The Treasury Playbook: Centralize Cash, Scale Globally, and Build a Function That Delivers

Mike Richards, CEO, The Treasury Recruitment Company: Welcome to this week’s Treasury Career Corner podcast. We’re interview treasury professionals about their treasury careers. Each and every week I talk to treasurer about how they built their careers, where they are now, where they see both themselves and treasury profession. Go to next in this week’s show, joined by Richard Abigail, the group treasurer and head of corporate finance at Knight Frank, LLP Founded way back in 1896, headquartered in London Knight Frank is one of the world’s leading independent real estate consultancies.

Mike Richards: They provide innovative property solutions for their clients that add tangible value across property, sectors and services. They’ve got a footprint in over 50 territories, 740 offices, and more than 27,000 people. They operate in locations where clients need them to be. Providing worldwide service, locally expert, and globally informed.

Mike Richards: There you go. So I could do their pr bls. There you go. But I’ve known Richard for a number of years. We’re gonna go back to how he first started in treasury and finance, and then got into treasury as well. Richard, there you go. Enough of me. Over to you, sir. How did he first start?

Richard Abigail, Group Treasurer and Head of Corporate Finance, Knight Frank: Thanks for inviting me on the podcast, mate.

Richard Abigail: Pleasure. First started as a standard accountant with Coopers, and I’m showing my age, then pre MERG with WC and Spence. A number of years auditing clients in the sort of biotech media sector, both here in London, and I did the traditional thing of accountants. I used PWC to go and travel and went down to Melbourne for a couple of years and was an auditor down in Melbourne.

Richard Abigail: And yeah, during that time, enjoyed various different aspects of auditing, but I quite liked sort of the biotech and media companies, the sort of high intellectual property consultancy style businesses. And then my time, as many people find, came up with PWCI. I wanted to change. I was sick of checking people’s work and I wanted to do the work myself.

Richard Abigail: So I decided to jump ship and jumped into a company called iTouch, which was listed full list in the uk and it was a ringtone and logos and premium rate telephony call. We do. Anything and everything with premium rate telephony apart from adult, which is very specialized area, yes. But we would run things like the voting for Big Brother and Pop Idol and programs like that.

Richard Abigail: And then if you remember when we had bricks of phones before the iPhone and Android was even a dream, everyone wanted to buy logos, ringtones, all that sort stuff, stuff. Great time, but they just listed on the stock exchange. When I came over, and this is when I started to think about treasury as a career, because they had a whole pot of cash.

Richard Abigail: They were raised. And they would burn a, burning a hole in their pockets. So initially it was investments, putting it on deposits, keeping the money safe and secure, and then a big acquisition opportunity came over or came up in Spain, the market leader in Spain, and we bought this company and that sort of chewed through our cash.

Richard Abigail: We were left with very little then. Tables flipped and it was getting cash outta the subsidiaries where it’d been pumping it in. We’d now had to bring it back out. And alongside that, we were highly acquisitive. We had obviously our paper of shares that we could use to acquire people. So we started, I started doing the corporate finance side at the same time, so we had a.

Richard Abigail: We used to call ’em horses on the course. So we would always have about two to three acquisitions at any one time at various stages of work buying companies in Austria. As I said, in Spain, we bought companies in the Nordics. We merged with someone in the States. It was a really interesting time. So there’s this sort of twin approach I had even back then, and we’re talking early noughties here.

Richard Abigail: Of having both the treasury aspect of looking after the cash and the finances and also doing the corporate finance element. And that was on top of my sort of job. Yeah. Of being group financial controller and just looking after the, the business, the financial reporting. And how did

Mike Richards: that, and how did that shape your sort of understanding of treasury?

Mike Richards: Because obviously you said you were dragged into treasury as well.

Richard Abigail: Yeah, I think. It piqued my interest and it wasn’t until quite a bit later when I went right treasuries for me, but I started enjoying it. And I like the sort of twin aspects that Treasury gives you of the relationships with the banks, the external view of life, the treasury of trying to manage all the risks, and then the internal, the sort of more techy aspects of it.

Richard Abigail: And back in those days, I wasn’t doing too much treasury. It was as a on the side of my desk as I was more focused on. MA and financial reporting, but it, it was becoming more and more interesting. So then from

Mike Richards: there you moved to aup. How did that come about and can you explain who AUP were and everything else?

Mike Richards: You did a great explanation of your I iTouch were,

Richard Abigail: yeah. So aup came about. I, we had delisted iTouch with sold to a trade buyer. And they wanted to move the head office to Milan where they were based. So looking for a new job. Yeah. And I, a came about, I like the name and bizarrely my university halls were opposite their office, so I’d known about them since I was 18 or knew of them since I was 18.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. Wow. And one of my old flatmates worked for aup and they had a reputation and still do have a great place to work. And I found my time there absolutely brilliant and really enjoyed it. So. They ticked all the right boxes. International group, which I really enjoyed, they had a role looking after their infrastructure business from a sort of management accounting point of view, and also looking after the Middle East and Africa.

Richard Abigail: Quite small presence there, but it was enjoyable. But when I joined, we hit the global financial crisis, and if you remember, Dubai just absolutely collapsed. So I spent quite a lot of my time working with the guys of working out how we collect the debts, how do we. Ourselves onto a sho Fussing again in the Middle East

Mike Richards: and Arab as a business.

Mike Richards: Can you just, you and I know them, but for say our US listeners, they may be sometimes may not know the name.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. So Arab’s a consultant engineer. Yeah. Famous for some of the real top ends, amazing buildings in the world. So the still their calling card is the Sydney Opera House. There were engineers behind that.

Richard Abigail: Absolutely fantastic. Building the Pom Perdue Center in France. High speed. One in the uk. And so they go from buildings through water, through all types of infrastructure. They’re a multidisciplinary consultancy. They’ve got a unique ownership structure. It was a partnership, but o himself. Decided they would gift their partnership state to a trust, so to now owned by the employees through a trust structure.

Richard Abigail: So it’s got that unique ownership structure in large scale consultant engineers.

Mike Richards: Lovely. And there you then went from financial control, but then when it’s treasury and it was, what was it when you walked in the door of treasury?

Richard Abigail: So the, it’s an interesting sort of stepping stone into it. Yeah. The, the treasurer at AR was on leave at the time.

Richard Abigail: We wanted to buy our head office building, so that came up. We had an opportunity to do it. We had to raise debt and term finance, and the finance director asked me to babysit that treasury aspect of raising the debt and putting it in with the lawyers. We went out to market, actually, a consultancy helped us go out and.

Richard Abigail: I think we approached him like 10 banks to raise the finance for it. It was the first time I ever, ever taken on any form of debt and I’d never taken on debt as well. So it was a brand new experience for me and the business. So blind leading the blind, somewhat, the lawyer, very helpful. The banks were very helpful, but suddenly it became apparent.

Richard Abigail: I really enjoyed this. I really enjoy talking to the banks, working with the lawyers, getting this cash in to buy this head office building, and that was fantastic. The finance director then had a big reorganization of the business and it was so if you walked into his office and he went, these are the roles I’ve got.

Richard Abigail: I’m putting people into different roles. Would you like to take on treasury? And I thought, why are they not? It is always interested me.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Richard Abigail: So I wish I could say I had this dream of becoming a treasurer. It was gonna be the, my career. I fell into it just from having people do. Yeah. And I said, yep, I’ll do that.

Richard Abigail: And that was around 2011. I decided to do treasury and I told the FD that I would do it for 18 months. I saw it as an 18 month project. Get out there now, what? 14 years later I’m still doing treasury. So it, yeah, it really did hit you in. Yeah, very much.

Mike Richards: And we talked before the show that you’d then did some interesting projects, like you did stuff with China.

Mike Richards: Talk us through that project because it’s quite an interesting one.

Richard Abigail: Yeah, the China ones. A really cool one. We were struggling to get cash outta China. Very difficult place. It will resonate with

Mike Richards: lots of people. Yeah.

Richard Abigail: Loads of people hope that it’s such a difficult place to get cash outta. But we were getting to the stage where between 25 and 30% of our cash, so our apart from this debt for its building is cash rich.

Richard Abigail: And we thought, how do we get cash outta China? And we work with HSBC to try and put in this sort of the world’s first rebi automated suite. It was a very interesting project trying to do something that was really on the vanguard of treasury. Cross Border Suites are now. There we go. You used more all the time, but at that point, trying to negotiate our way through PBOC approvals to get this sweep in place was quite cool.

Richard Abigail: It was quite a tricky structure. It was nice to just put something in brand new and leading edge.

Mike Richards: How did you do it? What I mean by that is, I don’t need right down to the detail, but for someone listening today, as you approach a project like that, is it just sort of sitting down with the bank and saying, this is what we wanna achieve.

Mike Richards: How can you help us? Or do you go in there again? It’s an advice show for other people.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. It was very much sitting down with the bank and setting out our problem. We’ve got too much cash in China. What can you do to help? And there was this new regulation. Still long ago, I can’t remember what the what it was, but a new regulations allowed us to sweep money out and we literally had to work through with HSBC UK and HSBC, China all the.

Richard Abigail: Process technologically. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t too difficult to do on the tech side of things. It was all the regulatory side of it. And also trying to convince our board that we weren’t doing something that would get the authorities in China coming to look at our business and, yeah, above board and everything else.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. And then later on when China had one of its financial problems, they banned that route. So we moved to a standby letter of credit. Process. We put deposits in in China. The bank issued standby, left of credit. And then in the UK those left of credit were used to draw down on debt. Yeah, so security for debt drawings, that was great.

Richard Abigail: And then we moved, we started a tech business. Arab not only did the consultant engineering part, but they also had the software to, to allow consultant ENG engineers to work. And they were selling that in China. So we set up a Shanghai free trade zone company to do that. It allowed us then to sweep money out through the Shanghai free trade zone.

Richard Abigail: So we, we actually had three bites of the cherry in my time at Europe and getting cash out, just adapting to the regulations as they each

Mike Richards: time. Yeah, yeah. And then as you say, throughout your time there, you went through some real just quiet times. Just had the Euro crisis, Brexit, and all the regulation going on.

Mike Richards: What was that like for you as a treasurer?

Richard Abigail: I think it was, it was enjoyable In one pass it, it got the gray matter working, but in other stages some of the regulation was tedious. A me F bar in the States. That was pretty boring regulation. Yeah. But things like the financial crisis where we thought Greece was gonna fall outta the Euro and problem problems with that, we thought, sorry, someone just caught me.

Richard Abigail: I thought I put that on block. So that’s what I thought. I. It was on block, but someone came through. So yeah. Just talking about the financial crisis. Yes. So yeah. In Greece, when they were about to drop outta the Euro zone or we all thought they were, what impact would it have?

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Richard Abigail: Doing strange things like the definition of a Euro might be different between a Euro based in the UK and the U, or based in the Euro zone.

Richard Abigail: What would all that mean for us? So spend a lot of time doing risk management and this is when I started do my exams. So the a CT exams were around at time as well, and the risk management paper really helped understand sort of financial risks, uh, other business of a treasury of a sort of a company turning over nearly 2 billion pounds at that in those days.

Richard Abigail: So it was a enjoyable time. Yeah. But a stressful time as well.

Mike Richards: And you’ve gone through all these refinancing, restructure, what would you say is the most complex deal you’ve done and what lessons did you get from that sort of thing?

Richard Abigail: I think it was one of the refinances we did. So as I said, we bought our head office building.

Richard Abigail: We had a second building on the same sort of campus in near the BT Tower in London. We decided to sell the building we were resident in, or the one we owned and buy the other one. So we had a buying sale of properties going on, and then we had to flip the financing by that stage. We’ve moved from a term debt as we got it initially to an RCF.

Richard Abigail: That was a very complex deal to buy, sell, and refinance at the same time, just getting all the timings right. The actual debt products make sure weren’t difficult, but it was quite a complicated deal. It was a twin RCF. Two of them at once. I, one bought the listeners with the detail of why we needed two of them, but it was, that was probably the most complex deal we did.

Richard Abigail: I don’t think it was the most enjoyable, to be honest. I think overall, my, my sort of thing that I enjoyed the most at my time at our, it was actually changing the culture of the business towards cash when we started off about 5% of the cash. The group was available to group treasury, and by the end of it we were over 90%.

Richard Abigail: So it really changed the way the business looked to cash. And we did that through putting in a cash pool, a single global cash pool. I, I quite liked at a, that we had a complete greenfield site. We didn’t have a, any cash pools in. I know a lot of treasurers come in to new roles and they look at it and go, oh God, I’ve got all this legacy I have to work with.

Richard Abigail: I can’t rip it out and start again. I was in a really lucky position that we had. Virtually nothing, so I could start afresh. But this cash pool allowed me to go out and tr travel globally. Literally flying from Sydney in the east all the way through to New York where our America’s business was based, working with the guys, understanding their cash needs and explaining what we needed.

Richard Abigail: An example of that is when we started, the Americas said we need at least 10 million pounds on our accounts at any one time. Just in case. Yeah, just in case. By the end of it, we had them sitting on zero cash, intraday limits sweeps coming with money, moving the cash backwards and forwards. And in the group we sat on about a million outside or sitting in the pool as residual and everything else was invested.

Richard Abigail: So we increased our sort of returns massively. We had cash available. That came to real. The benefit we found came from it when we had an opportunity during the financial, during a merger with our Irish firm. They, they owned their head office building and we were able to just pay off their debt because we had the surplus cashs in the pool.

Richard Abigail: We’d never been able to do that previously, but I could just dip into the cash pool and then and bring that cash out to we owned, yes. I think we bought it for something like 10 million. Last time I saw, before I left ar, the building was valued at sort of 30 million. So that was a phenomenal deal that we did for being able to buy that head office building for our doubling business.

Richard Abigail: Yeah.

Mike Richards: And then the transition, if you’d like to this new role and things, talk us through how that you and I know about it and things of that. Yeah. How did it come about? The move to Knight Frank and I gave a bit of a headline about Knight Frank. It’s all, I’ll do your pee, don’t worry. Talk us

Richard Abigail: through. Yeah, so I was getting a bit bored, Tara.

Richard Abigail: As I said at the beginning, I was gonna do it for 18 months and I think I was coming up to my fourth or fifth refinancing.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Richard Abigail: And fourth

Mike Richards: was

Richard Abigail: 13 and a half years. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t face doing another refinancing. And then at the same time as your personal life and your work life sometime intermingle and it may helps you make a decision.

Richard Abigail: But my son was transitioning from primary school to secondary school and I thought I’ll take the summer off. I’m a bit bored. I need to find a new job. I need to reinvigorate myself, but this is a perfect time, that transition. I can do loads of stuff with my son during the summer. We can go traveling. It will, it will be wonderful.

Richard Abigail: Sadly, that period was 2020, so as I was leaving a, I think I had a week left when Lock, the first lockdown started. Yeah. So that just obliterated all idea of Yeah.

Mike Richards: You got back to the garden. Yeah.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. And. I got a phone call from the finance director at HAR saying, look, we just don’t know what’s gonna happen.

Richard Abigail: You are leaving. Do you want to just come back as a consultancy? You won’t be taking your son on a road trip to Prague, which is one of the ideas we had. Yeah, you’ll be sitting around in your house, why don’t you stay and do that? And at the same time, the finance, the old finance director at that arrow had left and joined Knight Frank, and he gave me a call at the same time and said, I hear you’re not doing anything this summer.

Richard Abigail: I’m a bit worried that we’re gonna really struggle. The property market is just gonna shut down. Yeah. Can you come and help just an extra pair of hands at Knight Frank and see if we need to raise Debt Knight Frank had never raised debt and see if you can help out on that. So I had this twin consultancy role almost immediately thinking I was gonna spend the time lying around doing nothing all summer, to actually now working for two pay Masters.

Richard Abigail: Masters full on. It became a really bizarre concept. Many treasurers in the UK will know of a program called the CCFF program. This was for sort of. Credit rated or companies that may not have a credit rating but could get one to sell commercial paper. So it was an accelerated program to get commercial paper and the British government was gonna be the purchaser of us.

Richard Abigail: Yeah, yeah. And they would purchase the commercial paper. So both Arab and Knight Frank, decided they wanted to go into this plan, and I was asked to run both programs in Knight Frank, pretty much by myself in a, with the person who replaced me as group treasurer. Who you know, Mike? ’cause I think you do you, you’ve just recently placed her.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. And a new role. So I was having a bizarre conversations of running two identical programs with the same set of lawyers, same set of advisors coming off one call with a and going on to the, exactly the same call with Knight Frank. We got those two programs in place. Luckily both firms didn’t need to use them at all.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. And in fact, in Knight Frank, they. The property markets boomed during covid, which sounds absolutely bizarre, but in the UK we have stamp duty on properties on residential properties, and the British government waived that to try and invigorate the market. And it did. And Knight Frank had one of the best years ever during those covid periods, specialist people in the UK wanted to move out of London, as we saw worldwide.

Richard Abigail: Wanted to move out of London and move to the countryside. Get more space.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Richard Abigail: And it really drove the property markets. So that sort of took me to this hybrid period and I continued being a consultant for both of them for a while. So at TAR Up I helped upgrade their treasury management system. I actually did help do the Refin financing during Covid, which was an interesting period.

Richard Abigail: And then at night, Frank, it was clear that they didn’t have a individual treasury function. It was on the side desk of one of the, the sort of. The senior finance people. So I did a review for the finance director of what the treasury function would look like at Knight Frank and basically created myself a job, not purposely.

Richard Abigail: Yeah, you wrote it.

Mike Richards: Yeah,

Richard Abigail: I, but I scoped out what I fin treasury function would look like within the finance function. And cutting a long story short, I came on as a, a partner because it is a partnership with Mount Frank. Came on as a junior partner, a salaried member as we call them, and have been there ever since.

Richard Abigail: And what,

Mike Richards: and when you were doing that, just as you were writing that job description out, if you like, how did write, where did you position treasury? Because some people go in and say, oh, Treasury’s all about the cash festival and everything else. And, but you’d been through this and a very interesting sit to write your own job description as well.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. And it, it’s quite interesting and it came right down from, or right. Probably a better way of saying it, right up from have we got the right bank accounts? Yeah. Have we got the right structure in place? But it came once again from having lots of surplus cash and when I came in, they had all their cash, virtually all their cash in the uk, at least sitting in one overnight deposit account.

Richard Abigail: So the counterparty risk was extreme. Yeah. The return was very poor. They hadn’t turned anything out, the rates the bank was giving us. So it really went back to being the a nty. Treasury 1 0 1 Style of Work. Yeah. Conclusion outta that though is that Treasury Inmate Frank was gonna be relatively simple.

Richard Abigail: We have, it’s a consultancy, so very simple, easy working capital cycles, needing no debt. So spoke with the finance director and realized the treasury would only take. 20 30% of my time. So how could we carve out a role? So not only was I carving out the treasury function and creating that from building block upwards from bank account upwards, but also trying to create a role that would fill a full-time role for me.

Richard Abigail: And that’s where I started moving into the sort of corporate finance thing again. Yeah, picking up on my eye touch days from 20 years previously and bringing that into to this new role. And note, Frank has an interesting structure that. We own, or the LLP. The partnership owns a sway, the countries around the world, but it goes all the way down to where we franchise and license our name in certain territories.

Richard Abigail: The island, for example, they’re an independent firm, but they license our name. So the way we position the firm, the internal structuring, and how do we. How do we decide that we want to own Australia, but we don’t want to own Ireland? What are the parameters around that? So that, that was interesting. The other areas that have been interesting from a treasury perspective is it’s a partnership, as I said, so therefore we have partner capital loans, so work with the bank.

Richard Abigail: So we don’t have any corporate debt as such, but the every partner takes out a loan depending on their seniority from one of two banks. So renegotiated those, uh, facilities, reduced the. Loans. We’re trying to convert those into a sustainable loan, a sustainable wrapper around RCS is just the thing. No one really has put a sustainable wrapper around a partner capital loan yet, so we’re still trying to do that with the banks.

Richard Abigail: It’s at the wrong time as the banks rolling back their sustainability initiatives and things. The greenwashing, yeah. That they’re being accused of. So that’s somewhat on hold at the moment, but it’s still a goal of mine to try and get it. Sustainable partner capital loan where the rate each partner pays on their loan will depend on our meeting, our sustainability targets.

Richard Abigail: So that was one of them. The other thing that was brand new in Knight Frank that’s taken some time is client monies. So we manage properties on behalf of people we hope their deposits or their tenants deposits. We have a big. Lump of cash where we run their service charges. So we have hundreds of millions, far more than we have of our own cash of client funds.

Richard Abigail: And I’ve never done client fund monies. Yeah. Part of me on some days, which I’ve never done client, it is of pain. The regulations are tough, where regulated by Rick’s, the royal instituted charts, conveyors, so they have very set rules just as cast does. FCA. For financial services, just as the solicitors do under their regulations.

Richard Abigail: But that was new and novel as well for me, but I’d never done that. So trying to expand my range of knowledge in Treasury and Knight, Frank ticked all the boxes. Really friendly place to work, great atmosphere. Some of the properties sells are actually mad at the moment. We’re trying to sell Freddie Mercury’s house.

Richard Abigail: In London, which is fabulous. If you want to buy it, it’s about 30 million pounds. Oh yeah. Just tomorrow. Yeah, I get it tomorrow. Send Audrey Hepburn’s house in Switzerland at the moment. Wow. Uh, we really specialize in the top end of the market. Our sweet spot is 2 million pounds plus, and preferably 10 million pounds plus is the type of properties we do.

Richard Abigail: So a really interesting, really great place to work with A lot of, I wouldn’t say huge challenges, but setting up a treasury function again. Learning about client monies, learning about how a partnership operates for all sort of things that hit, and then being able to get back into the corporate finance world again.

Mike Richards: Yeah, I mean, um, you touched on their sustainability. Obviously that’s one of the, what’s the word? That’s one of the key things coming down the line, if you like. Yeah. What other things do you see for treasury? ’cause we’ve got technology, we’ve got all the different other things. What are you as a treasurer, you like what, you know?

Richard Abigail: Yeah. I, I might have a slightly different view from many treasurers because Love it. Technology and modern technology. I think I’m so old and whined these days that I’ve seen these big data was gonna be the thing that helped. And then it, blockchain. And Blockchain,

Mike Richards: yeah.

Richard Abigail: And now it’s AI and I, I always feel that we get a little bit too hyped up about these things and then when reality comes, so I try and position myself from treasury in sort of two ways.

Richard Abigail: One is a fast follower. I’m not on the cussing edge of tech developments.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Richard Abigail: But I try and follow quickly afterwards, just people get it right. We are not the biggest organization. The banks quite like us because we’re, and this was in the Arab days and night run days. I like to do things, I like to put technology in, but we’re small enough for them to get the head round.

Richard Abigail: If it was a mo multi-billion, billion pound. A company like a Shell. Yeah. This is gonna be an awful metaphor, but they’re like an oil tanker. They’re very slow to move. Because I’m smaller, I can move. Yeah. Yeah. And we can get things in and that’s exactly what we did with the cash bill and things like the China sweeps in a days, and it’s same with Note Frank.

Richard Abigail: So I try and fast follow. I also, I, my mantra is system heavy people light. I think rather than having junior analysts downloading statements from banking portals and uploading them doing cash report, everything I want is automated. I want as few people as physically possible and everything pushing a system.

Richard Abigail: So even though I do think I like treasury technology, uh, I don’t think, I think at the moment we’ve got hype in the AI space. So I think it’ll die down, and then we’ll really find out the elements,

Mike Richards: what difference and Yeah, I totally agree. And that’s actually one of the things that, yeah, we try and automate with our salary survey.

Mike Richards: We automate with everything else because you can, you know why, why do this? Oh, people are trying to sell me this system. I’m like, I’ve got it. It’s all right. System does. We don’t need it. Yeah.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. And it’s, and I find the things I’m learning in treasury, because I, my role’s wider than treasury. Now, a good example is ai.

Richard Abigail: In our mortgage broken business. So we buying a house, you need to get a mortgage. You go to a mortgage broker. Knight Frank has Knight Frame Finance. One of the leaders, sort of that top ends big mortgages for very nice flashy houses. They’re looking at AI at the moment and it’s interesting that I can have a very informed decision in a business.

Richard Abigail: I haven’t got a clue about, to be honest, which mortgage broker, but I can talk to them about where they’re positioning themselves on their AI journey. So it’s. Don’t want to have, they still want to have the face-to-face contact if you’re gonna borrow a couple of hundred, oh, a couple of hundred thousand pounds, if not more, into the millions, you want to talk to a person.

Richard Abigail: So the chat bot side of AI to replace the broker is just a no-no for us. Yeah. However, using the, using AI with the banks to fill out all the mortgage application forms, to do all that sort, that’s where they see the sweet spot. And that’s one of the things I see with treasury. At the moment, ai, I think it’s gonna work better, at least initially in the back end of the system.

Richard Abigail: So being able to take that sort of treasury mindset into a completely different business that I know nothing about, still have that informed conversation and be able to say, this is what I’m seeing in my space. What are you seeing in yours is a. Of those nice times where you go, yeah, treasurers do know about business.

Richard Abigail: We’re not, they do. Yeah. Sitting in the back office. We’re at the forefront of it. So that’s been quite interesting conversations with our mortgage broker in business.

Mike Richards: And if you reflect back, I know that you’ve been in the, the Treasurer magazine, they’ve seen you in the past and they’ve said you’ve got this, your career has been award-winning so far and everything else.

Mike Richards: With that, if someone’s listening today, what advice would you give to those people?

Richard Abigail: I think it’s twofold. One is the exams. I’m an old stickler for the exams. My father used to say to me, you are tainted by your parents’ attitudes no matter how chart, how much you try and fight against it. Yeah. He said to me, get it.

Richard Abigail: Get a profession. You can always fall back on it. So I’m a chartered accountant for my PWC days. I’m now FCT with the A CT in the UK and did their exams. I think those exams are brilliant. They do give you a great base level knowledge and then they. Allow you to sell yourself in the market. It doesn’t. It is a differentiator.

Richard Abigail: I think. You have to keep your education going. So I spent, I did a course with the CISL in Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Learning and did Sustainable finance course. Yeah. Which was fantastic. It was giving me the academic rigor whilst sustainability was blowing up a few years ago, this is gonna be the future.

Richard Abigail: It actually, yeah, allowed me to focus on just that, and that course was fantastic. So that. Formal education, I think is one. One thing I also think you need to understand your business as a treasurer. I do talk to a number of treasurers who, oh, cash is cash. I can go from business to business and put in a cash pool.

Richard Abigail: I can negotiate debt. But I think you, for me anyway, personally, you get the reward knowing how your business operates, knowing the culture of this, knowing all that sort. So I would say to a treasurer, don’t. No matter how junior you are, understand how your business operates. Learn about your business.

Richard Abigail: Don’t just sit there. Uh, as I see in finance functions, people going, I’m in ap. I just want to do ap. I don’t care. No Knight Ankle, whoever has really great business models, go out there and learn. Just understand the business. You become far more rounded and you understand what your positioning it. So formal education on one hand, and also really understand your business on the other for the junior treasurers.

Mike Richards: Love it. And anything else for the future of treasury, if you like, as you say, I like the fact that I agree with you, the sort of, I think also a lot of treasurers, late adopters, they actually say, let them all, we’ll watch from the sidelines. Yep. Then when we need to sweep in, we’ll come in and pick up the good bits or the people who make mistakes on it and any other areas as well.

Richard Abigail: I think technology becoming. More and more how the ability to converse in in a technology way. Yeah. And by that is the banks now are tech players. You’ve got the TMS providers that are, in my view anyway, seem to be fragmenting. You’ve got the big players, the ions and the fiss, they’re still around, but all these smaller players being able to plug in the likes of an FX all or a 360 T or a writers with Bloomberg.

Richard Abigail: Yeah. Being able to understand that text taxpayer. Being able to communicate with the lawyers because everything has to be reduced. The rating. So the skillset of a treasurer seems to be widening as I’ve gone through it. It’s no longer having a lunch with the bank and saying, can you gimme an RCF? You actually need to then be able to plug it into multinational businesses.

Richard Abigail: So tech, legal, and then just the financial acronym in that sort of is the base level of everything we do. So I think that’s where we’re going to skillset, getting wider and wider. And then my example with Knight Frank Finance and. AI being able to actually, people to see yourself, see a treasure in the businesses.

Richard Abigail: Oh, hang on. They understand this stuff. They know what’s happening. They’re using it themselves. Yeah, they, they can give me advice and help. In, in their business model. So yeah, that, that’s the future treasurer. It’s gonna be wider and wider and the skills you need are gonna be broader and broader.

Mike Richards: Yeah.

Mike Richards: Cool. And we’re gonna, as I say, was approaching the end, so we’ll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes, but, and I was about to say what advice you’ve actually given some, you said, do your exams, get yourself integrated with the business on a wider sense. Any other takeaways or any other thoughts as you’ve reflected?

Richard Abigail: No, they were my main two points, to be honest. I went, yeah, treasury can be really simple or as difficult as you want to make it, I think. And if you get out there and really understand your business, the problems that you can solve as a treasurer just leap out at you and you can grab them and run with them from the boring, tedious, how to open a bank account all the way up to, as I’m doing structuring licenses for businesses around the globe on the corporate finance side.

Richard Abigail: I think treasury is there as long as you’re willing to step outside the what is seen as the natural treasurer box.

Mike Richards: Yeah. Great. Final words, I’m gonna leave it there. Thank you very much for your time today, sir. Thank you. Thanks. It’s been