What Treasury Leaders Can Learn from Startups and Corporates

Jennifer: Your money's not sleeping in the investment account. That's real money that you can never re-earn. So if you don't manage it properly, it costs you money.

Philip: Meet Jennifer Pearson, founder of TreasuryEdge and a treasury expert with more than a decade of experience. From leading treasury functions at Freetrade to roles at Norton Rose Fulbright, Johnson Matthey, and Procter & Gamble, she's built her career helping organizations manage financial risk, cash, and growth with confidence.

Jennifer: If you don't have a treasury policy, you're just saying to someone, "The money's in the bank. We'll do a budget. We'll not track it too closely, but you do how you feel is best." Imagine if I said to you, Phil: here's my credit card. I have two children and a mortgage. Will you pay those, please, and feed everyone? And I trust you. And then if something goes wrong, that's my fault, isn't it? I didn't give you the parameters to do that. I don't want you to trust me. I want you to be clear how we should do this together. Let's create a view and let's make a plan.

Philip: Well, I think we have covered a lot already. So I'd like to ask you: what is the one thing you want to tell the listeners they should take away from you today?

Jennifer: The one thing you should do is

Philip: Welcome to this new episode of Treasury Leaders. I'm delighted to have Jennifer Pearson, the founder of TreasuryEdge, on this podcast. If, as a listener, you're a seasoned corporate treasurer wanting to innovate and freshen up your operations, this episode is really for you. And if you're a new treasurer, or someone in your 20s looking to make an impact in your career and wanting to learn about treasury, Jen is also the right person to listen to and, eventually, talk to. So Jen, welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer: Thank you.

Philip: Tell us about yourself. Who are you? How did you get here?

Jennifer: As you said, I'm Jen. I started working in finance when I was 18 — when I left school I went straight into a job, and I was so lucky to land the undergraduate scheme at Procter & Gamble. It was amazing because we rotated through different finance departments every year, so we tried lots of different things, and I ended up in treasury and just absolutely loved it. I think for most people who end up in treasury, it's not necessarily what they wanted to do — when they leave school, they don't say, "Oh, I would love to be a treasurer." But once you get into it, it's quite addictive. A lot of the treasurers I meet are quite similar types of personalities.

Then I moved to London to continue my treasury career, given it is the hub of all the treasury roles, and moved through lots of different companies and industries. I worked at Johnson Matthey, which is really famous in London for the Brink's-Mat heist — the biggest gold heist ever was from Johnson Matthey Bank. Then I moved into professional services, and after that I got my first role in a startup, which was Freetrade, at a time when Freetrade was really in its infancy. I set up their treasury there and just absolutely loved that whole experience. It's such a cool place to work, that startup environment, and it was so different from being at P&G and Johnson Matthey, some of the biggest companies. I just got addicted to it. And when I was at Freetrade, it was my boss who actually said to me, "You should set up your own thing. Why don't you do this — go into startups and establish their treasuries?" He didn't know that I had always wanted to be self-employed, so when he said that, I just thought: yeah, this is going to be my thing. And I set up TreasuryEdge whilst I was on my first maternity leave. You can see behind me. And I'm three years in next month. And I think I'm going to be going back.

Philip: How many kids?

Jennifer: Two — a one-year-old and a three-year-old. And I do think there is something — I don't know if you agree with this — about having children that just makes you think life is short. It does make you feel a bit invincible in that sense: if you want to do something, you have to just go for it, otherwise you'll regret it forever. So that's definitely how I feel with TreasuryEdge and how I approach the work with TreasuryEdge. I've tried lots of different things. We do lots of different types of business and continue to do that. I don't think there's any need to settle for one thing — with treasury, there are so many different areas.

Philip: And what is TreasuryEdge — what do you do at TreasuryEdge? Who is your typical client? What do you try to do there?

Jennifer: What I found is that there are loads of treasury consultants — loads and loads — but I don't know anyone who does the type of work that I do. Most treasury consultancies work with treasuries to do projects: a refinancing or a system implementation or something. But in my space, I work with companies who don't have treasuries but do have an interest in treasury risks. Say, an e-commerce platform that sells worldwide and has lots of FX risk, or a Series B company who's raised a lot of money and wants to start investing it. These are point projects that, if done correctly, can be operated by a finance team, but for the initial setup, maybe the CFO has never touched treasury before — they've never had to. Often in the scaleups, the CFOs come from a Big Four background, so they have a really good understanding of finance but not necessarily of operational treasury. And it's just great to get someone in who's done it, has a playbook, and can act quickly, because the thing that's different about treasury is that if you don't manage it properly, it costs you money. Every day your money's not sleeping in the investment account, that's real money that you can never re-earn.

Philip: That's actually something often overlooked. How does not doing treasury cost you money?

Jennifer: Well, if you don't negotiate your FX spreads or have a good hedging policy, you're paying a lot of money for your trades, or you're at the whim of the market and your cost base might go up and down — by as much as 10% over the course of a year. Then, if you don't invest your cash, obviously you're not going to earn the interest. If you're not negotiating your bank fees, you're going to be paying more. And you can't undo those things. So I think there is an urgency to having good treasury ops, no matter what size the business is.

Philip: So to recap for a second: you got into treasury a bit by accident, fell in love with it, worked for very large corporates and saw how treasury is done there, then started working for smaller startups, fell in love with that even more, and decided, "I'm going to do this for the rest of my life, or at least for the foreseeable future" — whilst having kids on the side as well. Quite ambitious. And that's what you do with TreasuryEdge: you help smaller companies, startups and scaleups, do treasury — taking how the big companies do things and making it useful for small startups. Is that right?

Jennifer: Yeah — thank you for that summary. It was great.

Philip: I would actually like to take insights from both sides, because I think you're the perfect bridge between large corporates and startups, and I think both can benefit from each other's point of view. Let's start perhaps from the corporate side. What is one thing that a treasurer working in a large corporate can take from a startup — from the energy, or from the tech, or whatever?

Jennifer: In the startup world, the level of ownership and responsibility is huge. Every single person who you add to that company needs to raise the bar. They need to contribute a lot, well beyond their station, and they'll be drawn into all manner of projects. When I think of Freetrade and the involvement in building the product itself — the FX netting software that we built was incredible, and that's obviously not something an operational treasurer would normally do. But if you have knowledge, you are expected to give it far and wide to everyone, and to feel like you own that company too. Obviously in startups and scaleups you often do get a lot of share options — in corporates too — but you really feel like this is your company and you're on this mission; you want it to succeed. And that doesn't just span the work that you do — it's also how you present yourself at work. I'm not talking about the social side; I'm talking about the leadership: everyone, from the analyst and the assistant up to the top, has to present themselves like an owner of the company. Your energy ripples through the rest of the business, and that's something that's just in your control. There's no space for someone who does what they're told. Also, there's no one there to tell you what to do, because everyone's so busy — you have to do it yourself. And there is something really cool about being the founding person in your job, where you're not going to inherit a load of processes and a load of documents. You've come in to do treasury — crack on. You'll know this too in your space: you go to interviews for this type of job and they say, "I'm interviewing you for this job — what are you going to do? Because I don't know what you're going to do; no one in the company has your specialism. So what are you going to bring?" And that is a really cool way to work, I think.

Philip: So it's the sense of agency — actually the need to bring agency: being the one driving and doing things, no matter the specialty, and rolling up your sleeves.

Jennifer: For sure.

Philip: Yeah, I recognize that. As the founder of a startup myself, that's what we hire for: people who have agency, roll up their sleeves, and get things done. I really recognize that. And that's what you've learned and experienced from the startup and scaleup side. How is it different in a corporate setting?

Jennifer: I should also say I loved working in corporate — I've loved every job that I've ever had. But I think you spend a lot of time in reflection in the corporate world. There's a lot of stakeholder management. There are a lot of people there — a lot of very experienced, very intelligent people who you have to show respect to, in a sense. That's what you feel: you have to respect that this is a very established company, that a lot of thought has gone into all of this stuff that we're doing, and that it's all there for a reason. But times do change and times do move on. And I think it's a skill to approach those types of situations with fresh eyes and still have that same mentality of: well, I'm coming into this job, and yes, this is all the stuff that we need to do to keep it running, but I'm a different person. I have completely different skills that no one else here has. Even if this is your first job, you have so much more information than the existing people. You've lived a different life, in a different era in a lot of senses, and you have to bring that to your work. That spans everything from your personal brand to your work style, and you should have the confidence to suggest those changes.

Also, one thing that I thought was really noticeable when I moved to Freetrade was that people used to say "I don't know" all the time. If they were asked a question, they would just say, "I don't know." And I remember thinking: that is wild — I never heard anyone say that in corporate. Everyone has to maintain this front and this professionalism, and then you just say a load of stuff that doesn't make sense, without understanding it. You just have to be yourself. And that's when you get respect: if you are the person who says "I don't know" when you don't, and you ask the question, or you say "I don't get why we're doing this," people will respect you for doing that.

Philip: And why does it not happen enough in large corporates? Why do people put this facade up?

Jennifer: Sometimes it covers for the people who don't perform. It covers a multitude of other things — it's about getting by. But for the people who are listening to this podcast: don't act that way just because you see other people doing it. If someone genuinely doesn't know something, it's very obvious. For me, if someone explains something to you and you don't understand it, it's because they don't understand it. And if you want to be different, and you do want to be the person who rises to the top, then just be honest, I think.

Philip: And let's take it from the scaleup and startup side. I think it's very easy — or there's the temptation — to look up to the large corporates, or to hire someone coming from a large corporate to set up treasury there. What can go wrong? Besides the fact that they have politics and facades and don't admit that they don't know, what else do you see going wrong?

Jennifer: I'll say I have seen other people, who have spoken to me, who have wanted to do what I'm doing. They've said, "Oh, I would love to do this fractional treasurer thing. That's really cool — I want to do that." And they try to do it and it doesn't work. Because outside the large corporate setting, the banks and all the providers and the whole ecosystem around treasury don't really work in a startup — the people who support treasury aren't interested in the smaller business. They don't have the time or the energy. Say you used a bank in a corporate: if you work at P&G, they are at you all the time — "Hey, come to this lovely dinner. Can I sell you this? Can I do this?" If you work with the same bank in a scaleup, you don't even have a contact to speak to. And in a lot of the creditworthiness calculations, you're not creditworthy, because of your cash burn — a lot of the metrics that treasury is measured with don't work in the scaleup. So it's just a very different type of relationship. It's a very different job, where at the start maybe you're fighting for attention or fighting for the business, and then, when you build up the relationship and they're on side, you start to get the support that you need. But I do meet a lot of really frustrated founders who are trying to run a set of treasury operations and are struggling. So it's different. But I would say there are a lot more providers and a lot more technology in the space now, ready to support these scaleups, because they see the opportunity there — especially on the fintech side, I think.

Philip: Can you give some examples of this?

Jennifer: Yeah. I guess a big one: every CFO gets hounded by FX brokers. The number of phone calls we get from FX salespeople is relentless. In a big corporate, obviously you have access to your FX salespeople, your network of individuals; you learn how to manage them, and you have a policy that supports you and protects you. Great. Everyone else is being contacted by salespeople and told constantly, "The market's going to dip today, you need to trade today. The market's going to go up tomorrow, you need to trade now." All this urgency — and there wasn't really anyone speaking their language. But now there are platforms — multiple platforms in that space. You don't have to contact FX sales desks, because that's a task in itself. There's automation, they're very low cost with very tight spreads, and you don't have to actively manage and monitor those things like a treasurer would. A treasurer is always benchmarking their spreads, because they know they get turned up when you're not looking, and then you negotiate them back down, and then they go back up. No one in a scaleup has time to do that. They just need automated, easy, quick processes that work — that is 0.05% of their job. And like I say, there are loads of good ones. I'm happy to name some, like Bound or HedgeFlows and all these guys — they're really great tools. And similarly, that covers investment platforms too — the same thing is being democratized now for everyone.

Philip: Do you have some names for that as well — some examples?

Jennifer: Yeah, of course. TreasurySpring is great, those guys. There are the smaller deposit platforms like Flagstone, and Round Treasury is doing really good things — people who are giving the time to these types of CFOs and finance teams to get them up to speed as well, because there is a handholding piece to get them ready. And then great platforms, easy to use, and it's done.

Philip: So what I hear from you is that these platforms are initially tailored or catered to smaller companies — scaleups and startups, in your context — who don't have a full-time treasurer and just don't have the time, the energy, or the budget to spend chasing the banks. And the banks — the big players — seem not to be so interested in these personas anyway. That's the status quo. Is there also an opportunity, then, for the large corporates to look into these automated, fresh tech solutions, or not? And if not, why not?

Jennifer: I think there is. TreasurySpring, say, is absolutely a fantastic platform — I think it's very scalable to every size of business. I was actually recently in a conversation with another company that I work with about whether this process would ever be automated in a corporate. Would it be so formulaic that you could say: if my balance is over a certain buffer above my forecast — 1 million, 10 million, 100 million — would I automatically start investing and sweeping that cash? So if it's needed in one week, it goes to my money market fund; if it's needed in one month, it goes there — and it's all automated. I think there is something in that. But there's also something in a conversation I had with James Kelly once: that's almost the most exciting part of being in treasury — booking the trades, doing the investments, having those discussions about where's best to put this money. It's not always where the highest yield is — and making those decisions. I think you do want to keep some control over that. And if you enjoy doing it, keep doing it. Automate the other stuff — automate your cash forecast — so that you're just doing the exciting decision-making, managing the portfolio. I'll add one tiny thing: you also have to think about how you spend your day and how you spend your time. And I know we'll come to this, I'm sure, about hiring younger people and attracting people into our industry: I think, do the exciting stuff and automate all the rubbish stuff.

Philip: And Jen, on that — I hear you saying that deciding where to invest is something you could automate, but if you have the luxury and, as a treasurer, that's what you enjoy, don't just go to where you get the highest yield. What else is there to consider?

Jennifer: I guess the usual: the wallet share. You need to manage your panel of banks.

Philip: What is the wallet share?

Jennifer: If you have five big bank relationships — or two, however many you have — and those banks give you other business, like maybe you have your syndicated loan with them, you will want to split your business between those banks and give them their fair share. In return, they give you favorable rates, or they will lend you more, or whatever is important to your business at that time. So you might decide: well, we should put our money here, because we haven't given much business to those guys this year. Let's put some of our deposits here, or let's give them some of our FX trades, even though they're not the most competitive. And that's a conversation to be had. This is long term, because a big part of being in treasury is those relationships — them supporting you, your business, and you as a person. These relationships go on for decades and decades, and it's a two-way street. So that's definitely a reason why you would diversify. And there are also other things, like counterparty risk. No one's going to lump all their money in one bank — not that the banks we work with are going to collapse, but now it's the cyber risk, the platform being down. If you had all your money in one place and they were attacked and you couldn't access it, that could end your business. There's a lot of chat about that now, I think — the impact of that risk when you're managing all these huge transactions.

Philip: And how does that apply — that's in the context of a large corporate — how does it apply in the context of a smaller company?

Jennifer: I mean, it's even more important, I think. I'm sitting next to a bag full of tokens — bank logins and tokens and stuff like that — and the people who are managing that in the scaleups aren't logging in every day; they're not treasurers. There's just a small finance team, and therefore everyone has bank access — or maybe they're not maintaining it as they should. So say you use a traditional bank that has a token that comes in the post, as they do, and you have an office day on a Wednesday when you all meet together: at least two or three people need to bring in those tokens to make payments, otherwise it doesn't work. That's quite a big ask — that people remember to do that every week — and therefore it's quite good to have a couple of banks, operationally, to make sure that you can always access the money. If someone goes on holiday and all of a sudden there are only two of you with that bank access, it is quite stressful. And in the scaleup it's very annoying, because it's often the CFO or the financial controller who has to do it — managing bank access has got to be the worst job.

Philip: Would you really advise a smaller company to do wallet sharing, wallet sizing?

Jennifer: Yeah, 100%. At least two banks, always.

Philip: And what else? Suppose you go into a smaller company for your first 100 days. What are the top three things you look at in your first 100 days?

Jennifer: It's a good question. I would say often the big one is: can we get our money earning good interest straight away? That's the top priority. It looks great in the board pack, it's great metrics, it's great ROI — it's just often the first one. Then the next biggest risk is often FX, because the companies I work with do have to have an interest in treasury risk, otherwise they don't need support — so often FX is the second one. There's always the question then of, "What do you think of my bank? Do you like my bank?" I don't often push people to move banks, but I do often suggest adding an extra bank. And then I like to round it out — assuming there weren't any other big questions, there wasn't debt or anything like that — and end with a treasury policy: we've agreed, we've ticked off all the main buckets that you wanted to cover, all your different treasury risks. Obviously there could be a cash forecast in that. They often come with a forecast, I'd say, because when you're managing cash burn and you've got big investment, they're obviously tracking the cash quite closely. So there will be work on the forecast as part of this project — because how can you invest, how can you manage FX, without a forecast? — but that's more just iterations. And then, like I say, end with a treasury policy: we've covered liquidity risk, op risk, FX, long-term liquidity risk, all the big ones — credit risk, market risk, whatever — a tight policy, some nice documentation. And then hand over to the finance team.

What's nice is when they feel confident to run it. I feel weirdly proud sometimes when I leave and they're running hedging processes and investment policies. Then we move into more of an "I'm always here if you want me to check how things are going," and it's often a quarterly or half-year review: how is it working? I think half of it is the policy and the other half is emotional, because when you're working with founders, it's their money, it's their business, and it's very hard to make these decisions. It's not like a corporate, where you're somewhat removed from the money — it's shareholders' money, and it's very formulaic — whereas in a startup it's much more emotional. So it's about moving someone away from that into something more proactive, not reactive. All this stuff kicks off — US GDP, rates, cable's gone, everything's so expensive — but that's okay. And the CFO says, "That's okay. We had this planned. Our risk is managed. Don't worry, we're hedged. We're not going to see a huge business impact — not for at least six months or a year. We've cut out that volatility. Our interest rate's locked." Having the CFO be prepared in that way for those obvious questions from the board is just great. And that's the whole point — I think making the CFO look great is the whole point of the treasurer, small and large.

Philip: Yeah, that's your job, isn't it? I mean, that's everyone's job, isn't it? Your job is to make your boss look good.

I actually have many questions. You mentioned the things you would do in your first 100 days — it was quite a lot, and there are two I'd like to narrow down on. One: you mentioned that if you don't already have another banking relationship, you should look into that. And the other thing you spoke about was forecasting. Let's talk about the banking first. What are you looking at when you're looking for a second or another banking relationship? What is a good bank for you?

Jennifer: For me, the best banks are the ones where the customer service is good and responsive and the platform is easy to use. I think those are the two big ones. In this space, we all know some banks are very hard to work with — some still need scanned documents to add users and things like that, and no startups are doing that. When they have those banks, often they keep their money there, and then slowly people lose access, and then it's so hard to manage. So the priority is to have a traditional high-street bank and supplement it with more of a new bank where you can add people easily, you can make payments, and you can keep the business running if you have to — and you use it for that purpose. Then ideally you have some sort of investment portfolio as well on the side. So I think that hopefully answers the question. I have used every bank platform I can think of, and some are definitely a lot easier to administer than others.

Philip: So your advice would be: have one traditional brick-and-mortar bank, and then have one neobank — Revolut, Wise, N26, something like that.

Jennifer: Yeah. Although I wouldn't always say Wise, because I don't think the access controls are great — but exactly, a Revolut or something like that, where it's easy to add someone and make your supplier payments. Or there are platforms that you can make your supplier payments through, automated through the ERP — that's a great solution. Just something that doesn't take too much headache to maintain.

Philip: And does that apply to large corporates as well?

Jennifer: No.

Philip: Why not?

Jennifer: No — I think they need the support of the corporate banks, but they also have more time and space to administer a proper bank. I don't think any corporate should use a non-creditworthy bank — well, not non-creditworthy, but a bank that isn't super-high investment grade. But like I say, they have a middle-office function responsible for all of that type of administration, and the real automation for them comes from the larger banks: they can connect to the APIs, they can link them up to the ERPs, they have host-to-host connections and things like that, so they're less likely to be logging into the banks anyway. Obviously that automation is available to scaleups too, but I don't know if you've ever met a scaleup where they say, "Let's stop our engineers from building our customer-facing platform and focus on connecting our back-office finance team to an API." That's just never going to happen. So I guess that's always going to be the challenge in the scaleup.

Philip: All right. And the other part of the question was the treasury tech. You mentioned forecasting — I guess visibility comes with it as well, as a prerequisite. What's your take on treasury tech, or a TMS — a treasury management system — for a smaller or scaleup company compared to a large corporate, for example?

Jennifer: I think you have to be of a certain complexity to get the benefits from a TMS, of any size really, because it's something to maintain — it's a whole other system. Say you've got a small finance team who are posting all the bank statements and doing all the accountancy, and then they have to do it all again in a TMS. To justify a TMS, it really needs a person who's going to maintain it, who has multiple entities, maybe consolidating information from overseas subsidiaries — that's where the real benefits come in. I think the scaleups generally do forecasting very well. Often the FP&A team have very complex forecasts that they share with the board; they run scenarios. It's just a matter of that exercise being translated into a cash forecast, and sometimes that doesn't get as much attention as it needs. I have tried a few of the different tools, like Anaplan — I've done that model-builder piece — and tools like that are great, but they're a big investment to get going, and when you move on, you need another model builder to take it on, so it's very hard to maintain. A lot of people are moving to AI to maintain them — well, yes, to maintain. I don't think they're building their forecasts with AI, but they have their forecast structure, they have information, and they can now reformat their data to get it into the forecast. And the best bit is that it can check for errors, because when you're running an Excel forecast, there's an error every time — and it's always the FX rates: "Oh, we've got this huge FX difference." But I also haven't seen an amazing AI self-built forecast yet.

Philip: And for the cash visibility bit?

Jennifer: For the startups, this is still very manual, and there's no real way around that just yet. Unless you're going to invest quite a lot of time into getting that live data, you're still going to have to log in and check. But I think it's so important. If you get it really tight, you can do it in five or ten minutes, and it could save you a day of dealing with an issue where you haven't checked, you haven't funded, and then money's gone out. Those little controls, although they feel like they're taking time, actually save a lot of time. The people who aren't treating cash management like a process — who treat it as an afterthought — probably spend way more time managing cash than the people who just log in and do it every day.

Philip: Why is that?

Jennifer: An example: there's a corporate tax payment going out next week. Everyone knows there's a corporate tax payment next week, because the finance team has done the computation and they know what it is. But the act of working out where we're going to get the money to fund this payment almost comes as an afterthought, and then there's an absolute scramble to move money into the right place — it's running late, we need to make this payment, making phone calls — when it would have been a one-minute task. That seems like a one-off example, but it happens every month. Or, we have our big IT spend in dollars — our big AWS bill. Having the dollars ready for that becomes, "Oh my goodness, that's three payments I need to pay. It's due today. It's a direct debit." That's a day of stress.

Philip: How much more expensive would it be to work in emergency mode — "Oh, we have a problem, I need to get the cash now in the right currency, dollars" — rather than having a proper forecast, planning ahead, and saying, "Okay, next week I'll need 200k dollars to make the payment"? What is the delta?

Jennifer: Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose — that's the thing, isn't it? The market moves every day, and you just don't know. If you need $200,000, you don't know how much it's going to cost. So if you've planned and you've got a hedge, even a simple one, at least you know what it's going to be and you can put it in your forecast. One of the things I hear when I meet CFOs is, "I'm autonomous. The founder implicitly trusts me to execute this, we work on this together, I manage the whole finance team, and I'm autonomous in that sense." And I disagree completely with that sentiment. Imagine if I said to you, Phil: here's my credit card. I have two children and a mortgage. Will you pay those, please, and feed everyone? And I trust you. I don't know how much you're going to spend to do that, or how you're going to do it. And in theory, if you don't have a treasury policy, that's what you're doing. You're just saying to someone: the money's in the bank, we'll do a budget, we'll not track it too closely — you do how you feel is best. And then, if something goes wrong — I said to you, "You have my card" — that's my fault, isn't it? I didn't give you the parameters to do it. And it's the same with FX. You would never, even just going on holiday, walk over to some random provider and say, "Oh, give me all of my holiday money at whatever rate — I don't mind." I think it's that agency thing we were talking about.

Philip: So what do you do instead? How should it be done?

Jennifer: You work it out together — that's the best way. You say: I don't want you to trust me. I want you to be clear on how we should do this together. And I want to teach you how I like to do it. If I don't have a view on how to do it, let's create a view and let's make a plan. Let's not be caught on the back foot, and let's have good metrics. I want you to tell me at the end of each month how much you've spent doing that stuff and what the rates were, and make them really good numbers, so that it's really clear to me how it's going — and then we don't have to talk about it again. I'm not worried about it, you're not worried, we're all agreed, and it's just running. And if it's not running itself — if it's not going as we expected — we can regroup and decide; we might change the plan.

Philip: So that's the treasury policy bit that you were talking about.

Jennifer: Yeah, exactly.

Philip: Let's move past the tech and the treasury policy and this stuff for a second, and go a bit more into the personal things — the people side of things. You mentioned at the beginning of the show that you fell in love with treasury as a young professional, and that it almost happened by accident for you. So can you tell us what you loved about treasury, what you wish you knew back then, and make the case for a young professional — maybe just coming out of uni today — to start their career in treasury?

Jennifer: What is different about treasury compared to accountancy — and I'm an accountant too, I'm ACCA, which is great and ticks a lot of boxes — is that accountancy is not live. It's backwards-looking: you are reporting what's happened, you're closing the books. It's very important, and I very much see the appeal of it. But in treasury, it's what's going on in the news — that's what attracted me at first. We are discussing the FX rates, the current market. We get economic updates every day and we discuss them together. Sometimes, in my job at Norton Rose, we used to argue — we used to debate. We had different views, and I used to love that. There's a decision to be had, and we had a really good policy that allowed us the bandwidth to do that, make decisions, and have a really good impact. And there's a lot of meeting people, networking too. Treasuries are really small, even in the biggest companies — they're small teams — so you won't have anyone to talk to unless you have a network, and treasury is a really small world. Everyone knows everyone. In the law firm world, all the treasurers meet every so often and say, "Oh, did that bank tell you about that? Have you tried that?" And you go to the ACT conferences and events, and people are great and really open, and they share. Whereas when you do ACCA, you're in a classroom full of people — ACT is not like that. You're doing it on your own; you'll be the only person at your company who's studying. And in that sense, you need the networks to know what treasury is like everywhere else. What a treasury does in a law firm is completely different from a manufacturing company, whereas in accountancy it's much more consistent.

Philip: What is a good way to get started with building your network today? What are your top three tips?

Jennifer: I think LinkedIn is your friend. Obviously I do post on LinkedIn, and I find that it does draw people. People message, "Can we meet up?", and a lot of the time I say yes — ask any questions. And obviously the ACT events are great. Deina, who's taken over the BD side at the ACT, is putting on a lot more events. She's leading a lot of new events — women-orientated events, as it's a very male-heavy industry — and a lot more events with the future leaders group, which I'm part of, to bring students together. The ACT have also started giving students tickets to the bigger events, which is great, so they get to experience that. And also the banks — the banks do loads of breakfasts and talks. Just go to them, I would say, especially if you're an analyst. Just go and walk up to people — everyone feels as awkward as you do. If you walk up to someone and just say, "Hey, can I talk to you, please?", they will love it — they'll think, "Oh, thank God someone spoke to me." Or sometimes you go to an event and people are in a little group they already know from work, and you think, "Oh, everyone's in little cliques." But you go over to those cliques, and those people have sat together every day for three years, and they're thinking, "Thank goodness someone has come over to talk about something new, because we have nothing to say." Just be that person. And I'll say one last thing on this — my last tip: everyone is so busy thinking about themselves. They're thinking, "Does my hair look right?" They're not thinking about you. If you're just yourself and you're nice, whatever you post on LinkedIn — as long as it's not rude or offensive — it doesn't matter. People just think it's cool that you posted on LinkedIn. The only person who's really worried is you; they'll be reading your post and feeling bad that they didn't post something. I think once you let go of that, the networking and the personal brand and all that stuff just comes naturally.

Philip: Yeah, thanks. I actually recognize all the things that you said. We met on LinkedIn, didn't we? And here you are on this show talking to us — you just reached out. Agreed. Well, I think we have covered a lot already. I feel we could talk on for another hour or so, but I think it's time to wrap it up, and maybe we'll have you on the show again soon. And we have a tradition — well, we started a tradition on this show — and that is the "one thing" tradition. So I'd like to ask you: what is the one thing you want to tell the listeners in one minute? What is the most important thing they should take away from you today?

Jennifer: The one thing you should do is treat your job like it's your business. Bring yourself to it. Make it yours. Speak about yourself, learn about other people, but act like the owner of that company in your job — that treasury analyst job, or manager, or treasurer, whatever it is. It's only yours; only you can do it. Bring all of your skills to it. And write about it on LinkedIn, write your blogs about it, ask if you can speak to the ACT about it — they would love that. Reach out to Deina; I'm sure she would support you in doing that. Make that your thing.

Philip: Super. Well, Jen, thanks a lot for being with us today. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and your experience — and till next time. Thank you.