My career to date has been in financial services, having started out in banking as a graduate trainee at Barclays. From there, I was recruited by Morgan Stanley (my client at the time) into their treasury department, where I performed several different roles over the years. Moving to Old Mutual in 2009 gave me the opportunity to fill in some gaps in my experience by working on a TMS implementation, plus debt issuance and liability management.
Superior technology is clearly one key to success, but regulatory pressure is building on potential non-traditional contenders such as Facebook, whose announcements regarding Libra already look over-ambitious: setting up a virtual currency comes with a degree of systemic risk and raises questions over financial stability, protection of deposits, data protection, and anti-money laundering compliance. And access to clearing systems depends on liquidity, which has a cost.
There will also be competition from central banks when they launch their own digital currencies, which will raise the regulatory bar and make the early ‘crypto’ currencies look exactly that – cryptic – and therefore with an increasingly questionable franchise.
So successful competitors will need to leverage a huge client base and/or superior data handling, sufficiently to offset regulatory costs. A big tech company could do it, but most rapidly with a bank or other liquidity provider as a partner. At Small World we make no secret of our global network of 200+ correspondent bank relationships, which has taken years to build.
But I think the more interesting long-term innovations will be in the actual mechanisms of value transfer, such as real time payments; and the harmonisation of cross-border payment standards. That’s the banker in me talking!
Supporting Morgan Stanley’s liquidity management at the height of the financial crisis, in the days following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. A never to be forgotten experience, lived hour by hour.
At the moment my main focus is on streamlining processes and implementing risk controls, to allow the organisation to grow in a way that is safe but also scalable. Having strong technical knowledge on which to base that framework is invaluable.
Over the years I’ve used my ACT qualification so often that it’s hard to think of anything I learned that I’ve not had to touch on in some way.
I like the website, as an up to date and comprehensive source of information. The Treasurer magazine is more an indicator of what topics I need to keep an eye on, and research further.
Don’t try to please everyone. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy, and you’ll end up not achieving anything.
I am re-reading ‘The Machine Stops’ by EM Forster, a science fiction short story set in a world where humanity lives underground, supported by a vast, omnipotent machine. Human contact has been almost totally replaced by instant and video messaging. I loved it when I read it as a teenager, but realised only recently that it was first published in 1909: amazing when you consider the technologies it predicted. It’s a cautionary tale, by the way.
Creative, determined, empathetic.
My late father: for his endless curiosity, and for pursuing his chosen profession with principle and purpose. And had LinkedIn existed then, he would never have thought it appropriate to advertise that about himself.
This might be surprising, but my happiest memory is of sitting my final ACT exams. I was six months pregnant at the time, which created a lot of extra pressure to get them done. Sitting at a small desk for six adrenalin-fuelled hours in one day was even more uncomfortable than it would normally be, but I remember getting the results a few weeks later and realising that the envelope was too fat to contain just a ‘fail’ letter – that was a very happy day.