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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