that appreciation, then the next thing for you to do is go out and create relationships within the organization, whether it's in your function, whether it's outside your function, because then that will give you a much better understanding to know how their function works, that you can apply it to yourself. The other thing is to communicate well within your organization about the things that you're interested to do. That was something that I did all the time, and it wasn't 100%, but there was a majority of the time that people said, yeah, you're interested in that, we're gonna give you an opportunity to try your hand at that particular function. And that frankly was what helped me become much— gave me a much broader perspective of the function and the company and what was happening. And it allowed me to really excel at being a treasurer and a head of tax and a head of global business services and so on and so forth. And then understanding that interrelationship then, and again, people then will recognize you and realize, wow, that person's a sharp person because not— they know not just that functional area as well. And that can be in any organization, doesn't matter.

Yeah. Rob, you've been amazing. Thank you very much, sir. Some great takeaways there. I'm looking forward to, uh, Yes, maybe seeing you in Naples, maybe in New York, who knows?

Perhaps, perhaps. And Mike, thank you again for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, sir.

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