From Cash to Collaboration: How Treasurers Can Transform Through Peer Learning and Partnership

Mike Richards, CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company: 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: I’m joined by Joseph Neu, the founder and CEO of Neu Group. Joseph founded Neu Group 30 years ago to provide insights to treasury and finance lead leaders to help them succeed. In 2001, you transformed the company into more of a membership organization for peer knowledge exchange tech sector by peer groups.

Mike Richards: If you’d been listening any of you for six years, you would’ve heard me talking originally to Joseph was kind enough to be one of my first ever guests. That’s right. Way back in 2019, before Covid, before the shutters came down, we had an episode, then we thought, should we just update that one? No, actually a lot’s changed.

Mike Richards: So what we’re going to do, I’m gonna talk to Joseph A. Little bit more about, we’ll go back through so you don’t have to visit that one from the archives. If you would talk us through your career and then we’ll go on to about Neu Group and who Neu Group are and ’cause you and I both provide services to treasurers.

Mike Richards: So over to you sir.

Joseph Neu, Founder and CEO, NeuGroup: Yeah, no thanks Mike. Great to be here with you and congratulations on the podcast. Thank you. Really, it’s really done and you’ve done a great job with it. Kudos to you. I started off working for this company called IT Business International that had been purchased well before I started there by The Economist Group, provided all sorts of services for multinationals, mainly US multinationals to help them do business around the world.

Joseph Neu: And as part of that, they had a research consulting division, a number of content divisions. But the basic idea was that they were advising multinationals across a number of different verticals, including, interestingly enough, the finance vertical. And so my time there, I, by happenstance, was put on as project I was called Building the Next Generation Treasury.

Joseph Neu: That was a research project that was looking at how multinationals were. Forming international treasury centers, but forming treasury centers and in-house banks to help centralize and facilitate their global treasury management, particularly on an international basis. I’ve found it to be quite interesting and continues to be fascinating.

Joseph Neu: I always say that I come at this area a bit from a research advisory perspective. And I have a lens that since I was never a practitioner, I’ve always been looking from the outside in, which gives me a different perspective on it than if you are in the job day to day. I think I appreciate greatly the practitioners that are in the job day to day.

Joseph Neu: I spend a lot of time with them, talking with them to get their perspective of what that looks like. And from time to time, I love to go to visit treasures and their teams and spend time with them to actually get immersed in their day to day. And I’m over to do that actually now again, and looking forward to that.

Joseph Neu: So maybe this is a call out. If anyone’s listening and wants to invite me, you come alone. Start an ending. Happy to come and spend the day. But yeah, I really come at this. From a non practitioner’s perspective, which gives me an academic lens, but also more of a theoretical lens on how come to work and

Mike Richards: explain what noise for the listenership.

Mike Richards: And then what I want to do is talk about the evolution of it, because I’ve been doing treasury crew in 28 years and known you all my career. So it’s, yeah. You, you, as you say, you get together practitioners and things like that, or is that how it started or what happened with at the beginning when it was, yeah, so

Joseph Neu: when I first left the Economist group to form Neu Group.

Joseph Neu: I started off, I had been part of their newsletter at the tail end of my career there. So when I started NOI group, I built it around a newsletter called the International Treasurer. And with that, as is typical of newsletter business to business newsletter businesses, I built small seminars and round tables, most importantly as an ancillary business stream.

Joseph Neu: And. I had always loved the round table experience of getting around the table with practitioners in a smaller group of anywhere from 10 to 25 or 30. And I just found that to be much more interesting than a conference. ’cause you got, actually got to engage with people, get to know them really well. And right around the 1999, 2000 period.

Joseph Neu: I saw the writing on the wall at the subscription newsletter business was a buying one. Yeah. And I came up with the idea to convert the subscription to the round tables essentially and make those, the product, the key product. We still do content around that, but it’s really these round tables that we call peer groups.

Joseph Neu: ’cause we organize them around job roles. Size of companies, sector of companies, and the basic principle is you’re trying to get true peers that share the same job. General principle is a

Mike Richards: curated peer group of, so you have some industry streams, don’t you, and then some size of company across thing as well.

Mike Richards: Why do you think that’s important?

Joseph Neu: It’s quite interesting, the evolution of it. The very first peer group that I started was in the tech sector. I had a lot of good contexts in the treasury community, in the tech sector, and so my first group was nicknamed The Tech 20 was essentially the largest tech companies in the us, the treasures of those companies, and in the evolution of that group.

Joseph Neu: More and more of them wanted to learn about what industrial companies were doing and what treasures from other sectors were doing, particularly, uh, around debt issuance. And so that clued me into the fact that there was a lot of interest in. Benchmarking and learning about how treasures in other industries, particularly that were much more heavily debt financed, did things, and a lot of cross-learning from across the sectors segmenting companies by size and a bit around complexity was a really good thing.

Joseph Neu: You could also, as the network grew, I mean we grew from the original tech treasurers group to some 30 plus groups now, and as the network continues to grow, there’s many more opportunities. To facilitate knowledge exchange across the groups. And when Neu Group started, it was constellation of different peer groups that were organized again, around job role, company size, sector.

Joseph Neu: But over time we’ve taken advantage of the network and the growth of the network to connect people across and that. Can help treasurers learn new things from outside the sphere of their company. A great thing about peer groups is you can talk with your team, your colleagues, but to get a real sense of new ideas and new innovation.

Joseph Neu: It’s good to reach out to and get to know those guys, and not only in your sector, but across other sectors, and increasingly across other countries as well.

Mike Richards: So I started the podcast six and a half years ago, pre covid hybrid working wasn’t a thing. Suddenly hybrid. What? Remote Then working from home and they, so that change and shift post covid.

Mike Richards: We’ve then had immediately came out, you had blockchain, you had technology, and now blockchain’s gone. People don’t really talk about, but now, oh, the rise of AI conversation and everything else. So going back to the beginning 30 years ago, if you would, just a quick, again, this is for the corporate treasurers listening.

Mike Richards: What have you seen evolve in the conversations you are sitting, you’ve been sitting at those tables for 30 years. Yeah. What were they, what were their worries 30 years ago versus in the middle and then now, or what are they? What’s coming out without confidential info?

Joseph Neu: Yeah, interesting. ’cause there’s two parts to it, Mike.

Joseph Neu: I think one part is. What I would dub the perennial issues around the management and capital structure, capital allocation, that those topics have remained remarkably consistent over three decades. What’s changed is the toolkit, the knowledge around how to do that, the technology, and then obviously the global conditions, market conditions, rate, environment, et cetera.

Joseph Neu: That all changes the topics. There’s one subset of topics that remain constant and you revisit them with these new contexts and perspective. So it’s really quite interesting to think back to the prior discussion and then think back also 30 years to when this was discussed. And every once in a while I go into the archives and look up some of the old presentations and notes from the original meetings.

Joseph Neu: And it reinforces that comment that things don’t change dramatically from what treasurers are talking about, but the lens with which they view them does change, and that’s what keeps this fresh and interesting that there are. These perennial issues and problems that treasurers have been trying to solve and grapple with for three decades plus now.

Joseph Neu: And really one of the things that I would really like to accomplish to help treasurers make a new leap by solving some of these issues, and probably the biggest thing you mentioned, ai. AI in combination with much better superior and workflow enabling technologies are really taking out some of the more mundane.

Joseph Neu: Transaction processing elements of treasury and allowing treasurers to spend more time going forward on more strategic business partnership type projects and really become a revenue or profit enabler through the business. And that’s another kind of highlights, a big change, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking quite a bit about in the last year or so.

Joseph Neu: Is back when I started this in the early nineties, there was this there. There was these blowups in with derivative trades, Procter and Gamble and others, and tarnish, this idea of treasury as a profit center. I. Because Treasury was not a profit center and labeled or thought of more as a cost center. The resources that it had at its disposal were constrained because it wasn’t earning profits.

Joseph Neu: I think that there’s an opportunity to break out of that a bit, not by being a profit center through financial trading or taking risks with corporate capital, but really working in partnership with the businesses. To help them earn more revenue, more profit. As you said, cash is king and I think there’s a growing appreciation that the cash is the truth.

Joseph Neu: The free cash flow really tells you a lot about the company and maximizing the free cash flow that the businesses produce and getting them to have a cash mindset and understand that is something that the treasurers are well positioned to take the lead on.

Mike Richards: And that’s one of the things people are going for pay reviews at the moment.

Mike Richards: ’cause treasurers, a lot of the time they just do their jobs, keep their heads down. They don’t really. Necessarily see where they can be a profit enabler, where they can actually help the companies save cash and then they don’t note it down. I’ve said, look, put that in your black book, so when you actually go to your boss for your pay review, okay, I’ve totaled up how much I’ve helped you save this year.

Mike Richards: Or helped you make How I’ve increased the profits, now I want my bonus. And that’s a good way of doing it. You’ve got that one. And if you like treasurers in a way coming out of the corner office a little bit more into the mainstream, which I’ve certainly seen,

Joseph Neu: I think there’s other perennial thought of, of treasury and treasures being in an ivory tower of being in this specialist function, which is fairly technical and few people outside of treasury.

Joseph Neu: Necessarily understand what Treasury’s doing. And there’s this ivory tower concept that is one part the nature of the job. And I think one part, a mindset that evolved in treasury and some treasurers where they maybe enjoyed being in this ivory tower. And I think that’s forcibly changed. And there’s a number of factors there.

Joseph Neu: One is that we see this in large enterprises in particular. Also at growth companies at a certain stage where they’re building treasury from a foundational level, maybe even a pre treasury company, they don’t really have a treasurer. So different people in the finance organization are doing treasury activities, and I think we’re seeing both at that level and at the large enterprise level.

Joseph Neu: The treasurers are. Not necessarily treasurers for their or in treasury for their whole career. I think that’s changing increasingly to have treasurers being part of what I’ve called the strategic finance career path, where they’re going through various key strategic finance roles on the road to becoming CFO.

Joseph Neu: And it used to be there was a tension between treasurers who wanted to be. CFO, which was probably the minority and a much more difficult leap or 30 years ago than it is today, but to people in treasury that are in the treasurer’s chair as part of their career path for maybe three, five years. But the plus side of it is they’ve been in more.

Joseph Neu: Business partnership oriented roles before coming into Treasury. So they bring that mindset, which I think really helps them become a revenue profit enabler and then ultimately help the businesses generate more free cash flow. I’ve always found that some of the best treasury functions, or that have been great exporters of finance talent have been those that have created a career path where to become a senior.

Joseph Neu: Leader in the treasury organization, you had to move out of treasury into a business finance role, even to become at some of the early companies that did that, wandered away from that. But they’re coming back to it and I think more and more companies are coming around to the importance of that idea and be curious like we, what you’re seeing in terms of placements.

Joseph Neu: To treasure roles and even their key direct reports. How much experience in a business finance role is important to make that next rung? It’s an

Mike Richards: interesting but great question. I think if I just take a typical treasury structure, if you like, so you’ve got treasury, analyst, manager, you move up obviously the pyramid against narrower.

Mike Richards: So there’s only limited opportunities and I think that’s where some treasury professionals make a mistake. I was just talking to a treasurer of the past couple of days where actually. They’re gonna go off into an FB and a role because they want to get to a CFO role at one stage. And they were going, if I just stay as a treasurer or and a treasury practitioner all the way through, I’m not gonna get the CFO role.

Mike Richards: And I was like, yeah, you probably won’t. Because I do see a number of companies now, some of them are bringing in rightly or wrongly, you have your treasury team one step below the treasurer, and they then, oh, hang on. We’re now gonna make that treasury job a stopping off point to train our next CFOs.

Mike Richards: Actually, I think if you’re a deputy treasurer and you’re listening to this today, go and work somewhere else. Not different company, but go and work at a different part of the function. It’s great if you work in treasury and you love it, but do be aware that if you want that number one CFO job, maybe you can’t just have treasury, maybe go and work in tax or go and work in the commercial side of the business.

Mike Richards: You are a finance professional first. Treasurer second, not the other way round. And I think, yeah. That’s where I’ve seen it for you and I both. Treasury is a passion, but actually when they say to me as a treasury recruiter, what should I do? Don’t stay in treasury All your life. Yeah. You go out of it and come back in and then you’ll know more.

Mike Richards: He now says that 20% of his job, he used to be a hundred percent of his job. Now only 20% of his job in this new role is actually core corporate treasury. A lot. The rest of it is corporate finance. He’s working with different businesses across the affiliates. Then corporate finance, then there’s investor relations, then there’s all this other projecting stuff, projects that like technology and automation.

Mike Richards: We’ve talked about that. Yeah. Any other big shifts in treasury, operations? Any other things that you are seeing as many treasurers in some ways, as I am at my events and things, you know? Yeah. But you are getting these firsthand one-to-one conversations with them sitting around the table. What are their.

Mike Richards: When you are having that coffee or maybe something stronger later on in the evening, what are they saying? This is the challenge

Joseph Neu: I, you mentioned one of those, and that is the expanding scope of the role of many treasurers. Like it tends to not be Discord treasury anymore. Yeah. And with that, the treasury may have treasury as not their biggest role in spanning these different areas.

Joseph Neu: There’s a challenge there, but also an opportunity. The challenge is you are having to learn another area. Maybe it’s taxed, maybe it’s investor relations, maybe it’s fp and a, and maybe it’s looking after the global business services, taking on more the A PAR roles with payments, and each of those areas has a different kind of management challenge and talent needs.

Joseph Neu: So it really compounds the complexity of the treasure’s role just from a management standpoint, people and process and systems. And so that gets to the opportunity of it. It does. We’ve seen a lot of change around collaboration with the other teams and looking at building common systems. FP and a is a great example.

Joseph Neu: We are collaborating more closely if not having fp and a directly under the treasurer. One cash forecasting model across treasury and fp and I and looking to reconcile the indirect versus the direct cashflow forecasting methods, and also reconciling those and the balance sheet perspective versus the p and l perspective.

Joseph Neu: There’s also, I think, an opportunity, the other challenge of these rotational roles and the spanning of the different roles is. If you’re a treasurer in that position where you’re just in the treasure chair for a finite period, or you’re spanning a bunch of non treasury verticals, your ability to really go as deep into treasury domain and knowledge is different, and so you’re going to rely then on.

Joseph Neu: A deputy treasurer or assistant treasurer who’s really strong in the technical knowledge of treasury to help keep things going. And that also puts an interesting challenge to the number two or to the deputy if they want to advance to the treasurer’s chair. How are they going to get the broader experience if they’re relied upon to be the domain expert?

Joseph Neu: Yeah, the treasury function. And I think the solution to that is. Probably going to come from technology and some of these AI tools that are really learning quickly how the technical details of treasury work, and maybe over time and probably quicker than we realize, the smart AI agents will become expert in these various technical areas of treasury that will make it easier for people to expand their scopes and rotate their knowledge base away from the technical details of treasury into these other areas.

Joseph Neu: And my view is that’s going to further strengthen this idea of being business partners. And the business is run still by people. And it’s a very people skills oriented focus that I think the future brings. And it’ll be really interesting to see how that evolves over the next five years. ’cause I think we’ll probably see.

Joseph Neu: The scope expansion continue and probably go faster. The roles within the treasury department are also gonna change and the balance between technical knowledge and these people software business partnering skills are are gonna elevate and it’s going to be interesting. How people in those roles adapt.

Joseph Neu: And we’ve seen this in the last five years. We’ve continued to expand our peer groups to more and more layers of the direct report under the treasurer. And one of the most interesting ones is the, what we call high potentials, but it’s a more junior staff that have been flagged as having high potential that the treasurer will want them to meet other peers at their level to get even better.

Joseph Neu: But we found that the people at the start of their careers really come to treasury often through in the US They have these rotational programs for MBAs or even pre MBAs to go through the finance function and treasury can become a magnet for these young people and talent because you get exposure to the capital markets.

Joseph Neu: It’ll be interesting to see that dynamic play out. For these young people who fall in love with some of the technical elements of treasury, that they’re going to have that but also expand because more and more those processes are going to be automated with smart automation and AI on top of it. What

Mike Richards: mistakes have you seen people make?

Mike Richards: Again, without giving, we’re not naming, shaming.

Joseph Neu: Yeah,

Mike Richards: but you get to see it. And peer groups are a confidential environment. The fact is you then also get an insight into that. Any other danger areas or you think that the learnings from some of those groups?

Joseph Neu: A common one is also around technology and implementation of treasury technology.

Joseph Neu: I think for a variety of reasons, there may be a need to maybe not spend the money on implementation expertise to get the system put in, or maybe not spend the time to really evaluate the very. Tools that are out there to get the right one. Everyone’s got their day job and doing a treasury management system implementation on top of their day job is a really difficult thing.

Joseph Neu: And challenges. Yeah. And so I think there’s an underestimation of the importance of putting resources towards these implementations and getting them put in. Correctly and also fit for purpose to what you’re trying to do. And then once they’re in, the process was tedious and painful in a lot of ways that you leave in a suboptimal implementation in place for too long, and that can come back to bite you in a number of different ways, particularly if you are trying to introduce some of these new tools on top of the system that maybe the data architecture isn’t set up correctly.

Joseph Neu: It is hopefully changing. ’cause the next generation of treasury technology tools all say that they can be implemented in weeks, not months or years. Yeah. Switch all back. Hopefully that will make things easier. But there’s countless companies that are on this SAPS four HANA journey that seems to be never ending and going through that process.

Joseph Neu: Even two weeks ago at one of our mega cap treasurers meeting, just reiterating the importance of if you’re going to do an ERP implementation to go with the standard processes that out of the box that SAP is built for and not try to bend it to the way that Treasury does things currently. I think that’s a common mistake and probably one of the most prevalent still.

Joseph Neu: I think there’s always going to be. Some learnings around foreign exchange management and hedging where you don’t really have a great exposure identification process with data, you’re layering on hedges against the exposures that maybe aren’t actually. Existing from a real economic standpoint. Yeah, so I think there’s still mistakes that happen around there, but hopefully not fundamentals.

Joseph Neu: There’s still stories that you hear about treasures that have been exited a bit in disgrace over some major snafu, a major error. There’s a huge risk asymetry in the treasurer’s role in that if you save the company. Tens of millions or maybe even times hundreds of millions in cash flow or from a risk mitigation standpoint, you reduce the exposure.

Joseph Neu: You’re going to get a little bit of credit for that, but no one’s gonna remember that if you, if something. Something that maybe was an honest mistake or something beyond your control that creates an EPS hit to the downside, and you may be let go over something like that because people aren’t remembering the cumulative value creation.

Joseph Neu: And

Mike Richards: I got asked an amazing question number of years ago by A CFO, Derek Harding, and Derek asked me, he said, Mike. How do I measure the success of my treasurer? I was like, what do you mean? He said, how do I measure it? If I get a sales guy? We measure ’em by the amount of sales they do and the amount of profit we make.

Mike Richards: Make sure that those are profitable sales. He said, tax guy, you saving how much tax they’ve saved us, what the original, what they’ve now done, how they’ve processed it, everything. Brilliant. Yeah. How do you measure that on a treasurer? Do you measure them on profit? Or cash saved. Where do I put the bonus?

Mike Richards: Here’s your bonus. And then reset day one and the next one, and they do a big deal. 50,000 pounds, $50,000. How do I reward them? I had to go back a number of days later, and I say, Derek, I don’t know. First time I’ve really been asked that what might be right for one treasurer and one company? The only answer we came up with is different for each treasurer.

Mike Richards: You’re gonna have to measure it on your business. What are your physical risks in that? What are your hedging exposures? And get them to break it down and say, this is where we are now. This is where we want to be, and the steps they’re gonna do it. And how did they save money in that

Joseph Neu: bit? Yeah, no, it’s a very good point.

Joseph Neu: And it’s actually quite timely ’cause we are, we’re in discussion with one of our members now about helping them put together. Benchmarking effort with other companies. And one of the things that they want to get out of that is how do they measure the performance gains from a trade standpoint and even an overall finance standpoint.

Joseph Neu: ’cause they’re one of many companies that have undergone, or in the process of undergoing pretty significant global finance transformation project. And then coming out of that, you want to ask yourself, we’ve done all this work and created brick on all these eggs to transform the whole finance function, restructure how it works, what do we gain from all that?

Joseph Neu: And they’re doing these transformations to become more agile, become a better business partner, and create more value, but ultimately to create more value for the business. But if you’re not measuring that, then how do you justify this painful transformation work that you’ve undertaken? If you look at the metrics that people benchmark and the various groups like Hack it put out there, they tend to be efficiency measures, and they might be around working capital utilization or things like that.

Joseph Neu: I think those are important, but I think that much more important for the treasurer and the treasury functions of the future if they’re gonna build a business case to. Continue to get better and get the AI tools that are gonna make the further transformation possible, and none of those are gonna be free.

Joseph Neu: There’s been studies that show correlation effects between treasury functions that are efficient, have top quartile or top quintile of these benchmarking metrics that are out there, tend to also be better performing companies.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Joseph Neu: But it’s a correlation more than actually. Showing the direct causation effect between having a great treasury and a great performing company.

Joseph Neu: People that deal with treasurers and are in treasury realize that they’re creating a tremendous amount of value, much more. On a pared count basis than a lot of other functions within the modern corporation, but it’s, they don’t have the same metrics to, to justify and support that others do. And again, this comes back to it’s, you can’t be a profit center in, in treasury.

Joseph Neu: And so that narrows the toolkit of profit is one that the people, modern businesses. If you show a profit that changes your business case and what sort of resources you can get. So that’s a big challenge for treasury, is how to make that case without profit as being a measure. It’s like how do you tie in to the profit that you’re enabling from the businesses that you’re,

Mike Richards: and I’m gonna qualify a little bit before I get you answer the question I wrote.

Mike Richards: If you had to predict where corporate treasury will be in. 10 years reflecting on the past 30 years. So again, I’ve been in similar time. When I first got into treasury, as you said, treasurers, I think I mentioned about the corner office. They went to the corner office. They wanted that, oh, that’s the treasury guy.

Mike Richards: Give them the money. I’ll look after it. He’ll de-risk it. He’ll do all this and Oh, actually I’m getting paid more. And they loved it. And then they realized they weren’t getting involved in the business. They were quite marginalized themselves. Just look after the cash arms round it and stuff. They’ve spent the past 15, 20 years trying to battle their way back out of that to be more involved with the business and things.

Mike Richards: I see that treasury is becoming more mainstream. People are, a lot of people get into treasury by accident. It’s becoming more of a career. People actually hear about treasury a bit more. What would your prediction for, I dunno if we can say 10 years, maybe that as of just the next five years, where do you see treasury?

Mike Richards: Obviously tech is helping enabling more, but where else do you see it going? Before Sue’s saying, if you’re looking through your crystal ball, what are you seeing through the miss of time?

Joseph Neu: Yeah, I guess. What I hope to see, and I think there’s a pretty good probability that this will happen, is that we’ll see treasurers having a real seat at the table, that business decisions are made rather than reacting to business decisions when the exposures are created.

Joseph Neu: And I think we’re seeing some of that already. One is in the. If we look at the complex geopolitical environment that we face. More and more companies through their growth journey. They start in the developed markets, go into emerging markets, and now more and more of them are going into what are called frontier markets.

Joseph Neu: It used to be that commercial sales, whatever went into these markets. The thought process was, we’ve gotta grow, let’s get in there. And they would basically, once. After the decision was made, they would, someone would tell them like, oh, we need a bank account. And then they would ask who opens bank accounts?

Joseph Neu: Finally getting around to letting someone treasury know that we’ve already entered this market and we need a bank account. And then the treasury has to react to the fact that they’ve gone into this country. We’re opening a bank account. It may not be that easy because there’s no real global bank partners in that market.

Joseph Neu: You’ve gotta evaluate a bunch of local banks and. There’s quite a bit of currency risk and all the money that you’re making in this market is gonna get trapped there because of currency restrictions and capital controls. And I think that building awareness to the business people at the front lines that are making these decisions, that bringing Treasury into the process earlier is gonna be a value add.

Joseph Neu: And the challenge there for treasury is they have to be. An enabler of the business and not something that just says no, because I think that there’s a bit of a reputation and it’s a delicate balancing act of how do you do these things right, and make them scalable and enterprise grade from a finance perspective without saying, no, we can’t do this.

Joseph Neu: Because if you do that enough, then you have these end around situations where the business, and you see this a lot in tech where. The new products are created. Treasury says, oh, we can’t do this. They bypass the banks altogether and go to a FinTech. And that maybe works as the business gets started. But once it gets to a real business, then treasury has to come in with all the controls.

Joseph Neu: But getting treasury early, a seat at the table at these early decisions that you know are impactful over time to to risk and cash flow, that’s one thing. And I think that we’re making some progress there and we’ll continue to. And the other is on a bigger picture. We see a number of companies that have significant working capital optimization initiatives.

Joseph Neu: And getting a handle on working capital improvement or even the larger position. Some companies, depending on which consultant they bring in to help them create these, we’ll call it a cash leadership council, ’cause it really goes to cash at the end of the day. And in order to get a improvement to cash or working capital, you have to have the cooperation of a number of other people within the company and get them to understand what’s happening from a cash or a treasury perspective.

Joseph Neu: And we’re seeing treasury have more potential impact by creating these collaboration relationships with procurement, the head of global supply chain, the people in charge of inventory, the commercial sales organization, as I mentioned, and creating some sort of relationship building exercise to have true working relationships with these other people within the enterprise that actually make decisions that impact cash and working capital.

Joseph Neu: Those I think are, once those are made and then sustained and maintained, the job of a treasurer gets much more interesting and also impactful. Reconciling bank accounts and coming up with a cash position, get automated so that they happen without much effort, then much more can be done on these activities and building these relationships and getting a better understanding and a common agenda with these other business partnering functions, both within the CFO’s office and broader than that.

Joseph Neu: I think are going to be the key to Treasury’s future, and I’m starting to see some good progress there. Obviously it helps if you’ve got these treasurers that have rotated through a bunch of these roles, have been in a business CFO position ’cause they’ve been exposed to those people and understand their mindset a bit better than if they’ve been their whole career in the ivory tower.

Joseph Neu: I think that this bridge building, collaborative relationship building is key to the future. It’s supported and enabled by the technology that’s gonna free up their time and mind share to focus on these things. One goes with the other, but I’m pretty optimistic about that. And with that, the impact and the value add, the treasurer’s role will continue to grow in importance.

Joseph Neu: Amazing.

Mike Richards: So we’re gonna put your LinkedIn details in the show notes and takeaways from today’s show. We covered so much there and that’s why I was just like, it’s great. It’s great just digging into some of this stuff. But we always, it’s great to listen to you ’cause you’ve got equivalent level of experience, but in a different treasures, in a different light to me as well.

Mike Richards: You get them in different situations, which is fantastic. I love it. But for yourself, when you’re talking to people, what advice would you give them? Then you walk from that room. And then next door, you’re doing the sort of the deputy treasurers. They’re in there. You can give them in the, what you’ve gotta do, they, you’ve been tasked, so you’ve gotta give the future leader some advice.

Mike Richards: Then you’ve gotta give the deputy treasurer some advice, and then you are in the room with a head honchos. What are the three different pieces of advice you give to each of those groups?

Joseph Neu: There’s one common theme, and that is that if you are, and it may be sounding a bit self-serving, but I think it, whether it’s with no group or another.

Joseph Neu: Peer networking organization that you should join some sort of peer group if you’re not in a peer group to benefit. From the knowledge of other people are you are really going about things with one hand tied behind your back. I, I think they were talking about hiring for a CFO position. It applies equally to treasury, that if you are, if you don’t have some indication that you’re part of a peer group association, property counts as that too.

Joseph Neu: But it’s a great marker that you’re a continual learner. Treasury is a knowledge job and you’ve gotta show that you’re continually learning. One of the best ways is to be a part of a peer group and have mentors that are above you as well. ’cause they’re gonna help you learn from their experience and the chances are that they’re gonna help you in your career as well.

Joseph Neu: You have to have a neutral advisor that isn’t, you’re not necessarily reporting to, that’s gonna help you. And then you’ve gotta have mentors that are going to help you get better through their experience. And I think if you’re part of a network and established a network, you’re gonna find those sorts of resources.

Joseph Neu: That’s the perennial. The other one that we touched on is as much as you love treasury, if you’re in treasury, is to try to expand the scope of your role and really think about these business partnering type roles and spend as much time talking to. Colleagues in the business and also other colleagues that are in these business partnering roles, whether it’s in the fp and a function, your colleagues in supply chain procurement, et cetera.

Joseph Neu: The more time that you can spend talking to those people, the more opportunity that you’re gonna have to rotate into those roles. ’cause I think we’re building relationships, whether it’s outside the company with peer groups and networking is important, but internal relationships are equally important.

Joseph Neu: And the third thing is. One of the advantages of rotating is it brings a fresh set of eyes to problems and solutions because if you end up doing the same thing for a really long time, you get a narrow view to what the fresh perspective and how you might innovate. And so every once in a while, forget what you think and try to take a fresh set of eyes on what you’re doing.

Joseph Neu: One helpful way to do that is to bring in somebody that you’ve built one of these relationships with that. Isn’t in your role and ask them for their perspective. We just, again, even at this treasury meeting we had a couple weeks ago, I think there was at least a handful of treasurers around the table that had just become treasurer within the last year.

Joseph Neu: Usually when a new treasurer comes in the role, particularly if they haven’t spent their whole career in that treasury department, they’re taking this fresh set of eyes out of everything the Treasury Department does. But if you don’t have the benefit of a new treasurer coming in who hasn’t spent their whole career in your treasury, it’s good to do this fresh eyes exercise periodically because it uncovers opportunities for advancement, process improvement, and just rethinking occasionally what it is you’re doing and why.

Joseph Neu: And with that insight, there’s a lot of value creation and transformation. That can be done and it doesn’t have to wait for a, a big global finance transformation project that the C-suite orders from the top.

Mike Richards: Yeah. Wow. I hope that was helpful

Joseph Neu: and I hope for your listeners as well, but always a pleasure, Mike.

Joseph Neu: And we’re on a six year cycle, but

Mike Richards: Well, I’ve done 370 now, so another six years. That’ll be 750. There you go.

Joseph Neu: I’ve dabbled a little bit myself and enjoy doing this podcast. It’s fantastic. Thank you to see your success with the Treasury Career Corner. Thank you. Cool.