Why Treasury Needs People Who Use AI, Not People Who Fear It | Treasury Careers Podcast

Mike, CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company: This week on the Treasury Career Corner podcast, we’ve got Luke Maclean, Senior Global Treasury Director at CBRE. He’s got a team of 35 across four regions. He’s 25 years in, but the two things he keeps coming back to are both trust and AI. Have a little listen. It really helped me because the back office is…

Luke, Senior Global Treasury Director at CBRE: I look at it a couple ways. Back office is a thankless job. Back office is a role where if you do everything right, no one says thank you. But if you do anything wrong, really wrong. And a lot of what we end up doing is based on trust. Senior management trusts us to, to settle trades, to make payments. And if you don’t understand the fundamentals of how it works, what could go wrong, what can go wrong, and how to fix it when it goes wrong, you end up blind to what’s happening, and then you can burn through that trust very quickly.

Luke: I think AI is amazing, but it’s a tool. That’s all it is, it’s a tool. It’s a means of becoming more efficient, getting data quicker and analyzing data in a better way. It’s never gonna replace having to go to senior leadership and saying, “We have a risk. This is how we’re going to manage it. Trust me to manage it.”

Luke: What it will do is it will take what the data we have, analyze it much faster than we could have previously, come up with sometimes very interesting analytics out of it. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong, and present it very quickly

Mike: 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, where they see both themselves and the treasury profession going to next. Let’s get on with the show.

Mike: On this week’s show, I’m joined by Luke Maclean, the Senior Global Treasury Director at CBRE. CBRE builds real estate solutions of the future to help clients, professionals, and business partners realize their potential. From instilling confidence in today’s decisions to reimagining tomorrow’s spaces, they thrive in complex and ever-changing environments.

Mike: But enough from me. I’ll hand the microphone over to Luke. Luke, if you would, take us back to the beginning. How’d it all start for you? Over to you, sir. Great. Thanks, Mike. Like many people, I fell into treasury by mistake. I was an internal auditor coming out of, out of college. I bounced around a couple of companies, and I was in mostly operational audits.

Luke: I was working for a large resources company at the time called BHP, and traveling around the world and doing all kinds of audits in South America and Africa and Asia and Australia. And I’d bounced around for a bit. I’d done a few corporate audits, but I’d never actually done the treasury audit. I was getting bored, as you tend to do after a while, and a job posting came up for the middle office manager for BHP’s global treasury.

Luke: And I looked at it and I went, “Controls, I can do that. Processes, I can do that. Reporting, I can do that.” So I applied, and I didn’t get that job. However, the guy who was recruiting for that role, who became my mentor in treasury, Anthony Persico, said, “We don’t have this role for you, but we’ll make another role for you.”

Luke: And it was a much better role. It was a role that was called specialist controls treasury. So instead of being the middle office manager and sitting there and having to, having to run counterparty risk at 9:00 AM, review report by 9:30, sign off by 9:45- Kind of thing. It was a job where I got to jump in and look at different parts of treasury.

Luke: A new instrument’s coming up, how does it work in the system? How do we trade? How does the accounting work? How is it gonna flow through to the risk reports? How is it gonna be settled? H- how are we gonna build reports? I’d been given a role which was basically free form and given problems to solve, which I thought was far more interesting.

Mike: It’s a great way to get into treasury. And with these guys, how were they able to do that or, you know, ’cause not all people get this, you know. This is BHP and they’re able to just go, “Right.” You know, they saw your background, said th- this is gonna really suit us, or? Anthony Costago had the support of the treasurer at the time, Billy Murray, and V- Billy had been treasurer there for, I want to say 25 years at that point, but it may be longer than that.

Luke: Wow. And they had a lot of political capital and a lot of trust, and they had incred- incredibly supportive CFO. And also what was to my advantage was they were moving to London at that time. They were moving out of Den Haag in the Netherlands, and moving across, and not everyone was moving across, and they managed to slip it in as part of the restructure and move.

Luke: So I was kind of a little bit fortunate with timing. And so I was the second employee in the office. The person who beat me was the treasury systems manager, and then I was the second person there. They were still building cabling in the floor when I turned up. But, but I’d met Anthony at a conference in Singapore.

Luke: We were talking about FRAs, fixed rate rents, and the documentation of those and the accounting of those and the risk of those. Yeah, so that’s how I got started. I got started in a generalist role, which I’m thankful for, ’cause if I… I think if I started in the middle office role, that would’ve put me in a middle office box.

Luke: And sometimes in treasury it’s hard to break out of those boxes, but in the generalist role I got to play in back office, front office, corporate finance, in the technical team, in the accounting team, in amongst the leadership. So I got to play around, around with everyone and learn from everyone. And what was the shape of BHP?

Mike: Or maybe, again, actually, we didn’t… We covered it. So at the time, well, still, BHP

Luke: is the world’s largest resource company. Like iron ore, copper, coal, uranium, silver. If it comes out of the ground, they do it. Pot ash. It’s an Australian-based company- It’s all over the world. From a treasury point of view, in some ways it’s a very easy company because all of their sales are in US dollars globally, which makes life simple.

Luke: But again, they deal in a lot of complex countries, like in South America and Africa and these kind of things. Yeah, where they get their product out of the ground and everything else. Yes. You know, and they have very large swap books, a lot of debt. You know, we’re talking hundreds of billions of swaps, interest rate swaps, cross-country interest rate swaps, all kinds of things.

Luke: And the beauty of BHP is, at its heart it’s an engineering company. A plus B equals C, which leads to D. That went through to treasury as well. Treasury was expected to be efficient. Treasury was expected to be process-driven, which led to a very interesting view when I went to another company. I was gonna say, you were there 11 years, so talk, you know, great basis for yourself.

Mike: How did that shape your treasury career, if you like? What it did was it gave me a very good overview of a large corporate treasury, and I had very supportive senior management, very supportive treasurer. I went through three treasurers there, ’cause Billy retired, then we had two others. And it was very much, if you see a problem and you wanna fix it, go do it.

Luke: Tell us what you need. So what ended up happening there was I ended up bouncing around, and then we ended up doing a global ERP implementation at the same time as doing a global TMS on the new ERP, which was all SAP. Wow. And it was a big bang approach globally at once for every module. So this was like a multi-year project.

Luke: And within treasury, I think at some stage we had 10 consultants in London floating around helping us out. And even working on that, again, the gentleman who helped get into treasury, Anthony Persico, did a lot of the heavy lifting on the management of that and the design, and he got me involved in a lot of it.

Luke: And even just seeing how a large project ran and, you know, the importance of data testing and understanding how the system works, and documenting how the system works and make sure everyone’s in agreement, and seeing end-to-end processes through that way was incredibly valuable. Once that project went live, I then got asked, “Do you want to be the back office and cash management manager?”

Mike: Because the lady who was there at the time was retiring, and she’d been in that job for well over 20 years. Right. And sh- sh- she could do it with her eyes closed. And I said yes, and then I went and then changed everything. Why? Um- You, well, just you, you just nothing had been changed or what, why were- First, like everything was paper-based.

Luke: Right. You know, every deal was printed, every confirmation was printed and initialed, and we had folders and folders of paper, which were great, made auditing easier, but we were killing trees every day, and people spent more time running backwards and forwards from the printer than organizing their filing at the end of the day.

Luke: And what, what year was this, by the way? Oh, this would’ve been about 20- Oh, wow. So not, yeah, not that long ago. So then, you know, brought in the idea of why don’t we just use OneNote and just if confirmation comes in, drag it across and dump it in there. Well, we’ll have a tab per deal, you know. Just everything on that deal is on that tab.

Luke: Just save it all there. Or s- it, it was a root and branch examination of why did we do everything, you know? And g- going to front office and going, “Hey, I know you’ve been doing it this way for so long- There’s a better way of doing it. Front office does a swap, they’re looking at it for three weeks, and then back office has it for 30 years.

Luke: It should be in the way back office wants it. Because… Or, you know, l- looking at middle office going, “Y- this is what you’re looking at, but that’s not the actual true risks of what’s going on here. Have you thought about this?” And I think that’s where my initial role of sitting in the middle of things and seeing how everything moved helped.

Mike: And a lot of our listeners will go, “Oh, really? Doing one more work in the back office?” It sounds like it really, really helped you. It really helped me because back office is… I look at it a couple ways. Back office is a thankless job. Back office is a role where if you do everything right, no one says thank you, but if you do anything wrong- Sure

Luke: it goes really wrong. And a lot of what we end up doing is based on trust. Senior management trusts us to, to settle trades, to make payments. And if you don’t understand the fundamentals of how it works, what could go wrong, what can go wrong, and how to fix it when it goes wrong, you end up blind to what’s happening, and then you can burn through that trust very quickly.

Luke: One of the best things I ever learned in back office, actually, and even in the previous role in treasury controls, was when we installed Swift. We went from a, a bank host-to-host connectivity into Swift. We installed Swift for corporates, and we learned so much on that, how Swift works, how Swift payments work, how the coding of the payment works, what happens when it goes wrong, how do you track payments.

Luke: So even now, if we’re doing an M&A deal, and we want to see, I can go grab the, the payment file, the Swift payment file, and read through it and make sure it’s correct. It gave you that insider’s view, would you say? I think it did. It gave me the view of how the plumbing works, and I think particularly if you’re in a smaller treasury, you really need to know how the plumbing works.

Luke: Larger treasuries- A lot of the time they say somebody else will do that. It’ll either be the technology team, or there’ll be a shared service center. But at the end of the day, if it’s a treasury payment and it fails, it’s not technology’s fault, it’s your fault. Therefore, you have to understand how your plumbing works.

Mike: Where were you based at the time? You were based in London, or where? This all, this was all in London. So you were in London. So then what happened next? What was next role? Next, then I got approached about going over to, um, Tesco, and initially I went, initially I wasn’t that keen. Then I asked around and found out Tesco was actually a really good treasury.

Luke: Yeah. And a, a person from BHP had previously gone over, and so I took the role, and they were between treasurers at the time, and I went over there as basically head of back office and technology. Right. I initially did have another role attached to that, which was head of cash, which I very quickly realized I couldn’t do, and that was, like, armored vehicles, cash moving in and out of the stores, making sure the stores had enough change- Yeah

Luke: all the cash processing. So they’d got a specialist team there who was meant to answer to me, and I quickly realized I didn’t have the experience for that, and I couldn’t add any value. So I quickly went to them and went, “I can’t add value here. I’m just gonna slow them down.” The guy who was running it, he got promoted as well, which worked out nicely.

Mike: Um- So when you joined, you joined with a new treasurer, or where were you? I joined between treasurers. Was it Shibural went over to Alphabet, and then Linda Hayward came in. And, like, Linda joined, like, a month after I did. And what we’ll do is we’ll put a link to Linda’s episode. She was way back, 2018, so- Yeah.

Mike: Linda’s great … one of my first episodes, episode 13. Lucky for me- She is … ’cause she’s amazing. Well, it was, you know, it was a challenging time for the business at the time. That’s what she and I talked about and, but it was a, a great episode, so it’s well worth a listen, actually, ’cause she’s such a lovely lady.

Luke: So yeah, what was it like? So whereas BHP was an engineering company, Tesco was chaotic. Yeah. I’d gone from, like, a nice central London office, you know, gleaming tower, clean desk policy. We had more cleaners than staff doing things. You, you put a coffee cup down, 30 seconds later somebody had taken it away and cleaned the desk.

Luke: To Tesco, which was up in Welwyn Garden City in a lovely campus, desks piled high with paper, coffee cups that were probably last replaced in the 1970s, getting there via the tube, then a train, then a bus. It was just different. It was- Gosh … lovely people, amazing company, but their philosophy, and rightly so- Is that every extra cent they spent on corporate functions had to come from the customer.

Luke: Yeah. It’s about the shops. It’s about the shop floor and It’s about the shop assistants, and rightly so. And the best thing was they used to make us work in the shops over Christmas to meet the customers and all this kind of stuff, which used to be quite interesting, ’cause, one, I loved it, but, two, it made the store managers very nervous.

Luke: They used to give me gifts after every shift I did at Christmas, but that was a different story . It’s… And going from a global company to a company that was more focused on the UK and Europe, and some other countries like Thailand and India and Malaysia, was a completely different focus. One thing about Tesco is their cash management is amazing.

Luke: All their analytics around customer buying patterns, which then all translates into how much cash are we gonna get today in what store? They had all that analytics. Their cash management was brilliant. Down to a T, yeah. Was down to a T. And the amount of data they could get out of Clubcard and all the rest, purely a data-driven company.

Luke: They were the first ones to actually launch it, and not a lot of people know this. They were the first ones to launch it, and they’re still doing it and they’re leading in it. They’re, they’re amazing. The time I joined, Tesco was slimming down. Yeah, it was an amazing place because every time you turned around, something popped up.

Luke: It turned out that they owned car dealerships, which they were trying to sell. Yeah. They also had Tesco Bank and Tesco Mobile and the, which is the Clubcard staff, amongst other couple names Um, brilliant company to work for. Incredibly dedicated team. Again, because their location is in the home counties and there’s not a lot of treasury jobs up there, so people who joined tended to stay, which was both good and bad.

Mike: And what did you learn there? I mean, you went in there from BHP, large- Yes … multinational. You know, Tesco is, as you say, is a shop. It’s a grocer. That’s it. That’s your business. Get back to nuts and bolts. What was that like? I think I learned to relax, which is probably a bad thing. Um, it’s, it’s not a great term, but it’s not everything will work the way you think it needs to work, or the way it will work, and you have to work around it.

Luke: And also, so BHP was incredibly driven by efficiency. Tesco was driven by relationships, so you had to be able to work with people to get things done. You couldn’t just brute force your way through it like you could in BHP through the mantra of efficiency. You actually had to be able to influence people and tell them why it was in their best interest to do this, and how could they win by doing this.

Mike: And you talked there as well about systems, and that’s a big thing for you. When you were- Yeah … at Tesco, what was it like systems-wise and stuff? Was there- Yeah … lots of good stuff, or? So we started off with Quantum. We took it out, and we put in Finda because treasury was going into commodity trading. ‘Cause the simplest thing is Tesco has these simple value meals, which is sandwich, crisps, and a drink for, how much is it now?

Luke: Two- is it still 2.89 or something? I don’t know. Yeah. I haven’t lived in the UK for a while. But if you could manage the cost of butter and cheese, and cut half a cent off a sandwich through commodity trading, the savings were immense. So treasury was partnering with the commodities team to do commodity, not really trading, but pre-purchasing at a good price commodities for non-physical delivery.

Luke: And we put in a treasury system that could do that, and we’d do, like, wheat, sugar, butter, milk solids. So any day we would have a system that would settle buying and selling euros- Commercial paper and butter all on the one team Wow And that was very interesting to put in and build. Again, we had a really good project management team there, some really good consultants who helped us out, which again built upon my experience with Swift.

Luke: But I remember the first question I asked at the interview for Tesco, which I think got their attention, was, “Do you know where all your cash is?” And I remember the people hiring, during the hiring look at me, looking at each other going, “We probably don’t.” Wow. So that was one of the first things we did was where is all the cash?

Mike: Do we know how much? Do we know where it is? How much can we get to? Every penny, every euro, everything. Every penny. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, so you went through that, and that was a transformation process at the time with Linda. What then… What came next with, and then how come the next move to CBRE and things?

Luke: At the end of- Was it end of 2018, or was it the end of 2019? It was the end of 2019. I’d gotten bored of the UK and I wanted to go home to Australia. Looking in hindsight, maybe I should have just gone home for a month and then come back refreshed, but no, I went, “I’ve had enough.” So, moved, packed up everything and went home.

Luke: I was back in Australia living in my parents’ house, and then within a week a job came up at CBRE as their treasury manager for APAC. And I looked at it, I went, “That’s interesting. It’s in my hometown, it’s a large multinational.” You say that, but who are CBRE? Okay. CBRE, we are a commercial real estate company.

Luke: So we’re in over 100 countries. We’ve got about 155,000 employees. We cover over 90 of the Fortune 100 companies in the world, providing real estate services. We do everything from leasing and sales of everything from data centers, to high-rise buildings, to golf courses, to hotels, to shopping malls- Anything commercial real estate, it’s, you got- Biomedical labs, anything.

Luke: We also have a division that looks after the running of buildings. So you think a building, it needs landscaping, it needs receptions, it needs cafeterias, it needs cleaning, it needs someone who can come in and fix the generators. We do all of that. Then there’s the investment side where we put together investment trusts, real estate investment trusts for pension funds, young people to invest in.

Luke: And there’s project management. There’s a company called Turner & Townsend who does project management for building of airports, and bridges, and large things. Then we own home builders and builders like Trammell Crow in the US. We own some large home builders in the UK as well. But basically commercial real estate, anything to do with commercial real estate.

Luke: It’s a matrix of a company where everything’s kind of interlinked but runs separately. So I got home, the job advert came up. Treasury market’s not particularly deep in Australia. Most Australian companies treasuries are in Singapore or London. And then I got the job. Within two weeks I was in LA meeting the team and going to the Christmas party, which I think was the main purpose.

Luke: And real estate, yeah, suddenly COVID, boom, lockdown. COVID, lockdown. Now, I was in Queensland, Australia, which was slightly different, but, you know, there was still some lockdowns. So again, I had to learn how to negotiate a different company- Negotiate all the different personalities, negotiate how this place worked, because again, BHP was very efficiency.

Luke: Tesco was very customer-focused. Everything was focused on reducing cost to the customer. CBRE is very much consensus-driven because there’s these large, we call them pillars, of different businesses like sales and leasing, building operations, investments, project management that are all run separately across those different pillars.

Luke: And then again, each country has the different pillars built within it, and you’re trying to get consensus across pillars, across countries, across regions. So how did you do it? You have to be very clear what you want to do and why, and what is in it for them. Now, it can either be what’s in it for them or what’s in it for the company.

Luke: Like you say, “If we do this, we can bring back three hundred million dollars,” let’s say. That’s difficult to argue against because, you know, if they say, “Oh, it means I need to put an extra person on in a shared service center to do the reconciliations,” go, “Well, what’s that going to cost me? Twenty thousand versus three hundred million.”

Luke: It’s all about being clear what you want and having a consistent message and trying to anticipate what– and sometimes a bit of bullying helps. I think that’s, that’s the way I’ve been doing it, is showing how they win or how everyone wins by doing this. ‘Cause I think if you go in with, “Oh, we want to do this, but we don’t– but this and this,” barriers will start popping up.

Luke: There’ll be a hundred reasons why they can’t do it. There’s always a hundred reasons. You know, it’s too difficult. We don’t have time. It’s going to increase my headcount. I need to change my processes, these sort of things. But in some ways, if you can show it as this is beneficial for everyone, yes, there’s going to be some pain, but let’s talk about it.

Luke: You just want to be heard, and yes, we hear you. We understand you. We sympathize. However, the greater good is this. And particularly in a company where you require a lot of consensus- This is what I found works. So the more time you spend up front crafting your message, crafting why you’re doing it, the less fights you’ll have on the other end.

Mike: And also, anytime anyone says there’s legal or regulatory restrictions, ask them to point them to you and get an external counsel and charge it to their cost center. Love it. That, that very quickly goes away. Yeah. So then, you know, you were coming out of, you were doing Asia Pac and the Middle East then, and can you just then more up to date, what’s happened in the past few years if you like?

Luke: Then we had a new treasurer. So when I was originally hired in CBRE, the treasurer there was Debbie Fann. And Debbie, again, I keep on running into this, had been there for, like, 25 years as treasurer. Then Debbie retired, then we went through a lot of interim treasurers internally until they got someone from external, which was, uh, Xu Hanjun from Kinley Clark.

Luke: Xu was based in Dallas, and I was doing some work on creating cash forecasting for APAC. I got that up and running. I look at it now- It’s horrible. It was all done on Excel and, like, do you remember in Excel the little button where you could press it and then it would record what you did and then you could replay it back and it would do it all for you?

Luke: Like, little cashflow costing based on that and VBA. Looking at it now, that’s horrible. Then she said, “Well,” she was reorganizing the team and said, “Do you wanna look after all the regions?” And I went, “Okay.” And then it was a case of you can do Americas in the morning, you can do APAC during the day, and you can do EMEA at night.

Mike: Nice. 24-hour a day. Lovely. And then she asked, “Do you wanna move to Dallas?” And I went, “No.” And she said, “Okay.” And she kept on asking, “Do you wanna move to Dallas?” And eventually I said yes. Why? A couple of things. One, moving from London back to Brisbane, Australia, Brisbane was quiet and there wasn’t a lot going on.

Luke: Yes, I just bought a new house, bought a new car, done all the things I was meant to do, but it was quiet, so I wanted something new and exciting. And two, the hours were killing me. I’d get on at 5:00 in the morning and still be on there at 11:00 at night, and this was just six days a week and it was constant.

Mike: And it wasn’t good for the other teams either, ’cause, you know, I’d only be available for, like, three hours or three to four hours in the afternoon for the US, or a couple hours for Europe. Well, you and I talked about this. I remember when we used to do lots of Singapore, which we don’t anymore, but one of the worst bits was, was getting up sometimes for doing interviews at, like, 5:30 in the morning, do it till, like, 9:00 o’clock and everyone was, “Oh, wow.”

Mike: And that’s when the UK day, day started, and then about 12:00 o’clock New York comes on, then the West Coast, and it was just, like, crazy hours. As you say, you can do it for a period if you know it’s that, but not long term. So what happened? Yeah. So eventually I said yes, and then I moved to Dallas. I’ll say my role in CBRE and treasury is…

Luke: It’s easier to explain what I don’t do. CBRE treasury is kind of divided up into three groups. First group is projects, so we have a little team- And they’re really good. The second team is capital markets, and they do long-term debt and strategic FX and internal capital management, so intercompany loans. I look after everything else.

Luke: So all the regional teams, the FX, the back office, a lot of the systems, the trade, the trade finance, all the admin work. Yeah. Everything that’s not one of those other things. So I’ve got a team of 35, somewhere around there, in the 30s. The teams in Singapore, London, Latin America, and across North America in various places.

Luke: And yeah, so I’m based in Dallas, and I look after all that because our head office is in Dallas. The treasurer is up in New York because the CFO is in New York. I go up there occasionally, but more often they come on down to head office, so… This podcast, as you may have worked out, has no sponsors, has no ads.

Mike: 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.

Mike: 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.

Mike: 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 you’ve worked across all these regions, Australia, UK, now US. Yes. You’ve got this global view on treasury leadership. How has that shaped your approach, if you like?

Luke: I think it’s understanding what the cultural norms are. Like managing in Latin America is very different to managing in Singapore. Managing in North America is very different to managing in Europe. It’s understanding what are the cultural norms and understanding who your team is and what’s important to them.

Luke: Like, I have some team members who just wanna rush forward as fast as possible and achieve, achieve, achieve. That’s great, I manage them in a certain way. I’ve got other people who are there, they’re embedded within the business, and who want to keep everything nice and safe and secure and stable as we move forward together, which is a different form of management.

Mike: So it’s all about understanding your team and the cultural expectations, because again, the businesses run differently depending upon which region they’re in. When you do that, how do you adjust your approach if you’re having to, well, hang on, I’m focused on Asia-Pac now, I need to do it this way, or doing US, these guys.

Luke: How do you find it? I almost mold myself to what they need. So for example, in LATAM there’s a lot of listening, because I understand LATAM, but I don’t understand it in the amount of detail they understand it. So like when we start talking about cambios in Brazil or, you know, the regulatory requirements out of Colombia, my people there are the experts, so I just listen and just help them think through their problems and they know the solutions and they do it.

Luke: That’s what they need. They don’t need me coming in and saying, “Do X, Y, and Z,” because, one, I’ll be wrong, and two, I’ll just frustrate them. So we’ve got that side. Whereas we have US. US is very much… The team we have is, is split into two kind of groups. One is the, we wanna rush forward and make everything better like right now, which is me slowing them down.

Luke: And most of these are young guys who are analysts who have discovered the wonders of AI and Claude and think they can solve all the problems of the world, and my job partially is to slow them down and go, “That’s great. Let’s do this, but have you thought about how it interacts with this and this? Or let’s finish this before you move on to the next great idea.”

Luke: Yeah, and it’s not being an obstacle to that, but it’s having a questioning mindset. Yeah. And that’s- They’re going, “Okay, you’ve done this. Have you documented it? ‘Cause I know you haven’t, and in two years’ time no one’s gonna know how it works. Document it now while it’s still fresh, before you run off and do something else.”

Mike: Now, you just touched on the AI technology, and you and I talked before the show. Let’s just cover that for a short period, but then- Yeah … I wanted to dive more into leadership and teams, ’cause that, as you say, that’s more of what you wanna do. I think AI is amazing, but it’s a tool. That’s all it is, it’s a tool.

Luke: It’s a means of becoming more efficient at getting data quicker and analyzing data in a better way. It’s never gonna replace having to go to senior leadership and saying, “We have a risk. This is how we’re going to manage it. Trust me to manage it.” What it will do is it will take what the data we have, analyze it much faster than we could have previously, come up with sometimes very interesting analytics out of it, sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong, and present it very quickly.

Luke: The example I like to tell everyone is, like every large company, we used to have a business intelligence department. They, they used to do BI reports, and you put in your request and say, “It has to do X, Y, and Z.” Two months later you get back the first draft, then you spend the next three months trying to make it work.

Luke: You get it right, and then six months later it fell over when the data feed stopped. Now we can do that in 10 minutes in Claude. It’s just made life a whole lot easier. So it’s just ways of changing. We’re also using it as a means of improving processes. So one of the things we did was we went to a lot of the team members and said, “What’s the most annoying thing about your job?

Luke: What’s the repetitive thing that takes time that’s the most annoying? Let’s automate that through Claude. Let’s have Claude do it. Free your time up. Your time is more valuable.” Now, again, we had to build a little bit of trust here. We had to put out some principles, and one of the principles was, if we make your job more efficient and free up your time, we will not throw more work on top of you.

Luke: Otherwise, why would you make yourself more efficient? You know? You’ve got something comfortable going at the moment. Why, why, why make it more efficient and why load yourself up? So the agreement we had was when you make yourself more efficient, that frees you up time to do more strategic things rather than just more churn, and that’s worked really nicely.

Luke: So an example of that is funding specific bank accounts around the world. We used to have someone whose job… Well, she’s still there. Her job used to be looking at every bank account, their current balance, what their forecast was for the next two to three days, and working out how much to fund or defund.

Mike: And when you have… How many bank accounts do we have? On the corporate side, we have about 1,400 bank accounts. On the other side, there’s tens of thousands. Well, the corporate bit, there’s 1,400 or so. That was a large job, just going, churning, double check, double check, how much. That can all be done by Claude really quickly.

Luke: Free up her time. Her time is more valuable than that. And I think part of this is recognizing that AI is a tool that frees up a more valuable resource. The more valuable resource is the team’s time. Yeah, Claude is not the value here. The team’s time is the value, and AI is just the method of getting at that value So we’re currently doing lots of little things.

Luke: I’ve also got a couple of guys who are trying to rework the entire cash forecasting process thought. I went, “That’s great. Work out the principles. We all agree on the principles, and then g- go and play. Just play around with it. You, you can’t break anything. Just go play.” ‘Cause again, I think one of the things is, I think in five years’ time there’s gonna be two kinds of people in treasury, those people who use AI and those that don’t, and I want my team to be all the people that use AI.

Mike: Because it makes them more efficient, more effective? And it also helps with retention. If I can give people the opportunity to learn and grow, they will start to love it, everything else being equal. And it’s not just the techie guys who do this. So I’ve got another lady who one of, one of her jobs was collating all of the bank fees reports.

Luke: All the regions would put together their bank fees, put them in Excel, and she’d get all the Excels and put them together and come up with the report. Her thought project was, how do we do that with the push of a button through Claude? And she built it. Wow. So we taught her how to use Claude, and then she went away and played with it, and then a month later came back with a way of grabbing all the source data up into a single report with analytics off to the side, various analysis, all the rest, through Claude, all done, and she built it herself.

Mike: And was she really technical before? No. Or was this something you… Talk us through that journey then, because how do you get someone that’s non-technical, great in treasury, but then give them the tools? How do you do that? Part of it is having team members who are curious, and again, having that agreement that if you do it, you’re not gonna lose by doing it.

Luke: You’re gonna win. You’re gonna win by having these skills and doing all this stuff and making your life better, and we will support you on that journey. This particular lady, she’s been in treasury a, a fair while. She’s very, very good at what she does, and we gave her the opportunity and she leapt at it.

Luke: And then we partnered her up with one of our other team members who’s really good at Claude. I- if you’ve Claude as general AI, and together they ran off and did it. And she was very proud of what she did, and we went, “That’s amazing. Keep on refining. Document what it is, how it works.” And it saved her hours a month.

Luke: Went, “That, that’s the first one you’ve done. What’s the next one you want to do?” And she’s got the next one lined up, I think, already. But, you know, if you do this across 10 employees who are just all doing their own little projects, the thing starts to snowball. You save four hours here, four hours there, you know, that’s a day over there- It all just starts to snowball.

Luke: The difficult bit is how are we going to link it all up eventually? Maybe we do or maybe we don’t. Because something else we’ve recently done is we’ve recently put in a new, a new TMS system. So that went live in February. And we looked at that almost through an AI lens as well, looking at if we know AI’s coming, how do we build a TMS system that can take best advantage of that?

Luke: And how do we define what’s in the TMS and what’s in AI? So we went for what we consider a bare bones TMS, which again is Integrity and just the main modules. And when it’s gonna be a repository of information, it’s gonna be a standard repository and, like, a lot of our reporting will come out of AI. A lot of the analytics will come out of AI, therefore we don’t need a lot of the other modules.

Mike: And just, sorry, just to dive in there, and again using that lady as an example but just in general, how has your leadership style evolved as you’ve, you know, moved across from managing… You talk about there managing processes, if you like, but now you’re- Yeah … leading gl- and teams and global functions. How have you, you know, reflect back on you as a leader?

Luke: I look back, it’s a very interesting journey, ’cause I was so used to getting in there, getting my hands dirty, and understanding everything And then realizing I couldn’t do that anymore, and I had to trust my team, and that’s really difficult. It’s really difficult. But if I jump in, it shows I have no trust in them.

Luke: I can act as a sounding board, I can talk through problems and issues they’re having, I can offer suggestions, I can provide leadership of where we’re going, but at the end of the day, I need to trust the team, and I need them to know that they’re trusted. Does this always work? Not always, ’cause some people thrive in that situation where they’re just given a direction and off they go.

Mike: Other people need constant course corrections, reassurance, pep talks. So I think what I’ve realized is it’s really difficult for me to step back and not control everything. Yeah. So when you’re hiring, what qualities are you looking for in those treasury folks? It depends upon the level. Okay. So we just recently hired a new senior analyst in Dallas, or an analyst, and what I’m looking for is curiosity.

Luke: I can teach you treasury, that’s not a big issue, but I can’t teach you soft skills. I can’t teach you how to articulate a problem. I can’t teach you to be curious. I can’t teach you how to talk to people. So how do you assess that at interview, though? I use a couple of questions. Like, one of the ones I use is, “Tell me what you’re most proud of achieving at work.”

Luke: And just to see if they can articulate what they’ve done and what they’re proud of and why. Curiosity is an interesting one. That tends to happen in the chat before and after the interview. You know, do they ask the right questions? Do they ask any questions? You know, are they interested in, like, what are we doing in the AOS space, or is all their questions about salary, conditions, and all the rest?

Luke: And being articulate is an interesting one because, you know, one of the other questions we always ask is, “CBRE is a company that works a lot upon consensus, and sometimes you have to deal with difficult people. Can you tell me a time when you’ve had to deal with a difficult person, and how did you bring them around to what you required them to do?”

Luke: You ask specifically what you want Like, I don’t care if you know how to do an FX trade or not. I can teach you that, or I’ll get you on Bloomberg and say, “Pick best price, hit this button here and that button there.” I can teach all that. I cannot teach curiosity or being articulate … that mindset. So you know, what, you know, if someone was wanting to follow a similar path to yourself and you’re reflecting on it, and, you know- Yeah

Mike: you and I, we had a beer and, you know, we caught up in Texas and stuff. What advice would you say to someone who, they say, “I’m gonna do a similar role to you.” What, what do you say to them? Oh, when opportunities come up, say yes. If someone says, “Do you wanna be on this project?” say yes. If someone says, “Do you, do you want to do this?”

Luke: just say yes and throw yourself at it. Don’t be scared of back office, because everything goes through there. You get to see everything. Don’t be scared of middle office. Don’t be scared of corporate finance. Throw yourself at it. People are really generally nice and wanna help you succeed. And is that what’s helped you?

Luke: You’ve made all these international moves. You’ve done Australia, the UK- Yeah, the US … and back to Australia, look- I, I’ve done, I’ve done work in South Africa. I’ve done work- Yeah … in Chile. It’s always saying yes. Your default is yes. If a project comes up, default to yes, and look at it as a chance to learn, because you can always go back to what you were doing before.

Luke: But these opportunities don’t come up very often, and when they do, you grab them. And another interesting skill, which I think is undervalued, particularly in treasury, is project management. So I’ve been through three TMS implementations. All have been on time, on budget, without major issues. And just seeing the project management skills and those organizational skills, and how…

Luke: I don’t know what it’s called anymore, but, and, you know, breaking down projects into tiny little issues, dealing with that Deal with the next little issue, deal with the next little issue. And even taking that and taking it over to then the treasury. Something’s happened, let’s break it down into little bits and pieces and deal with the little bits and pieces- Mm

Luke: rather than trying to deal with the problem as a whole. So picking up skills wherever you can. And then I think the other thing is, a lot of people get into treasury and become specialists. They’re, like, hyper-specialized in corporate debt or in FX trading, whereas I’ve always been a generalist. I float in between everything.

Luke: I can do- Yeah … a little bit of everything. I know how to do the in-depth stuff, but I need to do some research and do a few things. Mm. I’ve found being a generalist is more beneficial than being a specialist, ’cause again, most of the people you deal with are not in treasury. They’re in controllership or in accounting or in legal or in tax, and they don’t care how hyper-specialized you are in treasury.

Mike: They want to know you understand a little bit about what they do. About their, and you share their story. Yeah, about their problems. As we move towards the end, we’re going to put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. Good. And the others are very come with the time. What takeaway, someone sitting there with their coffee and, you know, junior staff, mid or senior level, what takeaways are you going to give them today?

Luke: I think treasury is a people business, both internally and externally. Everyone from your external bankers, having great relationships with them really makes a difference when times get tough. So screwing them over on yield today, it may feel good, but when things get tough or things are going wrong, sometimes that’s not the best way to deal, do things.

Luke: Again, it’s all about your relationships with them. They can put their neck on the line for you if they want, or they may not. The same thing with people internally. Having the best relationships you can with people buys you a lot of goodwill and a lot of trust. Because the best bit of advice I was ever given was by a boss when I was about 21 or 22.

Luke: He’s- told me, “Never annoy the PA network, ’cause they can get you in to see people or they can stop you from seeing people.” They’re the ones who hold the power, is to be nice to them. It’s the same thing everywhere else. If you are a trusted partner to tax or to legal or to the business, that will get you further than having the best rapport- best analytics.

Mike: It’s being a trusted partner and understanding the business. Understanding what their issues are will get you further than anything else. Luke, amazing to chat to you, sir. Thank you very much for your time today. Really appreciate connecting, sir. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Mark. Thanks. Before we finish, a quick reminder.

Mike: We’ve got a few discounts could save you some money. First, if you’re heading to EuroFinance in Barcelona this September, you get 10% off your registration through the Treasury Recruitment company. Then in November, I’ll be speaking at the AFP National Conference in Las Vegas. You can also access a discount on your conference registration.

Mike: I know, you’re welcome. There are also discounts available for CTP and FPAC qualifications. And don’t forget, you can earn official CTP credits simply by listening to any of our Treasury Career Corner podcast episodes, and complete the short quiz afterwards. You’ll find all the details, codes, and links on our partners page at treasuryrecruitment.com/partners.

Mike: Go have a look, use the

Mike: discounts, and let’s save you some money. Many thanks