Leading Global Treasury Across Finance, Technology, Consumer Products, Sports and Entertainment | Treasury Careers Podcast

Mike Richards, CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company: In this week’s show, you’ll get to hear from Garima Taur, the Global Treasurer at Creative Artist Agency. Have a quick listen,

Garima Thakur, Global Treasurer and Risk Leader at Creative Artists Agency, CAA: I think for my peers and, and how I’m thinking about it and in my role as treasurer it in in this really varies by company and industry. Of course. Yeah. But I think being mindful of who your stakeholders are.

Garima Thakur: And what is the measurable impact that you, you are driving for those stakeholders? For treasury, liquidity management is one of the most important things we do. Not just on a real time basis, but on a forward looking basis as well, to be mindful and thoughtful around scenario planning. So you’re not waiting for things to happen.

Garima Thakur: And of course there will be surprises. We adapt. That’s what we do. I mean, we have the strikes in the entertainment industry. Certain industries are more impacted than others by the the tariff talks. So there are things that are happening that will impact some treasury teams more than others, but. As much as possible if we can, you know, try to be forward looking and prepared.

Garima Thakur: In terms of scenario, treasury is a high stakes environment, particularly in cash management and treasury operations. Once you hit send on that payment, it’s out there, so mistakes can be very costly. But the first thing you, you say when you observe a mistake is, is the, like, we all do this, right? The postmortem of like, how did this happen?

Garima Thakur: What happened? How can we first stop the bleeding? But then how do you make sure this doesn’t happen again? Where did the process break? And I think when you approach learning with that lens of walking the team through those steps of where did it break? Do we understand it? How are we gonna fix it? How do we make sure the mistake doesn’t happen again?

Mike Richards: Welcome to this week’s Treasury Career Corner podcast, where I interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I’ll talk to treasurers about how they build 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 Richards: In this week’s show, I’m joined by Garima Tako, the Global Treasurer and Risk Leader at Creative Artist Agency, CAA, founded in 1975 and headquartered in Los Angeles. The creative artist agencies, one of the most foremost entertainment and sports agencies globally. Named the Most Valuable Sports Agency by Forbes for nine consecutive years.

Mike Richards: CAA represents more than 2000 of the world’s top athletes in football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, in addition to coaches on air broadcasters and sports personalities and works in the areas broadcast rights. Corporate marketing initiatives, social impact and sports properties for sales and sponsorship opportunities, but that we’re gonna come back to later in the show.

Mike Richards: Garima, if you would take us back to the beginning of your career and how you discovered finance and then the wonderful world that it’s treasury. Over to you.

Garima Thakur: Thanks for having me, Mike. Sure. Let me tell you how I got into the world of finance and treasury. I am originally from India, born and brought up there.

Garima Thakur: I did my undergrad studies in India in engineering, so very different specialty. I was a electronics and telecommunications engineer. I worked in India for a few years and then. Decided to pursue my MBA, which is what brought me to the us and I pursued my finance MBA at Thunderbird School of Global Management, which is now part of a SU, and it was during my MBA program that I was offered a treasury internship at Western Union.

Garima Thakur: I’ll be honest with you, Mike, I did. I had no clue at the time what a treasury function did, but Western Union hired me as their first treasury intern, so it was a new program they were developing, and it was a terrific program. It was a rotational internship across four different areas in treasury cash management.

Garima Thakur: Debt, capital markets compliance and foreign exchange.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Garima Thakur: And I got to spend about one to two months in each of the, the programs and that really gave me my first, you know, window into what does a corporate treasury function do. And I couldn’t have picked a better one ’cause it’s, it’s a huge treasury team there and so many different areas within Treasury that I got exposure to.

Garima Thakur: I actually ended up extending that internship. I walked away from that. Experience and came back to business school, uh, you know, aligned that treasury is what I want to pursue.

Mike Richards: So you gained those foundations in treasury, but why did you think, hang on, treasury is for me? Or what was it that lit you up if you like and thought, actually this is a place I want to be in?

Garima Thakur: That is such a good question. I, I think. The thing about treasury that I find very interesting, even till date, if you ask me what do I enjoy the most about treasury or what has kept me in this space for as long as it has it, it’s really how central it is to the business, and that is something I picked up on pretty quickly when I was at Western Union.

Garima Thakur: Strategy requires cash or capital to execute, and treasury plays that role of stewardship for that liquidity. You are right in the middle of strategic initiatives. You are also supporting day-to-day operations, and you end up working with nearly every function across the company. That combination is what I found really interesting of being.

Garima Thakur: Close to strategy, execution, and the business itself. And that’s what makes treasury such a unique and exciting function for me.

Mike Richards: Yeah. And then you, as you said, you went back to Thunderbird and obviously education, I know has played a, a big part of, in your career with, you know, a lot of the different things you’ve done.

Mike Richards: But you know that, did you find that you, that was filling in the gaps and then, right now let’s find my treasury career, or what happened next?

Garima Thakur: Yeah. What happened next was the financial crisis. Yeah. So graduating post financial crisis was not a great time to be changing a career path. Yeah. And for me, that’s what this was.

Garima Thakur: I was trying to get into a new area of. Treasury. After doing my MBA in finance, I was very fortunate. It took a while that I got hired or started my full-time treasury career after that internship as a treasury analyst for a publicly traded company in, in California that was a conglomerate e-commerce businesses.

Garima Thakur: The company was called United Online, and the, the. Great thing about that opportunity was it was a very lean team. It was basically me and one other person,

Mike Richards: right?

Garima Thakur: And I got to wear multiple hats in that job. I started off with cash management, but I also quickly learned investments, foreign exchange, hedge accounting.

Garima Thakur: Unclaimed property management, debt, capital markets, financial reporting. There was no, this doesn’t belong in treasury, so I’m not doing it because we were such a lean team in finance and they took a shot at me and gave me this opportunity and I was like a sponge. Just learning it all and enjoying it along the way.

Garima Thakur: So that opportunity was somewhat unique because if you think about a, a very large treasury function. By nature, they have to be more siloed. And I have had an opportunity to lead large functions like that more recently at Ingram Micro, where you cannot have one person wear so many hats. You have to have things more siloed because the operations are so large.

Garima Thakur: So I think starting off in a smaller operation gave me that incredible breadth across treasury on so many different areas within treasury. And then it was later on in my career as I. Continued on. I went to LPL Financial. Which is a publicly traded broker, broker dealer in San Diego. I went and joined them as Treasury Manager next, and I left them as their assistant treasurer and only to, it was a terrific company, one of my favorite places to be, but I.

Garima Thakur: It was hard to pass up the opportunity to go be the first treasurer of Tailormade Golf Company. They used to be part of Adidas, and were going standalone under p sponsorship for the first time and needed a treasurer to come in and build out a treasury function from the ground up, which is a very unique opportunity.

Garima Thakur: So I, I went and did that. I then, as I said earlier, led the treasury function also for Ingram Micro, which is a large global technology distribution company, and close to about five years back I came to CA, a creative artist agency and, and you introduced the company upfront, but it’s a, a terrific place to be.

Garima Thakur: Very similar to Tailormade. I came in and stood a treasury function from the ground up five years back, and it’s been an incredibly rewarding position.

Mike Richards: So you’ve, you know, and again, I’ve got you sort of your background here, that you’ve gone really broad and, you know, generalist, treasury, and then you’ve become much more LPL more, you know, narrower and, you know, set of responsibilities and things through capital markets, and then become this global treasurer obviously with tailor made of things.

Mike Richards: But picking out any of those moves there, if you like, rather than d di diving too deep in them. But there any things that you had, you know, as a guiding light, if you like, that you were your North Star. Because if someone’s listening today and they’re, you know, a treasury professional in a, on a similar journey, what was guiding you or what was, you know, you thinking, right, I need to keep doing this, or actually I don’t want to do that stuff, or that’s not gonna help me in the future.

Mike Richards: What was you, how did you drive forward that way?

Garima Thakur: I’ll really credit my journey successes, but also, you know, learnings along the way to the sponsors and mentors I’ve had, and it’s been so many of them from the MBA program till date. Like I said earlier, I was born and brought up in India. My whole family is still there.

Garima Thakur: So when I moved here, I moved for career for education, and as I was working in different companies. My colleagues were not just my colleagues, they were also my mentors, friends, my network and my support system. So I benefited a lot from, from those folks along, along the way in my journey. And I’ve been very fortunate to learn from people who challenged me, advocated for me, and helped broaden how I think about leadership and finance.

Garima Thakur: I’ve always followed the mantra of knowledge is power. You mentioned education earlier, and it’s, it’s very, very important. Yeah. Investing in learning, asking questions, and truly understanding the business has made a very big difference in my career. And finally, I, I’ll say I’ve been very intentional about diversifying my experience within treasury.

Garima Thakur: I talked about this a little bit earlier, and rather than staying in one lane, so getting exposure. If you think about treasury as an area, the bread and butter of treasury and the core of any function, any treasury function, what they do is treasury, operations, or cash management.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Garima Thakur: You then build on that.

Garima Thakur: There could be, do they have debt? It’s debt capital markets. Where does insurance and risk management sit? So. It then starts to build. And for some of these areas like debt capital markets and risk management, you know, it helps to go deeper and you have to have, you have to be a subject matter expertise or have a subject matter expertise on your team you can rely on.

Garima Thakur: So I, I think as I’ve gone. Through my career journey. It started off pretty broad. Great, wearing multiple hats. But then as I’ve gone through different roles, I’ve really taken some of these complex areas within treasury, like. Debt capital markets, hedging, hedge accounting, investing, investor relations, debt management, all of these, and become a subject matter expert in those.

Garima Thakur: And that doesn’t mean you don’t know it all. It’s, you know when to ask the right questions. You know, the fundamentals in that variety has really helped me grow. It’s helped me stay adaptable and continue to add value as I’ve. Gone across and evolved across roles and industries.

Mike Richards: How did you get the role of global treasury?

Mike Richards: You know, you’ve been at Ingram Micro and then LPL Financial, then you’ve done Telemate golf with private equity creative artists. I know that people say treasury is agnostic about industry. You can move across, but how come you’ve managed to secure this role?

Garima Thakur: It is very different. Yeah, so I, I mean, I had worked in sports before, right.

Garima Thakur: I had experience with tailor-made golf companies. I’d experience with sports, but not with entertainment.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Garima Thakur: The company had reached out to me and it was a really interesting opportunity. There was a lot going on here and I was very impressed with the team. But your industry point is a really interesting one.

Garima Thakur: I started off with. Financial services, money movement at Western Union went into broker dealer. I also did e-commerce. I’ve done sports manufacturing, technology distribution, and now entertainment and sports.

Mike Richards: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like,

Garima Thakur: yes, there are aspects of treasury that are consistent and you know, basic across all industries because it applies.

Garima Thakur: But there are some very unique things about each of these industries as well, that from a treasury standpoint have been very, you know. Good. Challenge to learn and learn a new industry, learn a new aspect of treasury within that industry. For example, financial, the broker dealer industry is, is a highly regulated one.

Garima Thakur: There is a concept of reserve requirement that the treasury team has to maintain there on a weekly basis. You don’t see that in other industries. The technology distribution industry is a low margin business. A very heavy focus on working capital that I have not, had not worked so heavily on working capital management in any of my prior roles until I got to Ingram.

Garima Thakur: Micro Entertainment has its own nuances around how money flows through a talent agency. So each of these has been unique and different, but that’s what keeps things interesting.

Mike Richards: So. Obviously a natural move for you. You’ve touched on sports and, but then you have brokering, you’ve got, you know, technology and things like that.

Mike Richards: Now you’re in talent agency. When I’ve spoken to other treasurers in similar industries, the variety is just, you know, it makes your head spin sometimes. Is it similar there or what, what’s it like? What’s the interest level there?

Garima Thakur: We are a fast-paced industry and you know, if you’re following the industry, you’ve also seen, you know, a couple of years back we had the, the strikes in the industry.

Garima Thakur: Yes. So we navigated that. Of course, you know, the pandemic and COVID impacted everyone and, and we navigated through that. So it’s a fast-paced environment which keeps treasury engaged to support the business. There’s a lot of new technology that, that we support as well for our clients and where treasury can help.

Garima Thakur: We step in there as well. You know, it’s, it’s also something to keep in mind, and I mentioned this earlier, is we are a relatively new treasury function, right? And we are still in that phase of kind of building out and right sizing the treasury function. Which is on top of all the fast-paced environment that we are in, keeps us additionally busy because we are still building out the fundamentals and processes still being a four to 5-year-old treasury function

Mike Richards: and with yourself, you know.

Mike Richards: How have you then seen your role evolving as the treasurer with, you know, AI technologies? You know, it’s, it is marching, it’s, it’s not stopping, you know, it is like literally, if anything, it’s accelerating. How are you seeing that affect your day-to-day role, or how are you, you know, planning for it with you and the team and things?

Garima Thakur: I think the future of treasury will be heavily shaped by technology, especially ai. We’re already seeing how powerful it can be for areas like cash forecasting. And I say we, I don’t mean necessarily at my current company, but just broader statement for treasury professionals in cash forecasting, scenario modeling compliance, capital markets, there’s so many use cases in helping teams.

Garima Thakur: Analyze data faster and with greater precision. Of course, it still has its drawbacks and you know, challenges around hallucinations. It’s not perfect and requires heavy focus on human judgment.

Mike Richards: Mm-hmm.

Garima Thakur: What excites me most is the opportunity to use AI as an enabler to improve visibility, efficiency, and decision making.

Garima Thakur: While still recognizing that it’s a tool, it’s not a replacement for human judgment, strategic thinking, experience and context will always be critical, but I think that combination of strong treasury professionals and technology is where the real transformation is going to happen. And we’re already seeing signs of this.

Mike Richards: One of the things I was gonna mention was you won some awards when that was one of the reasons why I originally approached yourself. When you were hitting the headlines in, in a very positive manner, what, what’s that been like for you guys? You know, winning, you know, you won this Alexander Hamilton Award.

Mike Richards: Can you talk us through that as well?

Garima Thakur: I think it’s important for the team’s efforts to be recognized. Yeah. And I give a hundred percent credit for this to my team, and we were lucky to, to be selected. We received the Alexander Hamilton Award for CAA in the treasury transformation category, which is a great recognition of the team efforts and the change we were able to drive over the last four to five years of, like I said earlier, being a a.

Garima Thakur: A new treasury function getting stood up from scratch, and some of the highlights there for us were driving a banking transformation at the same time that we were also building the treasury fundamentals around processes and procedures. And also creating a foreign exchange approach there. There is, there is a lot that the team did in a short period of time.

Garima Thakur: So it was that transformation from being scattered across different functions to being a dedicated. Treasury team that was handling debt, Campbell markets, risk management insurance, foreign exchange banking, treasury operations, payments, and the list goes on and, and I’m incredibly proud of the work that the team has done.

Mike Richards: And how do you, when you’re doing that, what’s your. Again, we talked earlier about your sort of guiding principles. Was there any particular ones there that you, when you’re talking to your peers and maybe you are interviewed and you go to, you and I both go to conferences when you’re being interviewed, you know, how do you recommend it?

Mike Richards: You know, sometimes say, right, get the cash right, then get the risks right, and then do this, or how did you drive, help drive, that sort of thing?

Garima Thakur: I think for my peers. And, and how I’m thinking about it and in my role as treasurer it in, in this really varies by company and industry. Of course. Yeah. But I think being mindful of who your stakeholders are and what is the measurable impact that you, you are driving for those stakeholders.

Garima Thakur: For treasury liquidity management is. One of the most important things we do, not just on a real time basis, but on a forward looking basis as well, to be mindful and thoughtful around scenario planning. So you’re not waiting for things to happen. And of course there will be surprises. We adapt. That’s what we do.

Garima Thakur: I mean, we have the strikes in the entertainment industry. Certain industries are more impacted than others by the the tariff talks. So there are things that are happening that will impact some treasury teams more than others, but. As much as possible if we can, you know, try to be forward looking and prepared in terms of scenario planning that helps us support the business better.

Mike Richards: Yeah,

Garima Thakur: and that’s kind of where my head is at,

Mike Richards: talking about your career if you like. So I. We, we, and we touched on it earlier that you, you had this breadth of experience in some of the earlier roles, then you became more specialized. But how important has that breadth of experience been in your own progression, and how would you recommend others follow in that footsteps?

Mike Richards: What should they be doing or what should they try and avoid, would you say?

Garima Thakur: I think it helped me tremendously. That said, you know, everybody’s career journey is different. It’s not to say that being a SME in one area is, is a bad thing. Yeah. It’s just everybody has a different career journey. What worked for me and I, I really valued, I, I would.

Garima Thakur: Recommend to others is, is to try that. To try the, try to diversify your experience within treasury as much as possible, the knowledge you gain across different areas, whether it’s cash management at capital markets, hedging, fx, corporate finance. Ir, et cetera. Look, that’s never gonna go to waste. It really strengthens your long-term career growth and focus.

Garima Thakur: Also, I would say in terms of advice, focus also on working smarter by improving processes and driving efficiency. Don’t be afraid to experiment and fail fast. Learn from your mistakes along the way. There is no prize for perfection. I think you have to be willing to try different approaches and learn from your mistakes, and then fail fast and move on.

Mike Richards: Good. But if you were in an earlier, earlier stage in your career, there might be a nervousness from those guys. How would they, you know, how have you handled it with your team? Or how do you. You know, how do you give them the, the space to do it or what, you know, again, this is an advice show. If you like you, there are other treasurers out there and they’re going, well, yeah, well we might struggle.

Mike Richards: We haven’t got that much, you know, bandwidth or we haven’t got that many people. How should they do it or how would you encourage it?

Garima Thakur: I think you have to lead by example. There is no other way really. So I cannot say one thing and do another, and if I am, then I have to be self-aware and course correct.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Garima Thakur: Again, there’s no, I’m not perfect. I make my fair share of mistakes. We all do. You have to be self-aware and if you know the tone at the top matters, the team will pick up on that. Treasury is a high stakes environment, particularly in cash management and treasury operations. Once you hit send on that payment, it’s out there, so mistakes can be very costly.

Garima Thakur: The first thing you, you say when you observe a mistake is, is the, like, we all do this, right? The postmortem of like, how did this happen? What happened? How can we first stop the bleeding? But then how do you make sure this doesn’t happen again? Where did the process break? And I think when you approach learning with that lens of walking the team through.

Garima Thakur: Those steps of where did it break? Do we understand it? How are we gonna fix it? How do we make sure the mistake doesn’t happen again? I think it’ll naturally facilitate that thinking for the team also of the mistakes. Uh. You can’t, you obviously can’t keep having mistakes frequently, but that you’ve gotta learn from them and adapt quickly and move on.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Garima Thakur: You also see sometimes in project environments especially that sometimes it just, people can get stuck and like, I don’t know how to proceed, but you’re stuck. And that’s where I would say experimenting, failing fast and trying different things and moving on versus waiting and figuring out the perfect solution.

Garima Thakur: Is, is is a mindset that we have to encourage.

Mike Richards: I understand that and I think, yeah, but when you are, you know, you are a senior treasurer and you are, you’re looking at different individuals if you like, when you are, I’m not necessarily talking about hiring, but when, when you’re looking at your team, what you know, what traits are you looking for with those people?

Mike Richards: What are you looking to sort of encourage them again? You know, how do you create that safe environment? What I mean by that is, you know, just to qualify a little bit, again, we’re an advice show. If other treasurers, you know, you’ve got this successful team, you’ve won this award recently. You’ve demonstrated it by, you know, a lot of the things you’ve just talked about.

Mike Richards: Any other tips you think that other people should be thinking about, about how they identify people and encourage them and things?

Garima Thakur: I think intellectual bandwidth, right? You can. If somebody has good intellectual bandwidth, you can generally train them on a lot of different things. Yeah. And attitude. So if, if you, you know, if you got somebody on your team who has those two things, they’re willing to learn, they have a good attitude and they have great intellectual bandwidth that that’s somebody that’s the keeper or, or you go hire them if you’re in the interview process.

Garima Thakur: Because I think those things are, are not easy to coach somebody on the whole thing about diversifying, we’re talking about, right? Yeah. If you are of the mindset that, well, this is my lane and I wanna stick in this lane. Guess what? Nothing’s wrong with that. Is totally fine. I’m not criticizing that approach, but it may not be for a small size treasury team or a fast-paced treasury team that needs things to move very, very quickly.

Garima Thakur: So I think it just depends on the setup of treasury. How big is the function? Do you have the ability to move people around and grow them, or are they going to stay in siloed? Functions within treasury or siloed areas within treasury? It depends. There is no one size fits all. But I think for me, finding somebody with good intellectual bandwidth, with the interest to learn new things and be reliable, be consistent, that that is just, you know, it, it makes for a really good hire.

Mike Richards: Anything else that we haven’t perhaps covered, you know, that you think is important that people listening today? You want them to listen to over their coffee. We’re not quite wrapping up the show, but you know, they’re, they’re having that coffee, they’re listening to this show, or they’re, you know, they’re commuting to work and they’re listening to it.

Mike Richards: What other advice would you give to the people out there?

Garima Thakur: I just wanna remind folks to not ignore the technology. Yeah. Side of treasury. AI is here to stay. Embrace it again. You know, I don’t think it’s a replacement for human judgment. But it is a incredible tool. A powerful one for areas like cash forecasting.

Garima Thakur: And I have to say, regardless of the size of the company I have, I don’t rarely meet a treasurer who doesn’t think cash forecasting is critical for their company. Right? It doesn’t matter if you’re large, small, public, private, everybody cares about the accuracy of the cash forecast. Same thing around scenario planning or compliance or capital markets.

Garima Thakur: Depending on the size of the company and the industry, some will take more of a react. Approach. Some will be proactive and that’s totally fine. But, uh, just a reminder for everyone to keep an eye on the potential that AI has to be helpful in so many different treasury processes.

Mike Richards: You’ve been very giving and some amazing advice.

Mike Richards: We’ll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. What takeaways would you give to the audience, you know, whatever level they might be, whether it’s junior or more senior?

Garima Thakur: I think if it makes sense for you, consider. Diversifying your experience within Treasury as much as possible. Look at other areas in treasury, knowledge is not gonna go to waste.

Garima Thakur: It’s going to strengthen your long-term career growth. See if it makes sense for you to get exposure to outside of cash management, maybe debt capital markets, corporate finance, hedging, investments. There’s so many interesting areas within treasury or even industries, if that’s something that makes sense for your career.

Garima Thakur: I also think focusing on technology. Embracing that where your company offers those tools, it’ll drive a lot of efficiency if you can leverage AI or other technology tools. So let’s work smart. Let’s take advantage of that and balance growth with wellness is the other thing I would say. It’ll help you stay resilient and effective over the long term.

Garima Thakur: This is a realization I’ve come to maybe towards more recent part of my career, and maybe not so much in the early part of my career, and I realize how powerful it is, especially on a personal level. Since I became a working parent recently, it’s really shaped how I operate. It’s made me much more focused on efficiency, prioritization, and using time intentionally, both at work and at home.

Garima Thakur: Frankly, look, there is no such thing as balance, I don’t think there is. It’s more on the lines of integration where there are days when you will prioritize work and there’ll be days when you’ll prioritize your personal life, and that balance is actually what makes you a stronger leader and decision maker because you’re clearer on what truly does drive impact for.

Mike Richards: Brilliant. Well thank you very much. It has been amazing conversation. We’ve covered so much different ground, so thank you very much and lovely to connect and looking forward to seeing you. Yeah, I’m sure. At a conference very soon, so, lovely. Thank you very much.

Garima Thakur: Thank you for having me. It was great to connect and happy to chat with everyone.

Mike Richards: Lovely, thank you.

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