How to Build a Treasury Function and Drive Strategic Value | Treasury Careers Podcast

Mike Richards, CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company: This week’s podcast is an update show with Ben Loper, the SVP and Treasurer at Hilton Grand Vacations. Ben and I originally spoke way back in July, 2022, and we’re catching up four years later. Fantastic to talk to Ben. One of the key things he talks about in the episode is about AI fraud and being careful.

Mike Richards: You have to be careful with your imagery, you know, whatever you have, even on LinkedIn. Actually, I’ll hand over to Ben, let him talk about it a little bit.

Ben Loper, Senior Vice President & Corporate Treasurer at Hilton Grand Vacations: Cartoon avatars are nice because obviously if a cartoon calls you that something’s up, but it is. We’re looking at all those kinds of things and really re scoping can handle money.

Ben Loper: When they can handle money, how they can handle money, why they can handle money, because the more you distribute that out into the field, certainly a business like ours, with over 200 resorts, there’s gonna be a lot of people in the field that are handling some measure of funding or vendors or vendor sign up and now.

Ben Loper: I used to say, okay, this person called me. I can do a Google. I can go to their website. I see their picture, I see ’em on video. Okay. This is really that person. Now with AI avatars and the ability to create synthetic voices, you can’t do that anymore. And even now with flawed and others, you can throw websites up very quickly.

Ben Loper: Yeah. It doesn’t take a lot of resources to completely fabricate a vendor or anything like that. And so it got just to rebate. I think I’d sent you a month ago, kind of a famous case out in Asia where someone got a quote, unquote call from the CEO and said, Hey, I need you to spend $20 million or $40 million out the door to year.

Ben Loper: And the person did it and they probably thought they were following every protocol that they have. We really put a lot of time and effort into vendor verification and vendor banking, all type of, even some of the older school methodologies around anti-fraud to help what is the very front leaning organization.

Ben Loper: We’ve got a great technology team that we do a lot. We go pilot it. Copilot Studio Power, automate all the systems and the combo of Riva and the bank put a lot of of good cards in place, but we’ve also added some of the older school anytime a, an account being, being who knows the person, what are the code words and all that kind of stuff.

Mike Richards: What we’re gonna do now is we’re gonna do the main show and then a bit later, uh, we run, run right up to 2022. And then Ben brings us up to date with what’s been happening since lots of more financing across the world, and very interesting times. So I’ll get on with the main show.

Ben Loper: 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: Delight to be joined by Ben Loper, the Senior Vice President, corporate treasurer, and head of the 2 billion asset financing business segment at Hilton Grand Vacations. Now Hilton Grand Vacations is a global timeshare company engaged in developing marketing, selling, and managing timeshare resorts underneath the Hilton Grand Vacations brand.

Mike Richards: Ben, as I say, on each and every week, enough of me it’s over to you, sir. How did you first discover finance and then Adela, say treasury?

Ben Loper: Yeah, perfect. So thanks for having me on. Excited to come on here and speak. Been a big listener of the podcast here for a long time, so it’s great to be on. Finance was new to me.

Ben Loper: I always liked economics. I started studying economics in high school. I did the AP econ and was sort of dual enrolled in college classes for econ, and then I went to Auburn University for undergrad. To study economics and I just assumed that’s what I would do. Who went through that process, took a lot of econ courses, and then my uncle, and never forget, it was like Christmas one year and he was like, there’s no jobs in economics.

Ben Loper: And I was like, what are you talking about? He was like, you have to have a PhD to have an econ job. There’s no econ jobs. And I was like, huh. And I went, there wasn’t really Google as much at the time, and I went and did some research. I was like, wow. So I had to pivot. So I started working, graduated college a year early, started working at this bank, which is now part of PNC, but at the time it was BBVA or Compass Bank.

Ben Loper: So I worked there for about a year and it was, I loved it. I learned a lot. My parents were like, you really need to go to graduate school. You, you, this isn’t gonna work. And I remember at the time thinking, I’ll just work myself up from here. I’ll be one of those stories. You started at a branch and then you’re CEO and it’s that easy.

Ben Loper: And I didn’t really realize at the time that it’s harder than that. So they were like, you gotta go, you gotta go get some kind of graduate degree. So I sort of started looking around, okay, if I wanna do banking or investment banking or really, what is finance at the time? Masters of Finance are pretty common now.

Ben Loper: There were really only, I think maybe three of them at the time. I think there was Vanderbilt, Tulane, and MIT. They were all sort of at varying levels of mathematical rigor. My wife now, but at the time, girlfriend, we’ve been together for a long time. She was a student at, in Birmingham, so actually this three hour circle around Birmingham, it was like, where can I go?

Ben Loper: What can I do? And the two best schools, I think in that circle where Emory and Vanderbilt and Emery had a two year degree and Vanderbilt had a one year degree. I’m, I actually am not a great student. I just don’t like school. The actual studying. It’s not for me.

Mike Richards: Sorry, so you were studying that, but did you then know that you were, you went in to do that study as you said, your parents said, no, you’ve gotta do this is the direction did you have then actually I’m gonna go the accounting route later, or CFA or, because I get asked this by some more junior candidates, they said, oh, what should I do?

Mike Richards: C-F-A-C-P-A? Or what do you recommend CTP? I said, yeah, they’re all great. And they’re like, oh. I said, you’ve gotta decide where you want to go or start to sort of direct it. We can’t. I can give you some advice, what I’ve seen and everything else. What were your thoughts or what, you know, where did you think, where is it gonna go next?

Mike Richards: I know it’s a while ago now, but within recollection as it were.

Ben Loper: So at the time it was 2007.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Ben Loper: And Wall Street was booming and that was gonna be awesome. And I’m like, okay, I’m going to Wall Street. So that seemed like the fastest way to get there. By the time I started graduated in 2009 from graduate school, that was not the time to be going to Wall Street.

Ben Loper: So that was what drove specifically that finance I ended up doing. Equity research and to, to your point on CFA, I have a CFA. That was the old bread and butter equity research, CFA, that’s the route that you go. It’s a very interesting industry today, economically. And where that sits, I think it’ll, the death of equity research has been over exaggerated, but it’s not like it was in the early two thousands or late nineties after the, I guess it was a Spitzer.

Ben Loper: I would recommend it to anybody to enter a career because it teaches you very quickly how to analyze companies, how to break it down, how to go to SEC filings, how to pull investor relations information, how to build a model on a lot of different companies quickly. So I benefited from the experience, but after three years, the writing on the wall was there for me.

Ben Loper: In fact, I’ll tell you a funny story. Pat Hampel at the time was the CFO of 3M. I remember somebody 3M, which you probably see it now with all this inflation, that’s like a gross margin story. So people always talk about their pricing power, right? At the time, people were like, why can’t you grow gross margin?

Ben Loper: Why can’t you do this? And hey, it was me and this guy, Ajay, who I worked and Pat, and he is, look, there’s not like a dial on my desk where I can just adjust up gross margin, right? Like I make payroll in 70 different countries. Do you have any idea how complicated just doing that is? And at that moment I thought, yeah, if I walked in his office tomorrow, short of turning on the lights, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Ben Loper: I mean, I knew nothing about running a business, being in a business, how a business runs accounting. None of it made any sense to me. There’s no change to their pension, no change to the funded this. They just changed the accounting. This is called corridor accounting. Yeah. And the stock’s up and I’m like asking my boss, why is this?

Ben Loper: And they’re like, oh, take the noise outta earnings. I’m like, but nothing changed. The economic value of the company’s unchanged. He is like, it doesn’t matter. It’ll clean up the earnings release. And I’m like, it just ain’t no sense to me. So at that point I was like, look, I’m done here. I need to go work for a company.

Ben Loper: That was really basically my brief. Three, four year, four A into Wall Street and back out into actually working for a company.

Mike Richards: And then talk me through, you did that and then, and I was just doing the research, as I said before, wall Street and then was it then straight to the move to BBVA or how did it work from there?

Mike Richards: How did it sort of flow?

Ben Loper: Yeah, so I was looking for different jobs and my wife and I at the time was pregnant and we started doing the math and we’re like, look, if we go to a suburb, there’s no point in being in a suburb next to New York if we’re gonna go to the suburb and live. I was looking at this job in Princeton, New Jersey, and that we were sort of just doing the math like, why not just be back close to our family if we’re gonna be in a suburb anyways, if we’re not gonna be in the city doing the city life?

Ben Loper: And so we started looking around and Birmingham actually is a pretty big. Legacy banking town. In fact, it’s coming back a little bit with a couple public companies, but you had a lot of banking in Birmingham. You had Wachovia, colonial regions, am south. All these banks were based, and Compass Bank was one of ’em.

Ben Loper: They were publicly traded, they were acquired by BBVA and what happened during the crisis, which seemed good at the time, but ended up not being great, is. Because they were an FBO, they didn’t apply the tarp or towel for any of that kind of stuff, all those rescue programs. And at the time, if you recall, Europe was actually in sort of stronger footing initially in the crisis.

Ben Loper: And so BBVA just kicked all this money into what was Compass Bank, their US franchise. So they effectively mothballed anything and everything that was going on in their treasury group. They no longer issued bonds. They no longer did repos, reverse repos. This time the bank was probably $40 billion. Asset bank, all those things just didn’t exist.

Ben Loper: So Spain just sent them money. And that’s common for someone like the Deutsche Bank or a Barclays. They, they call it single point of entry resolution authority, which is where you have a parent and they just kick money down to up so that all these investment banks here that you see that way. But at the end of the day, what it meant was once the Fed put in CAP and ccar R.

Ben Loper: All of these US subs had to have their own funding. They could not rely on the parent for funding. And so this guy, Chris Marshall, was a treasurer of BBVA super sharp guy. I just resonated with him and he was like, look, we need somebody to come in and build up a lot of what. So at the end of the day I was like, this is gonna be perfect because I’m gonna go work for a company.

Ben Loper: We’re gonna be building things. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do. So we left. We went back to Birmingham, Alabama, still traveled a good bit to New York, traveled a good bit to Madrid for different things at different points in my career there. But Houston, they had a big presence in Houston that was growing by the end, when I left, I think it was about $120 billion asset bank.

Ben Loper: So we grew a lot over those six or seven years. But what was fun about it was the treasury team had really had handcuffs on. We weren’t doing bond deals, we weren’t doing anything like that. And throughout the years we did all the regulatory things that we had to build, but we did the debt IPOs. We started putting up fixed income investor relations, working with the rating agencies, repos, reverse repos, broker funding, home loan advances, a lot of that kind of thing.

Ben Loper: That was where I got a taste of, okay, we’re managing our own money. We’re stewards of our own capital. And I realized too quickly that it was like turning a battleship. That’s not to say that the bankers, when they actually go to sell it, don’t do work, but initially you’re just coming up with these thesis, particularly on the equity research side, you’re looking at 20, 25 companies.

Ben Loper: It’s really hard to execute on some of the things that need to be done, and that’s what I like. It’s no longer two people, three people, four purpose and teams. It’s 50, 60, 500, a thousand people to get all of this stuff in order. And so. I really enjoy working for a company and being on the inside there.

Ben Loper: And at this point I think I’m, that’s probably a lifelong career track for me ’cause I certainly love my time on Wall Street, but personally it just wasn’t for me. I was happy to get in and sort of work in the company. Kind of cut wood that way.

Mike Richards: Ben, I want to just dig into this a little bit more, but sort of from a separate point of view.

Mike Richards: And what I mean by that is, so we just spoke briefly before that Summer Simmons, a previous guest over at Victoria’s Secret, but she was with Morgan Stanley, not just similar time actually for eight years and period. And she accounting control through to transfer pricing and stuff and new then were treasury funding strategists through to VP of liability based funding, which is now you’d gone into this, and this is again for the listeners and they might be going, well, let’s stick with corporate treasury.

Mike Richards: What, rather than banking, treasury, what did banking, treasury. Give you in your back pocket that you’ve u then used as a spring book ’cause you have effectively, and that’s something we’re gonna come onto shortly, why go into banking? Surely it narrows your experience, you, it’s gonna make it more difficult to go into a corporate role later.

Mike Richards: How would you answer that if you like?

Ben Loper: From my perspective, if you work for a large bank, you’re running a book, and I forget the total assets or liabilities I was responsible for, but at the end it was over 10 billion. You know, we have six pay fixed plain vanilla interest rate swaps, right? That’s probably all we’ll do on interest rates For a long time.

Ben Loper: The bank, we were doing it all the time. We were offsetting customer risk, we were offsetting all the deals. We were doing our whole asset liability picture with changing. We were doing a lot of that from a size perspective. We did a $500 million bond deal. We did an 850 million bond deal. We would borrow in a day, $2 billion.

Ben Loper: One time actually, I meant to repay $300 million and I borrowed $300 million. I mean, that’s, that was the scale at which we were operating, so there’s definitely benefits to doing it that way. So we were always dealing with large revolver draws or large customer deposit balances or ECRs, and we, we saw all that.

Ben Loper: And so when you flip to the corporate side and you’re trying to negotiate that you’re negotiating credit agreements, you’re sort of sitting on the other side. So it’s always been beneficial. And I think you’re right, you do see a lot of people making that move, whether from a bank treasury or just the investment banking side at Royal Caribbean.

Ben Loper: So they both left and become CFO. So there’s definitely different routes to roll in through treasury and I think treasury had rolled up to Naftali prior to the CFO role. You can come in from different ways, but for me, liking the operational side. And then as we look at now the lending business that we have, which is over 2 billion in assets, right?

Ben Loper: That’s effectively a bank. So we’re granting loans to people to purchase fractional vacation ownership. Working at a bank really helped because all of the allowance models, the credit loss models, all that work that we do here now, that was all things that we had experienced with at the bank.

Mike Richards: So you then made the move across to corporate.

Mike Richards: How did that come about? And again, as I say, I get a number of banking guys go, here’s my resume. Can you make, help me make the move? Unless there’s a big role as you’ve got there. How did you convince them you were the person, or what was it they were looking for? Or did they come looking for you? How did it happen?

Ben Loper: Yeah, so my wife reminds me that she found the job. I knew a few people. That it sort of worked around the deal. So you gotta go, gotta go back in time. So Hilton was acquired by Blackstone in a, at the time, massive LBO. It was thought to be a terrible decision initially, right? It was right at the peak of oh seven and, but it ended up being one of those profitable deals Blackstone’s ever done.

Ben Loper: So it’s worked. I think John Grace still on the board of Hilton nata and Kevin Jacobs and these guys have done a phenomenal job just over the years, turning that business around. And one of the things that they did was then they iPod it so Hilton became public again. So you had three distinct companies and you have kind of Hilton, which is the big, the mothership, the hotel business park, which was a reit.

Ben Loper: And then you have Hilton Grand Vacations and we’re the timeshare company. And what we do is we. Ourselves are fairly large, but we license a brand from Hilton. So we’re similar in the sense to just a regular hotel operator, except we’re massive. We have over a hundred properties. We all focus on really just this Hilton Grand Vacations brand.

Ben Loper: There’s some sub-brand stratification within that brand to, to hit different price points. But basically it’s Hilton Grand Vacations and we ourselves are a public company. There wasn’t a treasury group. There was a lot of things like that had always been done. Centralized. And then when they spun out, they just didn’t have these roles and these groups built.

Ben Loper: So same thing at the bank, especially a foreign operation. You were really gonna have to go to the risk side to really, really make your way up. So when this came around, I sort of knew the backstory and I’m like, this is building a treasury department all over again. But on the corporate side I’m in. But I was a VP at the bank and remember that Kathy Angel, the head of tax at the time, she was like, how do you feel about taking a step down?

Ben Loper: I was like, look, I don’t care if it’s senior director, I don’t care if it’s director. If I’m gonna get to really build the treasury group, that’s all I really care about it and I’ll come. And so we came over, I came over in July of 18. A lot of things happened in the fall. As any time the company spins out, it’s just a lot more work than people think from a SOX control perspective.

Ben Loper: From an operational perspective, we had a Oracle Cloud go live. We had to get on all our own systems, just all these kinds of things, put procedures in place, all of that kind of stuff. And I think within five, six days of joining our CFO left, so we were allowed A CFO through November. There was just a lot to be done and it was really a sink or swim environment.

Ben Loper: I liked it. I got a lot of exposure to mark our CEO, which has benefited me over the years, just as we do different things. I know a lot of the people here to get things done, which has really helped. I was all in. That was how I got there, and it’s been nonstop ever since. But as you see, I just don’t like to be bored.

Ben Loper: So it was perfect decision for me.

Mike Richards: And when you made the move from banking, treasury. But you came in and yes, you were leveraging a lot of your previous expertise, that level, but what was it like to move banking, treasury to corporate treasury? If you can think back to that time, were there different things?

Mike Richards: Obviously you were the other side of the table, which was, I’ve heard, I’ve spoken on a number of accountants and they said, well, they made that move. It actually makes the conversations with their banking planners that much easier going, yeah, but I did your job. In fact, I was equivalent to your boss actually, so you know what they’re looking for.

Mike Richards: But what was it like for you making that transition, would you say? Uh,

Ben Loper: it was very helpful to have that experience to lean back on at the time. Our treasury group was like two people. There was like a manager and an intern. We’ve grown obviously since then, and even in the last 18 months, we’ve done almost everything that a treasurer would do in a career, in a lifetime, in, in the last 18 months, just what we’ve gone through.

Ben Loper: And that started, frankly that fall of 2018. So we instituted a share repurchase program. We did securitization asset back securitization, which we used to do at the bank through indirect auto. So having that experience, there was no one at the company that had really done securitizations. We had done ’em.

Ben Loper: And not only that, we had worked on one that failed, which is exceedingly rare. I didn’t lead the team at the time, but that’s how I came to take over. Some of that was these guys had a deal that failed. You learn a lot from that too. So I was actually very fortunate. It was perfect ’cause I got to learn everything.

Ben Loper: I wasn’t necessarily the one responsible. So those are rare, but when they happen you had to take advantage. We did securitization, so I knew how to do that. We upside our credit facility from 200 million to 800 million. I had done that, so I had worked through that on the other side and that that helped.

Ben Loper: As I mentioned, we did share repurchase program. What helped is banks are very regulated and regimented and that’s not always fun, but it, when you’re a new company and you’re spinning out and you just simply do not have policies and procedures and you don’t have the rigor around these processes, that actually really helped to come from a background like that.

Ben Loper: So we put a lot of procedures, policies in place, SOX controls, we strengthened a lot of things. We reviewed a lot of things and we built a really smooth system. So that experience actually really does help. I know that the knock on it is not corporate treasury, it’s bank treasury. If you’re really doing it, there’s a lot that you can bring to the table on the corporate side as well, and especially if you’re coming from a public bank where you’re still doing.

Ben Loper: There’s less activism in banks. Apart from that, you’re still doing, you share repurchases and fixed income investor relations and all that kind of stuff. So we had some bonds that were tied to our spend. We were looking at, do we take these out? Do we refinance these? And having done a lot of bond deals and looked and traded a lot of bonds, right?

Ben Loper: We had about a $14 billion asset portfolio too, of treasuries and Sally Mays and Jennies and all that kind of stuff. I knew a lot about how bonds were priced, how the convexity worked and all this kind of stuff. So that helped, right? When we’re out there looking at pricing bonds or, or renegotiating bonds that we had from our spend.

Ben Loper: So it ended up being the perfect experience. I mean, it was just a different pace. People weren’t working all night. And that’s the same thing here, I think as it should be. But I had already made that adjustment as well. And sometimes that’s hard to come down. He worked at Bank of America covering us in their investment bank when he first shows up.

Ben Loper: He is, what do you mean we’re not working all night And we’re not, I mean, there’s a lot to do with, we just complete a big acquisition. So there’s definitely late nights, but it’s just a different culture. And I had made that transition as well at going to the bank. So a lot of those things were already done, which was helpful.

Mike Richards: You talked about being able to make your own policies and create them because you weren’t inheriting them. You were coming in with this new view, if that’s the right way to put it. And I get a number of listeners to the show where they say, I’m going in there, I’m the first treasurer, or I’m the first real treasury professional.

Mike Richards: What’s your ethos? Or you’ve got your whiteboard there, right? Is it risk? Is it cash? Is it assets? What’s made your focus? ’cause I want to then move on to the future of treasury as we see, and maybe this is the springboard for it. How do you view treasury fundamentally? Is it that all comes down to cash or other things?

Mike Richards: What are your thoughts?

Ben Loper: I think treasury, you have to have the basics, right? Like you have to have the policies, procedures, the practices. That all has to function perfectly, right? I mean, there’ll be incidents, but that all needs to work. And hedge committees a good example. We had no hedge committee, we had no hedge policy.

Ben Loper: We had none of that. And so just literally writing the policy, putting the committees together, chartering the committees. The reason you want all that stuff and you want people doing that is treasury really should be, particularly in a business that’s expanding. In the conversation about capital allocation strategy.

Ben Loper: And in our company it’s that way. We spent a lot of time on the front end. You know, we implemented kyriba, we’ve done a lot of infrastructure investment, Oracle cloud, all of that so that our processes are fairly smooth. That frees us up to think about things like we, we put on almost $750 million of pay fixed hedges over the last, prior to this rate runup, during COVID and all that.

Ben Loper: So we were able to take the time and think thematically about where we needed to be from a risk perspective, and that saved us tens of millions of dollars in cash. So you need your treasury team thinking about these things and they need to be free to do that. So that’s in my mind, the way you want.

Ben Loper: Think about it. And the other thing I would say is your, if you go back to when Sarbanes Oxley came out, the CFO role, almost immediately overnight, everybody was a CPA, right? Yeah. I think the mandate now for CFOs has translated back towards. A strategic guide or strategic asset and that in our company, I see it in a lot of other companies, there’s a lot of things like that aren’t just tying, ticking and tying numbers.

Ben Loper: So you’ve gotta be able to bring to the table, uh, some sort of strategic value. And in our case, we do a lot of what we call fee for service. We’ll run a property for Blackstone. So Blackstone might own the own, the actual building, we’ll run it for them. We do asset securitizations with Blackstone. We have joint ventures.

Ben Loper: We do a lot of very complicated things and we’ve gotta be able to take the time to think about how to do those properly. So I think having a very regimented process, a lot of systems, a lot of compensating controls in the way you design your process is very helpful. We have a control that just catches any payment above a million dollars.

Ben Loper: Doesn’t matter what it is, doesn’t matter who it’s been approved by. It just catches it for just a second set of eyes. And so there’s a lot of things like that we’ve built into the, to the piping to just protect us from having to fight fires. That frees us to think about, okay, in this kind of rate environment, in this kind of inflation environment, in this kind of property market, how can we think about partnering?

Ben Loper: How can we think about a whole loan sale maybe, right? So we deal with a lot of hedge funds that wanna buy our loan portfolios, our subprime loan portfolios. There’s a lot of things like that we can be working on, and you’ve gotta have the basics in place. So we’ve spent a lot of time over the last four years focusing on that so that we can make sure we’re free to really do the work.

Ben Loper: It’s value added.

Mike Richards: And when you look at the future of treasury, you’ve touched on the obviously technology, which is great, but what are the other things for you as a treasurer that you are thinking about? We’re post pandemic, we’ve done so many shows about the pandemic. Everyone’s like bored of it in a way, but this affect everyone’s businesses.

Mike Richards: But where are you seeing it going to next? What are your thoughts? What are the things you are thinking? What are your thoughts?

Ben Loper: I’m from Alabama, so you know, I always follow the University of Alabama, and Saban says this all the time, right? Like. Last year was last year and we need to win this year. And I think about it that all the time we’ve got to do our job.

Ben Loper: I mean, everybody’s got to do their job. And the pandemic was crazy and it was what it was. We put a plan in place, we responded, we execute on the plan, we were fine. And that was that. And we’ve got a playbook now on our shelf. We have another pandemic or another shutdown, but at the end of the day, we can’t just live on that.

Ben Loper: Or my CFO always jokes with me, we did all these interest rate swaps, they generate a lot of money, they’re done. You know, we can’t just keep milking ’em and say, oh, look what we did. So it’s on to what have you done for me lately? And I think that is any high performing team, you and I mentioned, the green break tournaments we do.

Ben Loper: So talking to these guys, right? So whether it’s University of Alabama, the Patriots, special Forces, everybody focuses on let’s do our job and let’s do it better than we did it yesterday and yesterday’s over, right? So we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on what’s next, right? From a fraud perspective, what is gonna be the issues that we have to contend with.

Ben Loper: In a remote environment, right? Because I think we are gonna be remote for longer than people anticipate. So not necessarily a pandemic issue going forward. How are we gonna train new treasury analysts remotely if that’s what we need to do, right? Inflation interest rates. Clearly we’ve not seen inflation like this in, is it transitory?

Ben Loper: Are we just gonna live with higher inflation? There’s all these different things that we have to think about. We have to think about how they affect our business. Fortunately for us, we don’t have really a lot of exposure to Ukraine or Russia in our business from an interest coverage perspective. We’re in very good shape.

Ben Loper: I was at a fixed income conference a couple weeks ago on the West Coast and. There’s certainly concern there, right? As interest coverage ratios, compress pricing power and those types of things. I think our business, leisure and hospitality in general is doing fairly well. But we have to think through that, like what is the next step?

Ben Loper: And then in our case specifically, we made about a $3 billion acquisition the last year. So we are in the process of go live, retraining, onboarding, synchronizing systems. Just pulling all these things together is enormous. I think payments are going to be a big focus for. At least if you have a customer centric product, if you’re buying steel, you’re probably always gonna, I don’t know, wire the money in or Aach H and n.

Ben Loper: If you’re consuming a leisure product and you’re at the pool or a yacht or whatever, you may want to use your Apple Watch and you may want to use Bitcoin or those things are more front and center for us as you start to define your product in terms of experience, right? What’s the comprehensive customer experience?

Ben Loper: What’s the consumer aesthetic when you walk into a property? That type of stuff is a big focus for us, and a lot of that has to do with upgrading. Legacy terminals, right? If we want to do Apple Pay, that can require new terminals, new, new backend, new PCI compliance work. So payments is a big part for us as well.

Ben Loper: We actually just brought on Flywire to do some of our international payments. We have a fairly large post-acquisition, a fairly large international business, but even pre-acquisition, we had a fairly large Japanese business. Capital markets is a focus for us. You’ve seen deals move a lot slower, particularly on the asset back side.

Ben Loper: You’ve seen spreads widen. I don’t think you’re gonna see some kind of great financial crisis market shut down. We had a very successful deal. We’ve seen a few other of our peers come in over the last few weeks and have deals go to market and everything’s been fine. But again, you have to just think about all those things.

Ben Loper: What kind of capacity are you keeping? How much dry powder do you have? How do you think about capital allocation in this market? So those are things that just never go away. And to your point, the pandemic is, I had an econ professor one time used to say, oh, you need in life is one good excuse. And I think the pandemic is.

Ben Loper: Become that for people. Oh, COVID, that’s just not the case anymore. We’ve gotta start thinking, okay, where’s the future? And we need to have a playbook for if things do shut down again. But each time that goes by, I think people just become less and less willing to fully hunker down for four weeks. I’m not sure we’ll see that again.

Ben Loper: So those are the hot button issues for us. And as for how we respond to ’em, we focus on teamwork, we focus on everybody. Doing their job. We focus on anticipating, you know what can happen. We focus on a contingency plan. We have planning called Pace, primary, auxiliary contingency, and emergency. We think through, for everything that we’re doing, what are those four levers that we can pull.

Mike Richards: And Ben, I just want to take you back. We’re gonna, I’m gonna ask you to wrap up in a minute, but before we get there, I just wanted to just go back on one of the areas, or one of the questions you talked there about training junior members of staff. Obviously this is treasury recruitment company. We host the podcast, but I deliberately avoid going on about recruitment all the time.

Mike Richards: ’cause I don’t think it’s that forum. What I’d rather do is explore with you just briefly, and that’s, I’m actually speaking about that in a couple of weeks time, talking about how people recruit, you know, what treasurers now need to think about. But it’s, as you say, it’s not just about great, it’s getting them on board, but then how do you remotely onboard them?

Mike Richards: If you’re a junior member of staff, you can’t literally sit next to them and show them which keys to use on the keyboard. Because they’re doing it over Zoom. How have you approached that, and then we’ll go towards the wrap up of the show, but how do you, as a company and you as a treasurer approach that would you say.

Ben Loper: Our approach has been to try to get people in the office. I think people have clearly proven that they can do their jobs remotely. I don’t have any issue with that, but normally that’s their legacy job, right? Learning things new is different, and so we really try to get people in. We have people remote in different states.

Ben Loper: We have people in different time zones, Nevada. Texas and it is challenging and we don’t begrudge anybody for being remote at all. But the issue, and this comes down to a personal preference, is if you’re in the office, if you’re around, the things going on, you’re just more likely to get pulled into something within an asset back securitization.

Ben Loper: We did a workout waiver request on our credit facility. We upsized our credit facility, we did share repurchases, we’ve done interest rate swaps. We’ve done just a ton of things that would make a career, and it’s tough to get exposure to that if you’re not here. It’s not to say people aren’t working, but it, my advice to someone who really wanted to come on would be come in, be present, and get exposure to things.

Ben Loper: But you’re right. I mean, it’s something I think everybody’s gonna have to contend with is what is the future of training look like and how do we all approach that? Mostly on the treasury side in the office. So that’s helped. The company that we acquired had an excellent treasury team, so they know what they’re doing.

Ben Loper: We go out to Vegas and see them. But that has helped. We’ve brought in a few new people here in Orlando. They’ve come into the office, even if it’s just a few days a week. It doesn’t have to be every day, but even a few days a week just to, Hey, I need to learn this. And the people that I’ve seen who have done the best have come in for a few days just to pick up.

Ben Loper: Okay, now I see what you’re saying. I think the job quit rate is like at an all time high. When people don’t feel like or understand why they’re doing something, it just becomes a job. And we, we were actually just meeting on presentation here in my office before this call, and I had asked for something and then something slightly different came across.

Ben Loper: And then they were like, why would you want this? And then we were explaining, here’s the point I wanna make, and here’s the trajectory to how we’ll make this point. Oh, yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, we can, I understand now. So just getting the context around it helps people develop and at the end of the day, and not everybody wants to be the CEO, but if you want advance in your career, it requires a set of soft skill sets and understanding the details, the context, the exposure, knowing who to go to.

Ben Loper: That all helps. Some people are gonna have to just pay up for digital training because it’s just gonna be tough to train people fully. Remotely.

Mike Richards: Yeah, I think you’re right and I think it’s definitely something I’ve seen and way back when I was talking to the head of the UK association, the treasurers, and I said that you guys as treasurers, there’s also that need for executive training as well because you’d gone, you’d get all this way to be a real specialist in your field and then you’re running these teams and I said, how much coaching have you had to run these now?

Mike Richards: Big skilled treasury teams. And then a lot of the time it was like none. ’cause there’s a real opportunity there. I’m not saying we are fitting it, but I think that’s definitely, you identify there, that’s something that is needed sort of thing as well.

Ben Loper: And we haven’t had it, the turnover where we’ve had to really contend with this, but I would presume that it’s gonna be harder to get into these areas that you want to be in because without maybe a certification, I think certifications are calling by the wayside.

Ben Loper: They may be coming back because. Now if I’m trying to hire someone who’s going to be remote and they have no treasury experience, immediately in the back of my mind I’m like, okay, how’s this gonna work? They might be smart, they might have financial experience, and they might in the office become a perfectly fine treasury person, but how do I bridge that gap if I don’t have time to train?

Ben Loper: I think all that education, and I’m not huge on certifications. I don’t have a TT p. I did the CFA working on A CPA for different reasons, but at the end of the day, I think that they may be having kind of their time in the sun because again, people are looking to minimize risk in this kind of environment, and if you don’t have the previous experience, it’s really tough to find.

Ben Loper: I think that’s what’s driven the wage inflation and the hiring stats. Is it. If you know how to do something right now, and a company needs that role, they used to say, we can pay this person 30 grand less and we can train ’em up. That was the whole thing. Yeah, we can teach you. It comes down to work ethic and we can teach you what to do and all this.

Ben Loper: That doesn’t exist anymore. Now in a remote setting, you really can’t train ’em. You’re almost, it’s almost the inverse. You’re really hiring this person to bring in that expertise because you can’t train on site. And so I think that has flipped kind of the desirability of certain candidates and then the pricing power of other candidates.

Mike Richards: Brilliant summary. I love that. Although we are gonna summarize in a moment, and we’ll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes so people can connect to you as well. But as we wrap up today, show, uh, the risk of you repeating any of that in which you might, if someone’s listening today and maybe earlier on in their careers certification is maybe coming back and digital training is key, but what advice would you give to those more junior, earlier on in their stage, in their careers, or maybe later on?

Mike Richards: What are the takeaway tips? What are your thoughts? What would you say?

Ben Loper: I think definitely be present, have a personality. I, I think that’s the big misnomer is, oh, I gotta come in and I gotta be straight and narrow and I can’t talk. Have a personality and people are bringing you in to work with them a lot.

Ben Loper: The people that come in and integrate and talk and joke and all that, I seem to do a lot better certifications, a personal preference. We don’t hire, not hire. I think the big thing is you gotta enjoy what you do. I love coming and doing what I do. It’s been crazy for four years now between COVID and all this, but.

Ben Loper: I love what I do. I don’t wanna be doing anything else. And not everybody’s always gonna be that way, but I think you definitely gotta find a team and a job that you wanna do because it just, especially with COVID, people have started to become introspective on reassessing work-life balance and what they want to do with their time.

Ben Loper: It life’s just too short to do stuff you don’t want to do, and COVID has really illustrated that to people. So I think you really gotta find something you wanna do. Treasury can be incredibly rewarding. You see a lot. You’re in the middle of everything. You see all the payments, there’s nothing. It really happens that the treasury group doesn’t see or touch or isn’t the first to hear about.

Ben Loper: So if you like being in the flow of information, that’s obviously helpful. You learn a lot from skills perspective, you become exceptionally valuable. I think. I don’t look at a lot of those compensation surveys, but it seems like analyst wise, treasury analysts tend to be a little bit on the higher scale just because of what they need.

Ben Loper: You need the fidelity of what they’re doing when it comes to trust and then when it comes to skill sets. And at the end of the day, I mean in some of these cases, like we’re, I don’t wanna say making bets, but we’re moving around or securing funding hundreds of millions of dollars and in some places billions of dollars.

Ben Loper: And so to be trusted with that, you’ve gotta be trustworthy and people have gotta relate to you. So I think that kind of having a personality helps. And then the last thing I’d say is just giving back. I know that’s not treasury specific information, but if you come in every day and you just think, Hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna work my way to the top and I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna do this, you just get burned out.

Ben Loper: You gotta have fun. That’s why we do the golf tournaments we were talking about. You gotta have fun and enjoy what you’re doing and it’s a lot of work, especially when you start getting to sort of the middle to the top. There’s a lot of travel you’ve gotta always be on. There’s always questions coming across you.

Ben Loper: You have to know the answer to a lot’s asked of you, but I couldn’t think of a better place to be. So I’d recommend to anybody treasury career for sure.

Mike Richards: Exactly. You can do that as you say. Yeah, salaries. We do our global salary survey. Go to treasury salary.com and you’re exactly right. I think one of the things there, which I certainly notice is that there is a rapidly rising junior market, if you like, as you say, if you secure the treasury analyst or manager you want for an extra 10, 15, $20,000, at the end of the day, as you say, they’re, they’re gonna de-risk hundreds of millions.

Mike Richards: It may be worth that investment. I’m not saying all the time, I just think it’s there. I’ve done it 20 odd years talking to you guys and we brought it to life over the podcast over the past three years rather. It’s been amazing. So just very grateful to you and look forward to catching up hopefully this year, really, and can’t wait to see you.

Ben Loper: Appreciate it anytime and schedule permitting, albeit a FP, but we’ll see. There’s a lot of moving parts with this integration. Yeah, so hopefully it works out. But yeah, anytime. I’m looking forward to hearing it.

Mike Richards: You’re a busy man, but yeah, I hope to see you there, sir. Thanks for your time. We’ll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes and I look forward to seeing you later in the year.

Ben Loper: Sounds good.

Mike Richards: Thanks sir.

Ben Loper: Thanks.

Mike Richards: So welcome back to today’s show. I’m actually rejoined by Ben Loper, the he is now the senior Vice President and treasurer at Hilton Ground Vocations. Ben will bring up his story up to date if you like. So Ben, if you like, for anyone that has heard the original episode, could you give us a refresher on what’s happened to you in the past four years, sir, over to you.

Ben Loper: We, we were coming outta COVID acquired Blue Green 2024, which was another large type operator, multi-billion dollar deal, that being integrated now and then of course said there’s artificial in intelligence, continued kind of geopolitical drop in, and now we have the ran war going on and world keeps turning and world keeps changing.

Ben Loper: We’re doing a lot out in apac. We did the first security, they been in Japan last year, which we can talk more about. And you’ve just been busy integrated deep, trying to kind of build and grow in a certain environment

Mike Richards: and you’ve progressed your role. You were before when we spoke, you. Vice president and treasurer.

Mike Richards: Now you’re SVP of treasurer. Is that just an evolution or what changes as you’ve stepped up in terms of responsibility and how does it, how has it changed from a few years ago?

Ben Loper: Yeah. But, uh, being vice president and treasurer, we have a very kind of AP book treasury team or, and really broader finding, so we’ve been our lines of bit that we have four lines of business and I also now run the financing segment, which is over a $3 billion loan portfolio.

Ben Loper: So then had ING title and recording de we’ve got a fraud p and a group bit rolled up that runs that portfolio. One of our critical accounting matters, so we’ve got a big team that looked at that. We’ve got a data team that’s looking at all the loan data that feed them to our secure date and, and nonrecourse ing.

Ben Loper: So don’t dely expanded. My, my boss that Wal our GFO and our WY report to him and. Troy Drew as DFO, but then he’s also the president. And so I sort of report to him and I operate the leader rolling into the president and he’s got, of course, everything I have. Yeah. And a lot more e development all in that.

Ben Loper: So the role definitely banded significantly. And we’ve got teams now. I’ve got teams in the uk, teams in Japan, teams in Vegas to Hawaii, and then the residual coming out of bunk retail. We bring the space to then obviously corporate headquarters in Orlando.

Mike Richards: And you talk about the capital market segment of that and how that’s evolved.

Mike Richards: You had some of that before, but what innovations or shifts have you seen? And as your role has come up as well, how has that space changed? And then we’ll come onto, as you say, the stuff you’ve done in Japan and various other stuff. So yeah, talk us through that briefly.

Ben Loper: A lot of our capital market activity over COVID was about waivers out flow, and the nature of our business is obviously very resilient.

Ben Loper: Since COVID, a lot of our capital markets activity has been related to acquisitions. And Brad bought the PLA A DLD here at unsecured node from bu, all the things that kind of went into underwriting, the large acquisitions. Now we’re getting a little bit more of that front. We’re starting to talk about renewals and really just asset liability management off the curve.

Ben Loper: And then on the non rate course side, so the ization side, that’s the kinda much larger franchise with the size, the low portfolio we’re doing, so around 3 billion of owned contract sales and over half of those people finance. Think about a receivables year generating in a given year over a billion dollars and into a billion and a half, 2 billion at some point simply.

Ben Loper: So there’s a lot of security data work that goes into that. And then you’re selling, we’ve got over 700,000 members within Japan. We’ve got over 70,000 members and we’ve got almost 5,000 in Korea. We’re starting to expand now into some of these geographic market and doing individual procures. Notably in Japan where we, and that market’s changed a lot.

Ben Loper: We, we been by the US, and I’ll get the numbers wrong, but effectively almost, or over half of GDP in some way. Kinda driven or touched by hereto date. Then productivity finance, so RBSB os, things like that. Then obviously Reagan, the way a BS within Europe, that’s the finding number, and though FBA and others have come out recently and tried to look at that, regulate and lower the burden of Reagan burden reporting to help drive some growth.

Ben Loper: Beer. Don, they didn’t have the fame, you know, rewrite came out of the great financial crisis and a lot of that ambu framework ization came out of being like the US Sectorization law. So they’re actually pretty attractive market, but there’s a lot of out Hong Kong being in Hong Kong. Next week became, or sorry, week after next.

Ben Loper: Speaking at the 80th summit Bear, a really fast growing back pace, innovative space, and I think given our physical vivid and all the work, our field and club and H two eight teams do in country in Japan, paved the way for us to go out and have that from a capital markets perspective. Very exciting. We’ve got a good team working on it, but the cost of financing out there is just randomly attractive.

Ben Loper: I think we had a 1.41% coupon on our Japan A BF deal last year. So when you looked at the, the size in field that we are, you’re talking millions of dollars of annually by going out doing that.

Mike Richards: And how is it, you talked about how it’s evolved differently, if that’s the right word, but is that the factor that matters most because that there’s, there’s still regulation, but it’s different, it’s gone a different way or how does that help you guys?

Mike Richards: What do you mean by it being they’re more o is it just they’re more open or they want to do business or what’s the difference?

Ben Loper: I think it’s more. I don’t think it’s regulate in around safety of assets. I think it’s more regulate in around retention and regulatory and reporting. Europe, I think more aggressive on that front and not that regulate the bad and income grow though regulatory reporting.

Ben Loper: But then Europe as it relates during, in a good bit more cumbersome than the us. Yeah. And so we’ve gone out, we market several times a year. We, you know, a DF, we do road those, we go out to Hong Kong, we go out to Japan. We don’t even invest, we’ve never gone to Europe to go out and meet with investors and there’s that be large pockets of money there, but the incremental risk, retention, regulatory and reporting that into the European market, it just isn’t worth the cost.

Ben Loper: We tend to have our deal very well over the drive. So for us to go pick up the incremental investor doesn’t do a lot to drive right. And we’re over restricted in Japan where we’re really doing unique to that market. Two end. There’s where the investor sort of matters and I think they don’t have the regulatory reporting environment that you’re,

Mike Richards: it’s just different, as you say,

Ben Loper: it’s more around reporting and compliance.

Ben Loper: Yeah, and let the bowel already,

Mike Richards: because you’re not criticizing, it’s just different markets and different requirements and so you know, you mold it to that, don’t you as well, and that’s one of the key things thing. But with the, what’s the word if you like, you’ve worked across these different areas. You touched on there that you’ve had this perspective, you were in banking many years ago and research now corporate treasury.

Mike Richards: How does that influence you when you are doing your funding? You personally, what I mean by that is does it influence the way you run your treasury team? You sort of, you question it a little bit more and say, hang on guys, we can think that. Whereas when you see some of your peers and they maybe follow one direction and go, so there’s more than one way to do this, would that be the right way?

Ben Loper: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think we bank him to be effect. I worked in banking coming out of great financial crisis, preservation of assets and a lot of risk management. I think we certainly we’re very conservative with our treasury cast, but at the end of the day, we’re out there running a business and so we, we have the financing group rolling up underneath.

Ben Loper: That’s a business that can and Doug need to green and we have obviously a big sales force that does a great job driving people into these loans, but it’s a little bit of a different approach. You’re not really in the field. You’re doing a lot of transfer pricing and you’re a lot of a LM work and you’re pretty conservative with where the money’s going, especially coming out of BB and some of these other banks that blew up a few years ago.

Ben Loper: On our side, while we’re definitely careful with the operating cap, do have a business that walk hand in hand with to bail force and that’s why the security agents becomes super important is we use zone to fund future development and fund lending. The A, b, F side, we are much more active. We’re doing three to four times a year.

Ben Loper: Like last year we did five deals. If you include a joint venture, it’s more of a business approach, I think. And that’s what’s fun about our treasury role or treasury team. And you’re a little bit more on the front office side and deal a lot more with the front off because the asset that they’re bringing in, we’re gonna go out and refund into market.

Ben Loper: That’s probably the biggest difference. I think we pulled a lot of the asset liability best practice because a lot of the fraud best practices into the treasury group coming out of banking. So we got, uh, hit a robust kind of anti-fraud program and we u we utilize a lot of bank tool that coming out of the banking world.

Ben Loper: But the other thing is kind of the a LM approach. So we think about, okay, if we can put a term loan B here, we could put a secured note here and spread and secured, un secured, very tight. We may go into unsecure. We may take a term loan B repricing and then use that put down TLA. So we really try to build a credit curve that goes out several years.

Ben Loper: Yeah. And then will we be a creative points on the curve that we can refund or reprice? We try to do that and then we use that data point put down other components on the curve and that’s a very kind of bank, a LM approach.

Mike Richards: So 2022, when we last spoke and caught up on the podcast, that is, I think we’ve kept in touch, but AI technology.

Mike Richards: I know that when you and I spoke you, you like technology, you’ve used automation, analytics tools across different treasury systems. Now technology is entering a new, a new era probably. And we did our round table sessions in New York last week and just the AI stream, everyone was like, we’re still in the early days, but we know it’s coming.

Mike Richards: We’re just trying to work out what should we be paying attention to which direction should we go, and garbage in, garbage out. It was just amazing. Yourself and where do you see it? Where’s it helping you? And actually feel free to bring up about the photo thing as well. We’ll bring up that about your imagery and stuff.

Mike Richards: Maybe bring that into it as well. So back to you about AI and technology

Ben Loper: in changing and changing very rapidly. We were an early adopter Ariba, but Riva treasury management system. We were very early on that we like having Gale and build a very scalable architecture, I think, on ai. And a big reason for that is people are able to create avatars, walk and talk exactly like me.

Ben Loper: And if you’re out public speaking, think about earning calls, people going and giving interviews, conferences. You don’t need more than a few pictures and a little bit of down bite. Yeah. Go in and create an avatar that looks exactly like me and speaks exactly like me. And it’s funny, we’re going back to much of the, the advancing technology.

Ben Loper: We’re going back to some of the older school methods and code words and things like that. If my boss called me, I know Dan enough to know if it’s probably him or not, but we spend upon a time together if Dan were to call an account payable clerk who’s working remote. Yeah. So the ability for people to go in and sort of rapidly build org charge, there’s the org is an example, and LinkedIn does a lot of these things where you have a lot of data out there on, on what the reporting drifters are and just do.

Ben Loper: And you can bet the build org ERs and avatars and it just increase the amount of work you gotta put into big darting the assets in the pipeline. So yeah, cartoon avatars are nice because obviously if a cartoon calls you that something’s up. But it is, we’re looking at all those kinds of things and really, recouping can handle money.

Ben Loper: When they can handle money, how they can handle money, why they can handle money, because the more you distribute that out into the field, certainly a business like ours would over 200 resort. There’s gonna be a lot of people in the field that are handling some measure of funding or vendors or vendor signup.

Ben Loper: And now I used to say, okay, this person called me. I can do a Google, I can go to their website. I see their picture, I see ’em on video. Okay, this is really that person. Now with AI avatars and the ability to create synthetic voices, you can’t do that anymore. And even now with flawed and others, you can throw websites up very quickly.

Ben Loper: Yeah. It doesn’t take a lot of resources to completely fabricate a vendor or anything like that. And so it caused us to rethink. I think I’d sent you months ago, kind a famous case out in Asia where someone got a quote, unquote call from the PEO and said, Hey, I need you to spend $20 million or $40 million out the door to a year.

Ben Loper: And the person did it and they probably thought they were following every protocol that they have track down on it. We really put a lot of time and effort into vendor verification and vendor their banking, all pipe of, even some of the older school methodology around. Antifraud to help footprint. What is a very front leaning organization?

Ben Loper: We’ve got a great technology team that we do a lot. We use copilot and copilot studio power, automate all these systems and the combo of kyriba and the bank puts a lot of good cards in place. But we’ve also added some of the older school, anytime an account change, who know the person, what are the code words and all that kind of stuff.

Mike Richards: Yeah. Why are they doing that?

Ben Loper: And this is a very interesting time. And also we think about a do building perspective. Can the treasury group be more effective with virtual agents and can I train it to do certain things? And we wanna look at trading data. We have Bloomberg terminal, we wanna look at trading data on our bond.

Ben Loper: And we build agents, make recommendations and pay. I noticed that these bonds are trading above BO and the bit above part for, for a week. Why don’t you go look at a reprise? And so there’s a lot of activity gains potentially, but I think on the fraud by too, it’s something we’re watching very close.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Mike Richards: And it sounds like again, there’s a big opportunity to use that. We’ve touched on some of the dangers, but are there other things that you think other treasury teams should be employing or you just talked there? Actually, I had one of my Julian Muay in Europe, we talked to him and they’ve created that AI bot, which actually answers a lot of the more basic questions for the people as well.

Mike Richards: So it’s sort of, rather than trying to search around for an answer, and it’s an internal system if you like as well. So it’s secure if you like, but it’s answering their questions. That was one, one example. Any others that you think that other treasuries you are going to, as you say, some of these conferences that you’ll be saying, Hey, you should look at this, or what else should they be thinking in treasury specifically?

Ben Loper: Yeah, I think definitely. I think there’s two, two things. I think first you have to look at your business and say, are we a business that can be disintermediated by ai? And so I think that the focus for anybody in a strategic fee, probably first and foremost, that, so if you’re working for software has gotten a lot of.

Ben Loper: Headline recently, and I don’t, I’m not manufacturer person. I don’t know what software companies will make it and what won’t, but that follow your first thing if, okay. Do we have a real risk of being intermediated? I think in our business, I think there’s no risk to that. No. We’ve fell hard out face to face in Austin location.

Ben Loper: That is something that AI is not going to place. I can tell you, I, I would never go to my wife and be, Hey, we’re gonna put these VR dos on for a week. It just isn’t gonna happen. So we feel like it back filling a great opportunity for us. And if anything, think of EDA, you know, on o OTAs and things like they actually even help us.

Ben Loper: I think the person can stronger and we can get closer to the consumer. So I think we feel pretty good about, right. So now it’s really about efficiencies and how do we build the ability to build efficiencies. And I think our shareholders are probably focused on a AI can be expensive, especially it be subsidized right now, but at some point we will bear the cost of all of that, that view power.

Ben Loper: You’re gonna make the investment, can we make sure that the bottom line’s really accreting to us? And so that’s really the way we’re thinking about it. I think that the chat thoughts are good. It’s great to ask in a question. A lot of that benefit a creep to that individual person. I think what we’re looking at is further up the chain.

Ben Loper: Either AI assisted process is, or AI has been remediated process is where a vendor change, right? And we have that communicate directly with our big partner to do vendor validation. And then we don’t necessarily have to do some of that work and we can take risk outta the system in manual work out. So that’s really where we’re looking at it.

Ben Loper: Obviously great to throw presentations up quickly and that is real time saving. But yeah, where we really get into the benefit, I think is especially on the actual financing side, where I’ve got hundreds of people doing collections, I’ve got hundreds of people doing, being in recording, can I make them more efficient?

Ben Loper: And then they spend more time doing higher level work and less time doing some of these manual things. RPA and bots and automation. I think that particularly around instructed data allows us to check things more quickly. And then again, people just spend more time focusing on strategic initiatives and implementing broader scale things that benefit the visit and left time having to review some manual component.

Ben Loper: But I think that’s where we do a lot of opportunity in that.

Mike Richards: For someone that is, and you’ve touched on a lot on your capital markets. You had your Wall Street experience, you have now, and you’ve continued your growth if you like. But if someone’s listening today and they want to move towards a treasurer role, they Again, when we go to our treasure crew called live events, I say, look, this is, you can learn from these treasurers live on stage about the steps they made and things that made a real difference to their career.

Mike Richards: What experiences do you think have really made a difference in your own career that you know as you’ve grown, and what other areas do you think. You look back and go, yeah, that really helped me.

Ben Loper: I have a CPA at bay. And those kinds of things, help and lean credibility. I don’t think we’re that necessary, but it can be important depending on what you wanna do.

Ben Loper: I think similar to the AI that I think what Bold is new again and when you think about getting God to go up down the pavement and talk to people and network and then became digital and now, so digital, then put the button in, you get 50,000 applications and yeah, it’s going back to networking and those kinds of things.

Ben Loper: Yeah. And it broke his arm. I be on an e-bike, but we’re kind talking about what he could do and he wants to be a director and then instead interrupting a rear choice, be with AI now and create all this stuff automatically. But I think at the end of the day, there’s always a place for good storytellers and he is very articulate and he has a good emotional quote, been on what people want or need to hear.

Ben Loper: And so I think it’s a great thing for him to do. And I think the extent to which can park it, belt market, be your product. It becomes more and more important, and I think AI is a great opportunity. I think it’s going to create this incrementality around jobs and functions. And I think that maybe somebody used to work for a big company and they were afraid to go out on their own.

Ben Loper: And now with AI to work three or four support staff roll into this person, and here’s a new business, right?

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Ben Loper: Yeah. Business are just gonna grow. I think that it’s probably a net positive for jobs, and I think that a lot of typical jobs are never gonna go away. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that it really comes down to being likable.

Ben Loper: And by that I mean showing up on time, having the support of the team, having the team be able to rely on you. I think all those people important. I think people wanna do business with people that they trust and that they like, and that has another thing that has been around for thousands. I think with ai, there’s always you of just put andro it on, or put Claude on it, put Palantir on it, whatever the service, and it’s gonna fix itself.

Ben Loper: And the reality is. Not the way that it works. Yeah. I think that you can leverage AI and build more resources to generate content, but it still comes down to marketing and people having some sort of connection with what you’re doing. And even if you’re using AI to generate a lot of that work, they want to have the trust at the end of the day that they can promote somebody.

Ben Loper: Somebody’s looking at it, and we do have all a dime with all of our consultants and auditors and everybody’s trying to implement it la but at the end of the day, I want a tax partner looking at tax work. I want audit partner looking in, audit work, whatever is, and maybe they’re more fit and they can do more work than make good previously so they can double their client worth.

Ben Loper: Right. But I think that the QA component is still very valuable and I would encourage people to spend a lot of time working on that component because with all the tech easy to see that get lost in some people.

Mike Richards: You and I last spoke four years ago, and this iteration said four years ago. If you were to, we were having this conversation in another three or four years time, what would you hope to have achieved by then?

Mike Richards: If again, what do you think you’ll be doing in three years? Because I barely, sometimes you can think what we doing next year, this time, next year, but it seems appropriate to say Where do you see it going? What do you want to have achieved? Where do you see it going next?

Ben Loper: Yeah. I think definitely we’ve got a, an eye towards expanding our foreign capital market back to that mm-hmm.

Ben Loper: Driver there. A lot of the implementation of all the technology into our business that can drive better, better sales or lending. All these tools that they, okay, he’s gonna default, he’s more likely to default. Why are people defaulting? Can we get the data to the point that we can tell between the other people that if this person just gets free night, then they, maybe they won’t default and they just need to in a reservation and whatever the components are, I’d let ’em just be the data, get to that point.

Ben Loper: Personally, I really love the operations. I’ve done hundreds of people doing all kinds of things, and to me that’s almost more fun than the treasury side because the problems are just much more distributed and they’re never the thing. I think that’s the operations side. Find more closely into the financing side.

Ben Loper: People are understanding more what we do and why we do it, and I’d love to be, you know, that partnership at Alliance Grow and as a company, as we build more of an ecosystem, our strategy and more around you could travel with us and we’ll make for any experience you want, we can try to make that happen.

Ben Loper: Left around the old school sort of timeframe, methodology. And so I would love to do that. Technology enabled that and allow us to integrate in quickly coming outta these acquisitions, the ability for AI to help accelerate that. Some of the things we thought about maybe combining now if you have AI fitting on comp, do you really even need to combine ’em or can you just, do you know two separate ones or can you just have AI build a new one?

Ben Loper: I think that’s what’s gonna be really exciting over the next three years. And again, tying back to hard and APAC particularly family, both the business and the capital market access over there.

Mike Richards: I was looking up earlier, the notes from our previous podcast, so someone you know listening to this, they’d have heard your early career, got you to your previous role before you got the promotion and stuff like that to quote you.

Mike Richards: Here you go. Some of the stuff be present and show your personality you liked. Certification. Treasury can be very rewarding, which you and I both know and it was great. And closing words were about having fun and things like that. Now you might just say, yeah, I’d repeat those four, which is fine. But if you are listening today and as well as listening to those, anything to add to those or reinforce out of those ones that you talked about before, what are you thinking?

Ben Loper: I think would almost kinda lean, lean more into those. Yeah. I mean play, if you’re not having fun, you’re not gonna enjoy it. And the reality is spend too much time at work to not enjoy it. So I think being present to perform, I think that’s important both by hand, a parental side, taking the time to be in the moment and taking, giving everybody your full intention.

Ben Loper: And that one thing I used to be, I know four years ago I was really that I had two dope and I would be on the bone for I

Mike Richards: and now you go full.

Ben Loper: I actually went down to One Bone, but I could just be on one. And I really tried to put that away in meetings and dinners and things like that. Again, both on the personal side and on the business side because it just time scare.

Ben Loper: And then you learn that more the older you get.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Ben Loper: But the ability to take the time and really focus on what you’re doing. And then, yeah, I mean credentialing and things like that are definitely important. I know that the barely hire or not hire somebody because they don’t have a PFA or do have a FA or don’t have EPA or do it.

Ben Loper: P, there’s certain roles where it’s required. Yeah. But it definitely helps you stand out and I think that those credentialing organization, they are who they are and they come with continu. But at the end of the day, I think they are important. And I do think by certain level that, but I think with so much noise out there, I think people all the time unity, these TE of AI staff bots to kind of give information and it becomes, those bots are not a hundred percent accurate and so they’re giving information sort of coming off as an expert, but the reality is they just don’t have the background to really make that determination.

Ben Loper: But I think within accounting and legal particularly and medical probably it’d be very dangerous. You, AI bot, you don’t know all these things, so, so I think those are all the ba I would just say too, maybe kind of hay around the rim. Right. That’s one thing I’ve learned as times gone on and you just don’t quit.

Ben Loper: And I hope my dad’s a great prop and IR coming up. Yeah. And so even when things are not going on your way. Continue toif away at it and something will open up. And I think that for things like treasury particularly, there’s no forage of opportunities out there and there’s all these branches that it can feed into.

Ben Loper: And in my case, particularly fed into to a large operations group and the lending book. And that’s all a lot of fun and a lot of craziness. But I definitely that talk and be, the one thing I’d add is keep talking away on it. Don’t quit, hang around the rim. Whatever phrase people like that really is important.

Ben Loper: Just keep moving and I think that opportunities break their way when you do that.

Mike Richards: Brilliant. I’m gonna, I’m gonna leave it there. No, it’s been fantastic. Thank you sir. And I really appreciate your advice and anyone listening today, we’ll put Ben’s detail, LinkedIn details in the show notes. You will see him.

Mike Richards: I’ve actually checked his profile, but you, he won’t be a cartoon on there for now. It’s okay. Maybe it’ll change in the future. But I know great personality, your network and thank you very much, sir. I’ve been brilliant to reconnect with you today. Thank you. Yeah, thank.

Mike Richards: Before you finish today’s show, a quick reminder, you can earn CTP credits just by listening to the podcast. Listen to the show, take a short online quiz, pass the quiz, gotta do that, and then we’ll send you CTP credits. This means you can recertify, which I know you have to do every two years, and lots of people do it.

Mike Richards: It’s so convenient. They do it whilst they’re commuting. There might be at the gym walking the dog. We are there to help you. It’s designed to fit around you and your real treasury jobs, not add more work to it. If you are already listening, you might as well get the credit for it. All you need to do, head to the episode page, take the quiz, and as I say, as long as you pass, we will send you the CTP credits.

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