How Did You Get Started in your Treasury Career?

[Music] Hello, I'm Mike Richards. My name is Mark Tworkham, and I'm the latest episode of the Treasury Career Corner. This is the first of a five-part series created following our attendance at the Group Treasures Exchange Conference. This is a great event where I spoke to eight Treasury professionals about their Treasury careers. This episode I asked them about how they first started their Treasury career and how they've seen the industry evolve. Andreas Vindel, the ex-group treasurer, Haribo Holdings. It was a total accident. I was interning in the US in the large corporate, actually, in the marketing department, programming intranets. I met the treasurer of that company for the US at a party, and I was telling him what I'm doing as an intern. Then he said, "Oh, I have a CFO conference coming up for all the American CFOs of the company. I want to have an intranet as well." This was back in 1999, so where everything started. Then I had the chance to interview the whole Treasury department every function what it is doing. I thought, "That sounds interesting." I asked him if I could come back and write my thesis on the Treasury topic. This was basically an analysis on cash pooling possibilities in South America back in 1999, 2000. I wrote that paper. It's still valid. Good news. I got hired straight away in the Treasury job in Germany. So you started the Treasury analyst and then worked way up through the time? Exactly. I was starting in the Ex-Head In-House Treasury as an In-House Treasury consultant. Being like a role, like an internal sales and advisory people. I'm dealing with foreign exchange, internal deposits, internal financing. I learned Treasury from scratch straight away out of university without having the plan. Straight into it. Not even having a finance stream in my majors. It was quite funny. Andrew Bishop, Head of Treasury Operations, Gas Prom Marketing and Trading. Some might say you fall into these things. I didn't really know what I wanted to do in school, college, university, all that kind of stuff. I just basically ended up working in a bank. I learned back office processes, sat with some of the traders for a week, bit of a common type thing, and just loved it from there. Like the fact that it's fast paced. The stuff has to get done during the day. You can't wait. I like the energy that it brings. Yeah, just never looked back since. When I was banking Treasury, they made the move to corporate. Yeah, big change. I was in city for about 12, 13 years. Having looked around the banking environment wasn't great at the time. I dealt with a lot of corporates. I'd seen how they worked Treasury on the other side. It was really interesting. The opportunity came up at Gas Prom and thought I could bring some of the banking disciplines to Treasury within the corporate Treasury. I think it's going to work out well from there. And Marie Moore, Director of Treasury Services, Plan International. I gave a life first came in Treasury. Not the traditional route. It wasn't through the accounting route. It was because I was in banking. And having gone into banking, the area that I drew me was the dealing room. So I then decided that's where I was going to be and went into back office in order to then eventually get into the dealing, because that was a routine to dealing with. Once in the dealing room, I then worked my way up the ladder from dealer, senior dealer, to eventually Treasurer. And from there, I moved to the corporate world as a corporate treasurer. And your corporate treasurer now? I'm Director of Treasury. Or the proprietor is Director of Plan Treasurer Services. I'm working for Plan International, which is a 75 year old NGO. A billion dollar corporation. And the number of members of the team, big team? Well, it was four of us in the team. Right. Very international. We were three. We were four originally. Then we got a TMS at a time when the office was looking for cuts. So we lost a person around about that time. It was natural waste. He decided to join Metropolitan Police. And I can see the connection. Not at all. But then this year, or last year, I actually managed to argue that to be strategic, which was the aim to actually take off sort of spreadsheet work and dump quadruple entry into everything, to actually save us time by having a TMS and being more strategic. I won the argument last year and managed to get something else in. Damien Glendennig, ex-Treasurer, Lenovo. So how did I first get into finance? That was actually quite funny because during my university days, I had a holiday job working in a factory that was making septic tanks out of glass fiber. And I very quickly got fed up of pulling the glass fiber splinters out of my hand every evening. So I went to hand in my notice and they said, "Why don't you go and work in the accounts department?" That's how I got into finance. I actually found it very interesting. And then the move into Treasury itself? The move into Treasury came after I then became an accountant when I left university and did various things. And then one day somebody said, "Would you like to go and work in our European Treasury Center in Dublin?" And that's how I got into Treasury. And I never look back. And over those years, you've obviously seen Treasury change tremendously. What was it like when you first started building Treasury? It's changed, but it hasn't. Because the basic things are the same. For me, Treasury is very simple. It's about, "Do you have enough money to pay the bills?" No different to your personal stuff. Obviously, the numbers are a bit bigger and it's a bit more complicated. And that's never going to change. I have seen huge changes in that when I moved into the Treasury Center in Dublin, we were managing all the different European incurrencies, the Deutsche Mark, the French Frank, and doing cross-border loans in all of these and hedging them. Marianna Policratti, Group Treasurer, Capita SA. I started in Treasury 12 years ago. Prior to that, I was in the banking session. So I spent eight years in the banking session, explored different variations like venture capital, leasing, financing. And I decided that corporate Treasury seems to be much more fun, much more interesting, and much more creative in doing things that matter to companies. And how did you discover Treasury? Did you just. Well, I had an opportunity. There was an old colleague in a company. She was an M&A director. And there was an opening, and I was lucky at that time because I was looking for a job. And she said, "Are you interested in like, there's looking for someone in the assistant, as an assistant treasurer?" And I said, "Okay, let's try." So I was very lucky because at the time I had a very good grip treasure. She was my mentor and she inspired me a lot, really. Another ice, group treasurer, Johnson Matthew, PLC. So I first got into Treasury through my interest in financial markets. And I was working at the time with Nestle, the food company, and the pensions investment team. And that triggered my interest in financial markets. And once that road came to an end, I was looking to move into another road within the company that would give me the opportunity to work with the company. And I was looking to work in a financial environment where I mean, at the interface between the company and financial markets. So that's what first got me into a Treasury road. And you heard about Treasury internally and they said, "Oh, coming to Treasury." That's right. I heard about Treasury internally. And I spent the day up in that Treasury department just to get a feel for what's happening and what Treasury does. And I thought that was quite interesting and interesting. And that's when I decided to move into Treasury a few months later. Resmus, Camboda, Melvang, Treasury Manager, Thomas Cook Airlines, Scandinavia, AS. Well, it was actually by accident. I ended up in a Treasury department almost 11 years ago. I started an adanious based company in a Treasury department at Treasury Manager. The reason for picking Treasury was because I found the job description exciting and challenging compared to being a financial analyst and controller, which was what I did before. It sounded more challenging if you can use that word. And it was, you can say, another way of looking at finance, which is still close to my heart. Sam Pitt, Ex-Grewd Treasurer, Never Rail. We want to get into corporate finance and funding, which is what I did. We moved into sort of mergers and acquisitions, you know, setting up joint ventures. Then started looking at debt financing, project financing. Then moved more into other debt products, capital markets, bank loans, etc. And then assumed responsibility for Treasury operations. So I kind of got into Treasury by accident, but obviously being a Treasury referal long time now, I really enjoy it.