From building a treasury team from scratch with just a laptop to managing billions in assets and navigating four major corporate deals. This week on the podcast treasury leader Mike Tackley reveals what it really takes to scale treasury functions that drive business growth, earn stakeholder trust, and withstand economic turbulence.

Mike Tackley, an experienced finance leader and most recently the Group Treasurer at Harbour Energy, shares the unconventional path that led him from night school and brown paper bags full of receipts to leading treasury strategy at one of the UK’s largest independent oil and gas companies.

With decades of experience including a key role at BG Group before its $70B acquisition by Shell, Mike offers an insider’s perspective on treasury leadership during times of rapid scale and transformation.

Main topics discussed:

• Mike’s unconventional entry into finance and treasury
• His pivotal career move from auditing to BG Group, and why internal controls were his gateway into treasury
• How Sarbanes-Oxley changed corporate treasury structures and compliance
• Setting up middle, back, and front office treasury functions from the ground up
• Lessons learned managing credit risk during the 2008 financial crisis
• Building Harbour Energy’s treasury team post-BG and launching operations with no legacy systems
• The strategic use of Reserve Based Lending (RBL) to finance acquisitions
• Treasury’s evolving role in M&A deals, cash flow forecasting, and regulatory reporting
• Integrating treasury with the broader business through stakeholder education
• Tips for growing and hiring a high-performance treasury team

You can connect with Mike Tackley on LinkedIn.

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• 🍏Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/treasury-career-corner/id1436647162
• 🎧Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/641KUrhdoQPynLc1q2Guqn

🎓 Save $150 on CTP, FPAC & AFP Boston 2025 - Exclusive discounts for treasury professionals – thanks to our trusted partners.

🧠 Leadership Under Pressure - Practical tools and coaching that actually work – from the team at Gazing Leadership.

🤝 Support for Your Treasury Career - From education to events, tech to training – meet the partners helping treasury professionals like you grow and succeed.

👉 Explore your support network here - https://treasuryrecruitment.com/partners/

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What does it take to rise through the ranks in treasury - from debt collection to leading the treasury function of a global engineering group?

In this episode, we dive into the real, unfiltered treasury career journey of Emma Hayward, Group Treasurer of Dowlais Group plc, covering everything from early uncertainty to leading high-stakes corporate transformations.

This week on the Treasury Career Corner, host Mike Richards sits down with Emma Hayward, Group Treasurer of Dowlais Group plc, a global engineering firm operating in the automotive sector.

Emma shares her unconventional journey into treasury, lessons from working at industry giants like Merck and Tesco, and what it's really like to build a treasury team from scratch during a corporate demerger.

Main topics discussed:

• Emma’s early steps in finance, banking, and her unexpected move into treasury
• Working in global treasury operations at a pharmaceutical company
• Life inside Tesco’s treasury team pre and post-financial crisis
• How Emma helped transform treasury’s role to be more strategic and integrated with commercial functions
• Executing Tesco’s first commodity trade and managing FX risk for thousands of products
• Leading during financial uncertainty and a corporate credit downgrade
• Setting up a treasury function from scratch during a spin-off
• The massive task of launching Dowlais Group’s treasury operations post-demerger
• Emma’s leadership principles and how she manages pressure and workload
• Advice on career growth, finding the right fit, and making strategic career decisions

You can connect with Emma Hayward on LinkedIn.

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🎙️ Subscribe to the Treasury Career Corner podcast - Never miss an episode! Hit subscribe on your favourite platform:

• 🍏Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/treasury-career-corner/id1436647162
• 🎧Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/641KUrhdoQPynLc1q2Guqn

🎓 Save $150 on CTP, FPAC & AFP Boston 2025 - Exclusive discounts for treasury professionals – thanks to our trusted partners.

🧠 Leadership Under Pressure - Practical tools and coaching that actually work – from the team at Gazing Leadership.

🤝 Support for Your Treasury Career - From education to events, tech to training – meet the partners helping treasury professionals like you grow and succeed.

👉 Explore your support network here - https://treasuryrecruitment.com/partners/

Is the treasury function still confined to risk management and cash preservation? Not anymore.

In this weeks’ episode with returning guest Joseph Neu, Founder and CEO of NeuGroup, we discover how the role of corporate treasury is undergoing a radical transformation. Treasury is stepping out of the back office and into a strategic spotlight - enabling profit, shaping business decisions, and influencing the future of finance. Learn what it really takes to evolve from technical operator to strategic business partner in a world driven by automation, AI, and cross-functional collaboration.

This week, we welcome back a trailblazer in the treasury world – Joseph Neu, Founder and CEO of NeuGroup. With over three decades of experience creating and facilitating peer groups for the world’s top finance professionals, Joseph offers a rare, research-driven lens on how the treasury function has shifted and where it's headed next.

In this episode, Joseph shares lessons learned from 30+ years of sitting at the table with treasury leaders across industries. From the early days of derivative disasters and newsletters to today’s AI-enabled finance transformation, Joseph reveals how treasury has quietly become one of the most impactful functions within modern corporations.

Listeners will gain behind-the-scenes insights into how peer learning empowers finance leaders, why treasury must move beyond technical silos, and what skills the next generation of treasurers must develop to thrive in an evolving landscape.

Main topics discussed:

• Joseph’s journey from researcher to leader of influential peer groups in the treasury space
• How the NeuGroup model fosters high-value, curated peer learning for finance leaders
• The biggest shifts in treasury over the past 30 years - from derivative disasters to AI integration
• Why treasury is moving from a support function to a strategic business partner
• How AI and automation are reshaping the scope of treasury roles
• Common pitfalls in treasury tech implementations and how to avoid them
• How to measure the success and value of treasury teams in a non-profit-generating function
• Advice for current and future treasury leaders at every level
• Why peer networking is non-negotiable for treasury professionals

You can connect with Joseph Neu on LinkedIn

❓Quick Quiz Link to CTP quiz for Joseph’s Episode❓

https://treasuryrecruitment.com/?post_type=ays-quiz-maker&p=7502

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🎙️ Subscribe to the Treasury Career Corner podcast - Never miss an episode! Hit subscribe on your favourite platform:

• 🍏Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/treasury-career-corner/id1436647162
• 🎧Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/641KUrhdoQPynLc1q2Guqn

🎓 Save $150 on CTP, FPAC & AFP Boston 2025 - Exclusive discounts for treasury professionals – thanks to our trusted partners.

🧠 Leadership Under Pressure - Practical tools and coaching that actually work – from the team at Gazing Leadership.

🤝 Support for Your Treasury Career -...