I have had an unorthodox career path; I joined treasury through the sponsorship of my PhD degree in mathematical finance at Imperial College London by the group treasury of BT Group. I was part of the Centre for Quantitative Finance at Imperial, and both banks and corporates would sponsor the PhD programme with the intention of providing a connected, real-world experience for post-graduates. As part of the sponsorship, I spent two to three days a week with the BT treasury team working on derivatives pricing models and learning about debt capital markets, liquidity and FX management, pensions performance management, rating agency interfaces and negotiating structured transactions with banks.
It was an exciting period as BT issued the largest corporate bonds of its time to pay for 3G licences during 2000.
After my PhD programme in 2003, I joined the BT treasury team in a permanent role where I deepened my treasury experience. I stayed with BT for three years before moving to Shell in London to work on project financing for Sakhalin Energy, a joint venture in Russia, where Shell held a 55% equity stake. For part of the project – to build a LNG plant – I travelled to Sakhalin Island, which was pretty remote. In fact, it’s much closer to Japan than it is to Europe.
That was my first experience of project financing and it was interesting to be on location to see construction taking place while I worked on the financing. And while my experiences at Shell in London had been much more focused on commercial paper and so on, this project had a very wide mix of government and multilateral agencies and commercial lenders.
With the financing coming to a close, I moved with Shell to Houston and took on the role of head of treasury manager – upstream, Americas. The role was to act as the treasurer of our upstream businesses in North and South America through a team of treasury managers.
Thereafter, I left the core treasury area and moved to an M&A and commercial finance role in Dubai. The role involved negotiating and structuring new business opportunities and acquisition of assets in the Middle East. Three years into the role, I got the opportunity to become the country finance lead [SMKS1] of Shell Kazakhstan. That role gave me the finance accountability for all Shell assets and operations in Kazakhstan and a broader role in leading the Shell Kazakhstan team. With the combination of Shell with BG, in addition to my finance accountabilities, I took on the role of integrating the Shell and BG presence in Kazakhstan.
The integration was an interesting experience. There can be a lot of hesitancy in communicating around any changes until the point where people feel they have all the answers. On the ground, however, people would rather know what others know. A big part of managing change is transparency around outcomes. You don’t want to say something that won’t come to fruition. So, it’s a delicate balancing act.
Once the integration was successfully delivered, I returned to London and my treasury roots as the treasurer, trading and supply, for the global trading business for Shell. I looked after all treasury needs of the global trading business in Shell, a fast-paced and dynamic environment.
Transitioning out of treasury, first into an M&A role and then to a country finance lead role have proven to be fantastic broadening opportunities. The M&A role allowed me to hone my commercial skills in negotiating with partners, and the country finance role gave me an integrative leadership role across all aspects of the business spectrum. Both these transitions also gave me added appreciation of the importance of treasury and the opportunity to understand the treasury-related challenges that businesses face.
The experience of integrating Shell and BG in Kazakhstan was fantastic. The scope spanned the organisational and systems integration (asset management, accounting, banking, HR and so on) to integrating office locations, combining and rationalising the teams and merging the cultures while retaining the best of both organisations.
There were also the important tasks of coming up with communication plans and managing the anxiety in the team – the list is endless. The experience was humbling and gave me a lot of visibility in the organisation, as me and my team delivered the first country integration while achieving synergies from the combination, critical to its success.
experience not only set me up for the next role in Shell, but was also instrumental in landing me my current role.
I am VP investor relations Europe at Shell, I took on this role from January this year. It has provided me with a steep learning curve, as it involves externally communicating the Shell strategy and performance to our investors and equity analysts covering the energy sector. In June, we put together a strategy update for Shell, communicating the Shell outlook to 2025 to our investor community. Part of that initiative was refining group strategy and what we communicate to the markets for the next decade.
I also have a strong role in providing market feedback, warts and all, to our senior management. So, the role gives me exposure to the Shell CEO, CFO, directors and the board members, plus the capacity to influence the strategy of Shell so that it aligns with investor expectations. Having worked in treasury, with banks and service providers, I’ve been able to leverage that experience. In fact, I continue to work very closely with treasury and even more closely with the group treasurer than previously. The necessity in investor relations to communicate on share buybacks and how we manage the balance sheet overall means we have a lot of touchpoints with treasury, which definitely has a role to play.
Liz Loxton is editor of The Treasurer