Secrets of a successful nomination
Where the award nomination process is concerned, Larson McNeil, Executive Director, Co-Head of Marketplaces & Digital Ecosystems at J.P. Morgan Payments, highlighted the role that the bank plays in supporting its clients through the process – an exercise that resulted in 11 award winners in 2024 alone.
“I’ve had the honour of working with clients to prepare for award submissions,” he said. “You already know the people and the problem that you’re looking to solve. But actually building the story is a fun and collaborative process, because you’re really looking to understand the impact of what you’ve achieved, how to measure it, and how to tell the story.”
In particular, McNeil noted the importance of helping clients tell their own stories in an engaging and human way. “It’s not just about saying, ‘We built this really interesting liquidity solution that did X, Y and Z.’ It’s about saying, ‘We’ve got this large complex business, and working capital is a problem for us, so we needed to make the best use of treasury resources in a way that maximises overall value to the organisation’.”
Jayna Bundy, General Manager, Procurement, Microsoft
“A lot of collaboration has to occur to deliver these successful projects. There might be only one or two names attached to the award, but behind that is a whole team that made it happen. So we make sure we’re celebrating the collaboration that goes into delivering these impactful solutions.”
Sandra Ramos Alves, Senior Vice President and Treasurer, Bristol-Myers Squibb
“I’ve asked everyone to avoid saying, ‘This is how we do things here’, because that’s the killer of innovation.”
Adopting best practice and creating winning solutions
During a group discussion exercise, attendees shared their views on the concept of best practice and innovation, with some past winners of Adam Smith Awards speaking about their successes and the innovative solutions they had developed.
Phung Ngo-Burns, Chief Financial Officer of Catalyze, noted that when adopting best practice, “the first thing you’ve got to think about is what are you reinventing – do you understand the process that you’re mapping out? You’re going to face everyone saying, ‘I’ve got to remain compliant’ – but let’s combine compliance with agility and collaboration.”
Attendees discussed the role that bank relationships can play in helping to further innovation, and the value of challenging core banks to come up with ideas and solve problems. Also important is fostering a culture of continuous innovation: while some companies may have a dedicated team to drive innovation, others can move things forward by allocating a specific day for talking about new ideas and driving incremental changes.
The discussion turned to the reasons why treasury teams choose to take part in the Adam Smith Awards programme. As well as helping to motivate teams, participating in the programme can also bring recognition for the treasury organisation, both internally and externally, and may even help with recruitment.
Illustrating this point, Colleen Ramsay, Head of Treasury Insights Planning & Analytics at Amazon, spoke about her experience of winning the Adam Smith Award for Best Cash Flow Forecasting in 2023.
“I think a lot of people across the company don’t really understand the treasury function,” she observed. “So getting that award sparked some brand recognition and conversations among the teams internally. That recognition can help to garnish that seat at the table for our treasury team, and make sure they can participate in the right conversations.”
Finally, attendees shared their thoughts on what kind of people are needed in the treasury function today, and whether it is essential to be a ‘numbers person’. Paul Franek, Global Head of Treasury Services & Solutions at Apollo Global Management argued that the qualities that most matter are intellectual curiosity and the desire to learn and grow, “because treasury is an on-the-job learning kind of function. It’s about being driven, being a sponge and being curious, more than it is about having a strong grasp of one particular mathematical skillset.”
Phung Ngo-Burns, Chief Financial Officer, Catalyze
“I think the journey to CFO for me was because I had a good mentor – someone who has always looked at me as a whole person – as well as the accumulation of what I’ve learned through my career in different roles and different industries.”
Personal and professional development
Turning to career development, Jackson hosted a second panel discussion exploring the steps that treasury practitioners can take to develop their skills and achieve their goals. Taking part in the discussion were Brooke Tilton, VP Treasury Operations at Paramount; Nicola Bates, President and CEO of Siemens Capital Company, and Tiffany Eng, Global Treasurer at BNY.
Bates explained that she started her journey with Siemens as an intern in Munich, and was able to secure a role at the company’s new treasury centre in Hong Kong. “So I packed up all my belongings and went on a two-week vacation to Hong Kong for the interviews, and I was offered a job – the caveat being that I had to start on Monday! I decided it was an opportunity I couldn’t miss.”
Some four years later, she was ready for her next move, which took her to the treasury centre in the US, “and I’ve basically moved my way up within the organisation since then, touching a lot of different areas of treasury. Now I’m heading the regional finance centre, which is treasury plus a couple of other areas, like insurance, pensions and trade finance advisory.”
She added that the moral of her story was to “figure out where you’d like to go, put one foot in front of the other, and start moving in some direction.”
Conversely, Tilton reflected that a lot of people “stumble into a role in treasury by accident – and I’m just the same.” She explained that she had been focusing on activities such as cash forecasting, collections and accounts receivable, when the company she was working for split. “The person doing treasury in corporate told the new treasurer, ‘Just bring Brooke up – she’ll be fine!’ She really invested in me and helped me move into that role, which I was totally unprepared for, but I appreciate her faith in me.”
Since then, Tilton has held various different roles in treasury, and has found she is particularly drawn to problem solving. “I like working with teams across the company, finding a pain point and figuring out a way to solve it together – through technology, through process improvement, through partnering with our banks and other teams.” She added that much of treasury is about long-term problem solving, “and you can really get a good return on investment out of small, incremental changes in treasury.”
Demonstrating another of the diverse routes into treasury, Eng explained that she started her career in finance and asset management, but then decided to go to law school and “make the world a better place”. After that, she moved into the regulatory area, taking a role at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), where she worked on the liquidity coverage ratio – an opportunity which she described as an “inflection point” in her career. She subsequently returned to the banking world and joined BNY in 2022, where she was recently appointed Global Treasurer.
“What I love about the treasury space is that it’s so open-ended in some ways – there’s a central mission, which is to protect and manage the balance sheet, but it also allows us to have tentacles into every part of the firm,” she reflected. “And there’s such a strategic element to it as well.”
Priorities and aspirations
Jackson asked Eng about how she approaches “thriving professionally, while also taking care of yourself at the same time.”
Eng highlighted the importance of drawing personal boundaries and prioritising the things that matter, such as time with friends and family. “In treasury, there are always challenges to address, but there is an element of predictability which means you can draw those priorities for yourself and manage the workload.”
Speaking about her approach to career development, Bates said her career path had been shaped not by “big picture aspirations” but by an iterative process, combined with an entrepreneurial spirit. “Before I started, I always thought I would eventually become an entrepreneur myself, but I didn’t really anticipate how many opportunities I would have within a big organisation like Siemens to exercise my entrepreneurial spirit,” she said.
Bates added that her strengths included the ability to challenge the status quo, approach things creatively and identify the problems that need to be solved.
