How Tradeweb Enhanced Its Treasury Team with Tech – No Expansion Required

Ashley Serrao, Managing Director, Head of Treasury, FP&A and Investor Relations at Tradeweb Markets:: I think about it the way I manage my personal finance. I get annoyed if I’m not earning it. The best return possible. Yeah. Why not apply the same mindset to your own corporate job? There are options out there and just a question of taking a little bit initiative, doing a little bit extra work, but it’s worth it.

Mike Richards, CEO & Founder, 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: This week’s show, I’m joined by Ashley Serrao, the managing director, head of Treasury, FP&A, and investor relations at Trade web markets, and a member of the executive committee. Tradeweb are a financial technology leader driving the evolution of electronic trading. Tradeweb combines market expertise, technology, intelligent data, and a global network of clients to improve the way financial markets trade as an ideas and solutions company.

Mike Richards: They value the power of collaboration and innovation. Then I’ll also get Ashley to explain the linkage between ICD and Tradeweb later on on the show. First of all, I want to go back to how you first started. Ashley, how did your career first start in treasury? Well, finance actually, and then you later on got into treasury.

Mike Richards: Over to you, sir. How did it all start?

Ashley Serrao: Yeah, so it was funny story. I was in college trying to decide what I wanted to do in life, and at that point I thought I was gonna go down the medical route, so biochem, et cetera. I quickly realized that these subjects get incredibly hard the further you advance. At the same time, I was exposed to economics, and economics came naturally to me.

Ashley Serrao: I found it fascinating studying markets and the inter, the interplay between different factors. I. And I thought about like, how can I apply this to the real world? Didn’t wanna be an academic. And I felt like the finance was the closest match from a career standpoint to economics. And I moved in that direction.

Ashley Serrao: I mean, I studied economics all through college, so I learned finance on the job essentially. But for me, if I ever to boil it down, like finance is just the ability to add subtractive, add, divide, and multiply. If you can do that, learn the language and you’re off to the races. So that’s kind of what I did.

Ashley Serrao: I taught myself finance.

Mike Richards: And then where did you, that you learned how to add up, as you said, and that added up to your career now. So what happened next? ’cause then you joined, how did you then get to Credit Suisse? Or how did it all start?

Ashley Serrao: Yeah, so I was always fascinated by business. Ever since I was a kid, my dad used to come back from the office, tell stories by like what he did during the day, and it was all fascinating.

Ashley Serrao: He worked in different fields, marketing, sales, et cetera. But then in college I got exposed to the stock market. I was part of the investment club there. And for me, the stock market was fascinating because it was sort of this attempt at predicting the future. But in doing so, it wasn’t just a pure quantitative exercise.

Ashley Serrao: It was like a mix of psychology and motion. And how did it all come together? It was very fascinating. So I ended up getting an internship at Credit Suisse within equity research, and that’s where I started off my career. Ended up being an equity analyst, got a full-time offer to come back. I. And it was just eye-opening.

Ashley Serrao: The way folks craft a narrative for, if you think about the stock market for every buyer, there’s a seller, right? There’s someone taking the o other side of every single trade and every and both sides had the same amount of conviction that what they’re doing is correct, is the right thing. So that that kind of tension that creates these interesting outcomes was very fascinating.

Ashley Serrao: And so that was my, that’s where I started off, that’s where I spent about like nine years at Credit Suisse.

Mike Richards: How did that then sort of prepare you for later on corporate treasury or the move them into corporate development and things?

Ashley Serrao: Yeah, I, I kind of consider myself really lucky to admit with entering the industry at the time when bank stocks or bank financials were receding into the background and it was all about how technology was taking over the world of finance.

Ashley Serrao: And so the non-bank financials that were really powered by technology became hot stocks. And so these were like companies like electronic trading platforms, your discount brokers, rating agencies, index companies. They’re proliferating rapidly. And that’s where I sort of cut my feet as an analyst, like really studying the space and kind of getting to know the drivers and in depth, kind of forming a view on the secular trends.

Ashley Serrao: And the good news there was it was all super positive and some, sometimes you catch a wave and when it’s a growth wave like that, it’s like eye-opening. ’cause you get to be at the forefront of seeing real transformation happen.

Mike Richards: Yeah,

Ashley Serrao: and that’s where I first actually came across trade as well, which is where I’m here to where I work thing

Mike Richards: and who are trade web for those people that a lot of people do, but a lot of people going.

Mike Richards: Who are they? What are they as a company or what were they at that time? Actually, that was eight, nine years ago. So when you joined them, what was their situation?

Ashley Serrao: Yeah, so Tradeweb is the largest electronic platform to buy and sell fixed income. And today our clients spend the gamut. So you have large institutions like hedge funds, asset managers, central banks, to Fortune 500 corporates with our.

Ashley Serrao: We got through a recent acquisition of ICD to financial advisors, so we have the entire spectrum. Anybody who’s serious about a serious about investing or trafficking in the fixed income space ends up using trade web. Our claim to fame is like we do this all electronically, so as a easy, intuitive, in interface that people find very easy to use.

Ashley Serrao: And today we’re a trusted partner for the financial ecosystem. There’s about $2 trillion in trades on our system every single day, and so we are very akin to like an Amazon for fixed income trading. Yeah, we have buyers and sellers just trafficking all day long. And we have done this over the last 20 plus years.

Ashley Serrao: We start off with government bonds, and today we do credit ETFs, money markets. Now we’re also global Europe. Asia is a big emerging area for us as well, alongside all the emerging markets. And so it’s been a ra, it’s been a company that’s been growing rapidly, that’s been leveraging technology to capitalize on change, and it’s been a, it’s a fun ride.

Ashley Serrao: It’s been a fun ride since they joined them about, now it’s been about eight years.

Mike Richards: And you are the treasurer there now, but you originally started. You went through the IPO where you were then in a role there, and then you transitioned to Treasury and having advised the CFO and Treasury yourself, I thought it was a, an interesting one.

Mike Richards: It’s not me asking three questions, but the, that development, that arc for your story. Can you talk us through that? I.

Ashley Serrao: So like taking a step back when I was an equity research analyst and that’s when I first encountered Tradeweb. I knew this was a company to, that was shaping the future. And as I thought about my own future in equity research, I felt that the equity research industry was going to see some challenges.

Ashley Serrao: And I didn’t want to grow in the shrinking industry. So I thought about pivoting to the, to a corporate and a corporate that I felt had great growth prospects. And the same time any of these pivots, you take a little bit of risk, you’re moving from a. Commentator to the role of a practitioner. So I started off in on corporate development and strategy.

Ashley Serrao: That felt like home to me. Coming from equity research, that’s what I did day in and day out. I tried to understand company strategy and direction, and so that was kinda my first pit stop, and then that morphed into trade of actually going public. And so we went public about six years ago. We listed in Nasdaq today, the ticker is TW, and that gave me an opportunity to help the company shape their story for the external investors.

Ashley Serrao: A lot of the investors and were actually my old clients when I was an equity research analyst and the analysts were my old competitors. So it was a very natural segue into investor relations and it was fun telling the story. And it’s also at the same time challenging to be able to. Take a complex story and kind of distill it into a few sentences and kind of make it easy to grasp.

Ashley Serrao: For an equity investor, it is always challenging. Lots of companies have done it, but every company does it differently. And so that, that was the, that’s how I ended up the investor relations side. And then on the investor relations side, I ended up becoming or playing a big role in. Shaping our capital management story.

Ashley Serrao: And that was really my first intersection with treasury as a function. And it was on the capital management side or more, or what I described as more the strategic side. Yeah. And we were contemplating things like our first dividend. Should we pay it? How big should it be? Should we have a buyback program and buy back our stock?

Ashley Serrao: In the open market? How do we think about m and a and conserving or managing cash to fund some of, fund some of these. Inorganic aspiration that we had. So it was like very fascinating, but it was it, there was a lot of synergy between that and investor relations. So that then led. Into another pivot where a couple years ago we went through A CFO transition.

Ashley Serrao: Our old CFO, retired new CFO came in. I kind of put my hand up and said that I’d love to learn a little bit more about the operational side of finance, and I got, that’s when I took on FPNA, which is financial planning analysis and the treasury functions full-time in addition to also managing investor relations.

Mike Richards: Now you are in that seat. How has your perspective changed, sort of thing? Has it surprised you? ’cause you were that side and then you, they were sort of, you were halfway round the table and then it’s like, right now this is your big seat.

Ashley Serrao: Yeah. It’s, it’s funny when you, when you migrate from being a consumer of a product to maybe the creator or the manufacturer of a product, you really get to understand or at a better, maybe a better words, really appreciate, appreciate.

Ashley Serrao: The inner workings, sort of like how the sausage is made. And so stepping into the treasury role, it was an eye-opener. I found it fascinating that it was incredibly manual at that time, and in some ways ironic because as I described Trader a little earlier, we were at the forefront of electronifying fixed income markets, but our own finance function wasn’t necessarily.

Ashley Serrao: That slide here. Yeah. And so that to me was a low hanging fruit, often compare and contrast. What describes institutional finance or personal finance, right? Personal finance. You can pull up an app, get all the information presented to you or packaged in a really nice way, and it’s real times instantaneous.

Ashley Serrao: There aren’t any lags. There aren’t is. You don’t have to do a lot of work. It’s all been done for you. And so that kind of user experience was sort of the vision I had for the treasury function. How could we leverage technology and maximize the efficiency of what we were doing, and efficiency expressed in multiple ways, accuracy, saving time, making the job more enjoyable for the team, thinking about how to make the function more strategic.

Ashley Serrao: But these were sort of, if you set off in a different direction, I inherited the treasury function, what I described as very manual, all really Excel based. We didn’t have a treasury management system. That’s the first thing we did. We went on this journey of, in installing a treasury management system, and that was sort of the foundational heartbeat of the function today.

Ashley Serrao: And then we laid on other, uh, technology platforms. I know we’ll talk about ICD later on. ICD was one of them.

Mike Richards: Yeah. And then of those, the TMS implementation, some of the investment strategy, what’s been the biggest challenge so far for yourself?

Ashley Serrao: I think T TMSs or freshly managed systems, they’re great. But in order to make them work for you in your ecosystem or world, you have to really integrate and you have to like create some level of customization to adapt it to your workflow.

Ashley Serrao: That takes time. And so the challenge usually is tasking the team to go about their day job, but also think about the future and almost wear two hats at once and invest the time and energy to get the implementation right and correct. Then once it’s implemented, it’s not like a set and forget it mentality.

Ashley Serrao: It’s one of continuous learning. Yeah. Technology, I think technology and the evolution of technology doesn’t stop. It keeps advancing and so new features and functionality get constantly rolled out. It’s very important that we stay on top of those trends and really maximize the ability of software. And so that’s always the challenge.

Ashley Serrao: Challenge is like technology’s changing. Are we set up in the best possible way? And what else can we do to improve our process and try and be sort of a best in class treasury function?

Mike Richards: I was talking to a treasurer the other day and one of the key things we talked about, he said, it’s all very well, you set up your TMS, you get all the pipe work sorted.

Mike Richards: And he’s like, brilliant. And then you sort of sit back for a while and it’s working. Brilliant, lovely. And then he is like. Okay. And then all the pipes are gonna change. He’s like, whoa. He said, no, our pipes working and the pipes are working, but okay, we need to up the flow. We need to change this. And he was like, right that, and we’re not gonna re-implement.

Mike Richards: But that’s sometimes a challenge. And he was talking about also the attention sometimes going back to treasury when something breaks.

Ashley Serrao: Yes.

Mike Richards: When you’ve got that, how have you shifted that? It’s not just when things are breaking or stretched. How have you done that?

Ashley Serrao: I think at the end of the day, if you can maybe rise about the operations and get that right, it’s important that at the end of the day the treasurer’s role is to make sure that the operational element is secure and well executed.

Ashley Serrao: But then how do you sort of also earn your, earn a seat at the, what I describe as at the strategic table. Yeah. Are you influencing capital management decisions? Are you influencing just technology transformation decisions by sharing your own experience within your function? I think at the end of the day, you’re trying to become a valuable partner to the CFO, and I think there are, maybe there are a couple ways to do it, but perhaps the most impactful way is to actually impact the balance sheet.

Ashley Serrao: And that to my, from my standpoint, is making sure that. You are not only just managing cash, you’re also maximizing the interest earn and not leaving money on the table. And that is maybe the most tangible way to make an impact, both internally and externally. ’cause your income statement, especially your public, is consumed by your board and investors, et cetera.

Ashley Serrao: That’s probably the most tangible way that you can make an impact. But then it’s all. Obviously very important to get all the operational elements right as well.

Mike Richards: Yeah. And then you, I know that, and linked to that, we had our conversation before and you talked about the investment policy rewriting some of that, and what triggered that or what and what was the follow-up impact?

Mike Richards: You just touched on it there. I wanted to go into that.

Ashley Serrao: Yeah. I think the ultimate vision that we had here was be more on the treasury function to be as sophisticated as possible. We wanted to do it in a way that made sense from a financial control standpoint and all the parameters that a treasury function needs to operate in one.

Ashley Serrao: One of the gating factors, we felt that our old treasury all investment policy statement, our IPS that was written maybe a decade ago. Wasn’t necessarily well defined or didn’t really reflect modern investment options, right? There was a time when bank accounts were really the only game in town. Now there are so many other cash alternatives that a treasurer could potentially use and leverage, but you need to get permission to do that.

Ashley Serrao: And the IPS is a way to make sure your CFOs on side, your audit com, your audit committees on side. The board is on side, and so you get permission to be able to invest in other alternatives. Money market funds being one example, but there are others as well. And that’s your guidebook. And then as technology advances and there are new vehicles, the instruments that treasury could potentially invest in, you update it.

Ashley Serrao: But that was really the drive. The drive was we want to get more sophisticated, we wanna maximize interest, we wanna make sure we are operating a modern technology function and do it in a compliant way. So that led to the, the, the rewrite of the IPS.

Mike Richards: And is that the advice you’re gonna give to treasurer, other treasurers?

Mike Richards: The, the, if you want more visibility with your CFO and Board, that’s a great way of doing it. Or are there other ways or what’s the sort of advice you give ’em there?

Ashley Serrao: I think so. I think it depends on where your company is and their company lifecycle. Right? Some companies are flush with cash. Some companies, cash management is a, is an hourly headache, right?

Ashley Serrao: Because you’re trying to really optimize the flows. I think either way, I think you first have to do the, what I describe as the crux of the job, which is. The operational side, ensuring that the bills are paid, cash is being collected, all of that, that that is the core. But once you do that, it’s, that sort of almost becomes muscle memory in some ways.

Ashley Serrao: And then the only change you’re making is when the company expands, adds new division and doesn’t acquisition, which brings a, brings along a, a whole wave of work that I definitely don’t wanna minimize. Then if you want, if you wanna go like beyond that, I feel like thinking about cash management proactively is probably the best way to go.

Ashley Serrao: And that has multiple dimensions to it. It’s like actively negotiating with your banks around the interest that you get. And then I. In many ways being a fiduciary to your shareholders and thinking about like how can you earn the best return on the cash without taking an accelerant amount of risk, it was still a function and we, not a hedge fund, it’s gonna be cash and cash alternatives.

Ashley Serrao: It’s gonna be short dated instruments, very safe and secure. But often you’ll find that it’s very easy to leave stuff in a bank account. But with a little bit of extra work, you end up and a little bit of extra work, you end up spreading the right balance between bank. Other cash alternatives and you can do it without really expanding the team.

Ashley Serrao: Our team hasn’t changed since we moved in this direction. It’s still the same size. We just use technology to do it in the most efficient way.

Mike Richards: Yeah,

Ashley Serrao: and that’s been a great outcome for us.

Mike Richards: And you touch on technology obviously. I then got introduced you through our podcast sponsor’s, ICD, and, but you had an interesting, and this is why we jumped on the podcast because you’ve got an interesting journey with ICD.

Mike Richards: You were a client of ICD or you brought in ICD. Can you talk us through that? ’cause. Again, it was fascinating to me that you’re a treasurer and treasurer said, well, who are ICD? Why do they use them? And everything else? But what drew you in, or what was the, explain your journey, if you like, with your group, and then we’ll sort of bring the listeners up to date a little bit.

Ashley Serrao: Yeah. While I was working on the corporate development strategy side at Trade Web, one of the things we do is we look at potential acquisition opportunities. Yeah. Right. And that’s how ICD came across our radar for the first time. And it was a very interesting story that rhymed with the trade rep story here.

Ashley Serrao: It was the. Rather than the electronification of fixed income markets, there’s electronification of the treasury function from an investing standpoint. Treasurers bought money market funds picking up the phone or using very basic portals out there. And then ICD was sort of like the best in class independent platform.

Ashley Serrao: And so we evaluated several. As a consumer in terms of like that vision that I laid out, let us establish a best in class treasury function. We looked at many different treasury portals, and then what resonated with ICD and why we went with ICD was we felt that. The, the product options were best in class.

Ashley Serrao: We had access to everything and because that was all they did, they were independent and that’s the, that was the entire existence of the company. The client service was phenomenal. And so if you can, if you think about a treasurer trying to embark on a transformation journey, it can be daunting. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Ashley Serrao: Having a, a partner, if you will, who has seen other treasurers go down a similar journey, has advice, is very responsive, is tech forward willing to integrate with the treasury management system, willing to help, kind of help guide you with other strategic decisions. On the treasury side, that’s where ICD added a lot of value.

Ashley Serrao: And apart from there. Product options. What I really appreciated was the analytic capability. There are lot, although lots of portals out there, but just a limited amount of options to invest in.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Ashley Serrao: But marrying that analytics and having it all flow through. If you, if you do it on the ICD portal, it flows into the ICD analytics.

Ashley Serrao: You don’t have to do extra work. That was like, that was an easy sell.

Mike Richards: Yeah. And then I know that when you and I had our pre-discussion, and I sort of pushed it back to you said, look, independence, you’ve said treasurers. At the time it was gold. I said, you don’t have to use it if you’re a treasurer, but you’re leaving money on the table.

Mike Richards: Could you explain that? Those are your words, some about yours. Can you explain what that means? And so some treasurers are not sure, but explain what that means to you.

Ashley Serrao: Yeah. I simply put like, are you taking advantage of the best yield you can earn out there without compromising on your risk parameters or principles?

Ashley Serrao: Right? And so one, one easy example is what we did was we were, we, our cash is primarily at banks. We negotiated rates up. Yeah. After that there were still certain banking partners where the rates were like, fine, but they were not as attractive as money market funds. So we proactively shifted cash to money market funds to making sure that we were maximizing the yield we were getting.

Ashley Serrao: And the other thing we found with money market funds, especially if you’re in an environment where. Arguably rates are being cut across the global Go global ecosystem or financial ecosystem. Money market funds are on a lag, so they often offer higher yields than banks for, call it 30 days, 60 days, 90 days depending on the product, but there’s often a lag that you can capitalize on.

Ashley Serrao: So from my standpoint, it was earning significantly more interest, in some cases up to 200 basis points more without taking. Taking a lot of extra risk money. Market funds are tested. They’re fairly liquid, they’re reliable. You can look at all the underlying, you can run all sort of analysis. You can look at credit ratings.

Ashley Serrao: You can get very comfortable with what exactly a money market fund holds, but it designed to be a cash and cash equivalent that just a better yield that on average than a bank account. And so we move a lot of our excess cash, our, our idle cash into money market funds as often as we can. By doing so, we’re able to maximize the interest that we earn.

Ashley Serrao: We’ve also looked at other vehicles to to increase our interest. We’ve looked at fixed term funds. We’ve also, in the US looked at insured deposit accounts as well. So these are just different technology solutions that are out there, but they’re all cash and cash equivalence.

Mike Richards: And you and I also talked about the fact, and this was why we were doing this one-to-one, that we were keen not to be salesy about it because there are, there’s a sales element to, and you are not linked to that, which is great, and actually that’s why they’re independent.

Mike Richards: But then you and I were. Because you’ve been through that journey yourself. Is is, is it as a product plug and play or is there more to go on? We talked about the pipe work. What would you say? ’cause some people say, hang on, I’ve got a Lean Treasury team. You are saying, I’ll bring in a new tech you, you said you’ve got a small team yourself, but yeah, that’s all very well actually.

Mike Richards: But then I know that you predated this and then getting together. Can you explain that?

Ashley Serrao: Yeah. So I’ll share with you the time we implemented ICD. It was a team of two. It was myself and another person. Wow. The really small. Yeah. And from IICD. What made it easy was it was more of a software setup. So you can get the up and running pretty quickly.

Ashley Serrao: And from there on, it’s a function of like how complicated you wanna make it. Do you want to integrate the ICD portal with your treasury management system and extract or glean more efficiencies? You can do that. And so we invested the time to make sure we were taking advantage of all the efficiencies possible, but.

Ashley Serrao: At the end of the day, implementation is very quick, as like I said, as a software setup. And then from there on you have decisions to make. And that kind of comes down to the frequency of how quick frequency of investing or buying money market funds, are you gonna do it every day? Then maybe it’s worthwhile integrating it with your treasury management system.

Ashley Serrao: You’re gonna do it once a week or once a month, then you can just rely on the web software portal, login, place your trades, and then manually upload it to whatever system that you wanna upload it to. But it’s not labor. It’s not labor intensive, which I thought was also a big selling point. And the other thing I thought was also a big selling point was.

Ashley Serrao: It doesn’t cost you anything to be to implement the software. There’s no like software fee or recurring fee or license fee for using the ICD software. They don’t charge the corporate, they end up charging the money Market fund families. So if I’m buying a fund from JP Morgan Asset Management or BlackRock Asset Management, I see D charging BlackRock and JP Morgan and not me.

Ashley Serrao: It doesn’t cost me anything. It can be quickly implemented. I can make a tangible impact to the bottom line by increasing interest income. I felt it was a win on many fronts. And so for me, it ended up being a no brainer or something we had to sort of do.

Mike Richards: That was one of the reasons we partnered with ICD because also that independence, we get approaches from lot of cash systems and yeah, we can do this, and immediately, oh, we’re gonna charge this corp.

Mike Richards: We’re gonna charge. And I’m like, whoa. As soon as I’m doing that, I’m like, that’s not a message I wanna be taking back to my treasurers. Yeah. I’ve got this great idea. It’s gonna cost you loads and there’s loads of implementation. And you mentioned there about the not being time intensive and high value.

Mike Richards: Any real world examples or any, anything that you can explain to the audience?

Ashley Serrao: I think we, we had our initial testing and, and website up in, I’d say less than a week. And then after that we were in the midst of implementing a treasury management system itself. So that was very labor intensive. But if we already had A-T-A-T-M-S in place and we were just doing the ICD integration, we are talking probably another couple weeks like Max, and you could be up and running in a month in a fairly sophisticated way.

Ashley Serrao: Without you doing a ton of work. ’cause the software installation is really you working with the IT system, IT managers to get it approved for your corporate environment and then you’re off and after the races.

Mike Richards: We’ve done a quite a deep dive on the product there. I wanted to sort of talk to you about, come back to you as a treasurer sort of thing.

Mike Richards: Do you see that your role maybe needs to be more like a portfolio manager? Is that the way you think a lot of treasurers need to be or? I think so

Ashley Serrao: I go back to this concept of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders towards like maximizing value, right? Especially if you’re public. The way to maximize value is to make sure you’re earning an adequate return on your capital.

Ashley Serrao: Cash is one form of capital, so why not try and maximize the value on cash and do it in a way that suits your risk, your risk appetite, right? You may want to just stop at money market funds. You may want to buy short dated government instruments like US treasury bonds or European government bonds, and that may be something that you may want to, you may be willing to get duration risk.

Ashley Serrao: You may want to, money. Market funds are overnight instruments. You may wanna go out one week, you may wanna go out one month, you may want to go three months. It all depends on like your, your cash flow, life cycle and your needs, but making sure you have a point of view. On that, and it’s just not parked in bank accounts, I think is the way of the future.

Ashley Serrao: I’ve seen the rapid growth of the money market portal industry itself, ICD and others as the CFO function gets digitized and their loss of different software solutions for all different elements from AP treasury, payroll, et cetera. It’s a software, it’s a software soup. Essentially making sure that treasury doesn’t get left behind I think is key.

Ashley Serrao: And this is like a very easy, well, if I compare and contrast some of the other implementations that I’ve seen at Tradeweb, they are six months to sometimes a year long implementations of software. Here you’re up and running in a week to a month. You are able to make an impact a lot faster than I, I think, and it’s pretty, it’s low hanging fruit in my perspective.

Ashley Serrao: I think you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t take advantage of it.

Mike Richards: I’ve talked to you and Trey, we and ICD and some of the guys. It’s like that at Trivial Pursuit, the sort of the pie sort of thing. And this is one of the slots in there. ’cause I know that there’s other developments in liket, bills commercial paper.

Mike Richards: You’ve got that it, it really changed or enhanced it, didn’t it? ’cause for you as a treasurer, that was something you said to me, you’ve now got a handle on in. Explain that. Explain that for an audience.

Ashley Serrao: So the vision when we acquired ICD was great, was a great solution for OI liquidity or daily liquidity in terms of money market funds.

Ashley Serrao: But we recognized that treasures had different risk appetites. Some of them are sitting on. Large cash files. We’re talking about very large tech corporates out there sitting on billions and billions of dollars and when, and they’re just very highly cash generative. And I feel like as more and more companies end up becoming more and more successful and profitable, the byproduct of that tends to be cash, tends to build up on your balance sheet.

Ashley Serrao: E, especially if you are not acquisitive, even if you do an acquisition, you end up in the same situation again. Right, and so use, use the term thinking about it like a portfolio manager. I think that is gonna become increasingly more common. And it’s the old mindset of, it’s not just about cash preservation, but it’s also about cash optimization, would be the way I describe it.

Ashley Serrao: It’s a new mindset, cash optimization, doing both. Having a dual mandate and part of that is what is free of Tree RevB Excel at Tree Rev, as I mentioned today earlier on in the show, was. It is the preeminent platform to buy fixed income securities. Some of them are US government bonds, European government bonds, very short dated commercial paper or treasury bills.

Ashley Serrao: But these are the kind of instruments that would appeal to a corporate treasurer. But I don’t think a corporate treasurer will be buying equities, for example. Right. Too risky. Too volatile. Not really. It doesn’t really suit the treasurer mandate other instruments can and making them easily accessible.

Ashley Serrao: Is key, but democratizing access to these instruments is key. And so we thought it would be a cool concept to turn ICD into like a one-stop shop where you could access, where you could invest big according to your liquidity needs, overnight, daily, longer duration. And so where, as you mentioned very shortly, the first product we are rolling out will be treasury bills because of the demand that we got from our client surveys.

Ashley Serrao: We have a couple others in the pipeline as well, and you, as you can imagine, they’re all the cash and cash equivalent sorts, like, like commercial paper or even like repo for example.

Mike Richards: And what’s great is that you are doing it from a treasurer’s perspective. And this is why we were doing it again, it was more, it could explain it from your seat, literally with a small team.

Mike Richards: Actually implementing it, and this is what you could switch on and off and do everything else. And where do you see it going from here? Obviously technology’s developing and stuff. What’s happening next?

Ashley Serrao: Yeah, I think one thing that we didn’t really spend a lot of time on is, okay, as you get most sophisticated, you need to also excel at reporting, right?

Ashley Serrao: The reporting and analytics. What are you doing? Are you owning the best possible yield? Are there any benchmarks out there that you’re benchmarking yourself to? You can see, like some of the language I’m using is very similar to a portfolio manager. This is the mindset that they think about what is the opportunity cost?

Ashley Serrao: Are they doing the best job that they can? So I think analytics is a key thing. The nice thing about ICD was. They have a tool called Portfolio Analytics, which basically if you buy anything on the platform, it all, the data rolls up into this analytics function, so you can have a consolidated dashboard of all the investments and risk in one place.

Ashley Serrao: I think reporting is going to be increasingly important as the treasury function gets more sophisticated. And then beyond that, I think. More and more there’ll be more instruments that are democratized to, to have access democratized for treasurers. I talked about one. One of the things we also buy here at at Tradeweb are fixed term funds, which is basically like a security wrapped up in a fund.

Ashley Serrao: So you can buy a US Treasury, but it’s in a fund structure. So it looks like a money market fund, but just a US Treasury, all right? Versus going out and buying the US Treasury itself. So there are, these are new things out there. Same risk profile as cash. Arguably, if you are taking the risk of the government, uh, the US government in this case.

Ashley Serrao: So fairly safe money, good assets. More you, more and more will be developed. And you as a treasurer, I feel like staying on top of these trends and figuring out how to take advantage of them in a way that makes sense for you and your company and the lifecycle that you’re at, right? It’s not gonna, it’s not gonna be the best option for everybody, but I think that’s the direction we are headed in.

Ashley Serrao: It’s going to become. More pervasively common in that folks think like this. And that’s the, that’s what we’ve seen in all the data and ever since we acquired ICD, the client onboarding, et cetera, and the feedback we get.

Mike Richards: We’re not quite at the end of the show yet, but we’re not far off. But the thing I was gonna say to you is when you and I had this conversation before, you talked about the risk analytics and all the reporting and everything else, and you would then talk about it deepening your relationship with your CFO.

Mike Richards: And you’d seen it also with other CFOs that you’d becoming more of that sort of you moving to become their CFO’s friend, you know? Can you describe that? How has it worked?

Ashley Serrao: Yeah, I think. Doing anything to make your manager look good, are their life easier? It’s kind of like the name of the case, right? Uh, and so if you can show your CFO that you are running a treasury function that is leveraging all the latest technology is operationally efficient, not only that, that you are actually helping them manage earnings with contributing to through interest income.

Ashley Serrao: On top of that, you are giving them reports so they can be aware of what’s going on without having to ask. They can share that with the board or the audit committee. You’re making them look good. It’s like a win-win on so many different elements. And you, if you end up gaining the trust of your CFO, I think then you get buy-in for other treasury investments that you may or may not need you at the, we touched on the fact that a little bit, the treasury at the end of the day is a cost center, right?

Ashley Serrao: It’s not a profit center. By managing a by approach, by adopting a. The mindset of a portfolio manager, you kind of turn it a little bit into a profit center of sorts, but at the end of the day, you are. You’re just finding a way to add value and if this is one of the ways to do it, I think it’s one of the easiest ways to do it, actually.

Mike Richards: And just like yourself as you put it, you said you become the trusted advisor. To that CFO to the, they’re turning to you for that kind of forward focused device, which a lot of treasurers are being consulted to by CFOs. Previously there was stuff like blockchain and go and check it out. Now we’re not doing it now.

Mike Richards: Oh, hang on. Look at ai, look at all. These are the other future focused things that you are being asked to do, aren’t you?

Ashley Serrao: Yep. Definitely we’re thinking about that. It’s more that emerging technologies is a question of timing. When is the right time to seriously invest resources and your own time and really in really researching and scoping out a use case, right?

Ashley Serrao: I think AI is pretty promising. There’s definitely stuff that AI can help, uh, in terms of like manual making, manual processes, more efficient. Even in terms of like generating reports, we’re exploring use cases here at Tradeweb. Uh, so that’s, that, that can be pretty interesting. And I think the other part of that we touched on in terms of being a trusted advisor is as a treasurer, I think you have two options.

Ashley Serrao: You can either be a recipient of capital management decisions or you can be an influencer, right? And so I would say if to the extent that you can get yourself into the mix or in, or get yourself own a seat at a table. Where you actually express your own point of view. What should we be doing with the dividend?

Ashley Serrao: What should we be, what should the size of our buyback program be? I’m like, why does it make sense? These are other ways to kind of, kind of really make an impact, but these are the same questions that the board or audit committees asking your CFO, and so you can, if you can help. Help. Help them craft the answer or come up with a solution and partner with them to figure out what works.

Ashley Serrao: I think you become that much more valuable as a treasurer.

Mike Richards: Yeah, you have the voice, but also then you gain that seat at the table and help them as well.

Ashley Serrao: Yeah,

Mike Richards: and we are gonna put your LinkedIn details in the show notes. This is how we wrap up each of the shows, the takeaways. So if you are looking back at your earlier stage career and then maybe a bit further on in your career, any advice we’ve given some great advice for current treasurers, but also maybe as you reflect on this as well.

Ashley Serrao: Yeah, I’d say don’t be afraid to try something new. If I look at my career, I’ve pivoted multiple times. I felt, I feel like all these pivots collectively when I stepped back have helped me develop a keen sense of the big picture. How do all the functions interplay with each other? How are we all rowing in the same direction to advance the corporate?

Ashley Serrao: Cause I. How to really influence or make an impact with your CFO, and I think that’s invaluable. Ultimately, I think wisdom is a collection of experiences. The more you can accumulate, hopefully the more savvy you can be in terms of making decisions to help the company.

Mike Richards: You become a portfolio career for your portfolio managers, your portfolio career.

Mike Richards: Amazing.

Ashley Serrao: Yeah, it’s, I feel like we’ve been fortunate to be given the opportunities, but at the same time, you also gotta put your hand up. You gotta take a little bit of risk, right? Sometimes it may not work out, but I think I’ve enjoyed kind of having to learn and relearn every few years.

Mike Richards: And just coming back, just to, to wrap up, as I say about ICD, we talked about it quite a lot, but I just wanted to round out on that.

Mike Richards: As you said before, it’s why wouldn’t someone use ICD? You’re just leaving on the table. Would that be right, the right way to describe it?

Ashley Serrao: I think I, I think so. I think about it the way I manage my personal finance. I think about, I get annoyed if I’m not earning the best return possible. Why not? Why not?

Ashley Serrao: Why not apply the same mindset to your own corporate job? There are options out there, and just a question of taking a li, taking a little bit initiative, do a little bit extra work, but it’s worth it. That, and it’s, at the end of the day, it’s not really intensive. A lot of it can be automated too. It’s just a function of spending a little bit of time.

Mike Richards: Returns are fantastic. Great. Yeah, Ashley amazing. Knew would be like this. We had a great call before. We’ve had a great one. Now we’ll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes so lots of people can connect to you. So your LinkedIn’s going to take off now. There you go. And, and also we’re doing this just before you’re having your second chart, so enjoy that time and yeah.

Mike Richards: Thank you very much, sir. It’s been brilliant.

Ashley Serrao: I’ll have, I’ll have a new portfolio to manage. Yeah, exactly.

Mike Richards: Lots more on your hands as well.

Ashley Serrao: Yeah. Fantastic.

Mike Richards: Today’s episode of the Treasury Career Corner was brought to you with the support of our partners ICD. If you are looking for a smarter way to manage your short-term investments, ICDs independent portal gives you access to a full range of investment products, integrated analytics, and a simple centralized platform built specifically for treasury.

Mike Richards: If you head over to treasury recruitment.com/partners, you can learn more and we’ll be able to connect you with the right person at ICD for both you and your business. Many thanks for listening to the show and thanks for your continued support.