This year’s Women in Treasury & Finance APAC Forum brought the community together at the Four Seasons Hotel in Singapore on 9th July. In this episode, hear highlights from a fireside chat with Rachel Whelan of Deutsche Bank on her career journey, equity and resilience, followed by a panel discussion with leaders from Clifford Chance, MUFG, SATS and J.P. Morgan covering diverse talent, allyship, difficult conversations and the equity implications of AI in the workplace.

Hello and welcome to this podcast brought to you by Treasury Today. On the 9th of July, treasury and finance professionals from the Asia-Pacific region came to Treasury Today's annual Women in Treasury & Finance APAC Forum at the Four Seasons Hotel in Singapore.

During the event, attendees heard from expert speakers about a range of thought-provoking topics. These included supporting diverse talent, navigating difficult conversations, and extending the reach of empowerment programmes beyond the organisation.

The forum also included the awards presentation for this year's Women in Treasury & Finance Awards, as well as an insightful workshop sponsored by Standard Chartered.

Meg Coates, Publisher & Operations Director at the Treasury Today Group, welcomed attendees to the event.

Our forum here in Singapore is so close to our hearts. We've received such overwhelming support since the beginning and have together with all of you built a phenomenal community.

Sophie Jackson, CEO of Treasury Today, held a fireside chat with Rachel Whelan from Deutsche Bank.

So Rachel, the inspirational Rachel, I'd like you to kick us all off. What we want to do with Women in Treasury is to be humans as well as financial professionals and leaders in our industry. So tell us a little bit about your origin story, your human story, and what's led you to the role that you're at today.

Well, I suppose my origin stories, coming from a very small village in Ireland, in the southeast of Ireland, not really having a clue what the world looked like outside, not having really the support from a career development perspective. So I ended up as a 21-year-old in London, not really, again, having a clue, but found my people. There was other Irish graduates there.

I took on challenges. So I never worked as an accountant, but ultimately it got me that door opener into the role. I really was in the investment bank side of things for the first number of years, and then I got the opportunity, got headhunted to go and work for Deutsche Bank.

So we're here today to celebrate equity and I know that's something that's very important to you. Why is this something that's important to you and what's been your experience of this?

For me, equity is really about giving everybody a chance. We need to be able to see that people are different. We need to be able to ultimately allow people and give people those opportunities that ultimately if you go and read the CV, they'll never even get past the first door.

Ultimately as a leader, I want to be able to see those diverse talents and that's why exposing myself to diverse talents but also then helping support them is really important.

Can you leave us, as we wrap up this and move through to our forum, with some advice for everyone in the room on how to take care of ourselves?

From a female perspective, we definitely push ourselves harder. Yeah, we always think, if I keep working harder, that's going to sort it out. And that is not. Yeah, resilience is not about just keep pushing harder through it. Resilience can also be about making the decision to stop. And that's a big thing. For me, this is where we show up for each other and don't think it's just going to get solved. You have to sit down, give yourself your time, find those recharge capabilities as well.

Following the awards presentation, moderator Rozella Marie Mahijhrin introduced the speakers for this year's panel discussion.

So Shelly Maneth is the Chief Financial Officer at Clifford Chance. And we have Manoj Bhatia sitting next to her, Managing Director of Global Head of Subsidiary Banking, GCIB APAC at MUFG, Jinny Goh next to him, Group Treasurer at SATS, and Rebekah Wong, Head of ASEAN Payments at J.P. Morgan. Please give them a warm welcome.

Thank you all so much for being here, and Shelly let's start with your journey, because your path to finance began in a very grounded place.

I grew up in the Midwest, and I went to university in the Midwest. And 35 years later, I'm sitting in front of you as the Asia Pacific CFO for Clifford Chance, a law firm, one of the UK law firms, magic circle firms.

But what I've learned across that time is as I work across different countries in Asia Pacific, and you know this, is that we have different ways of communicating. We have different styles, different cultural norms, et cetera.

And what you see is you see talent, though, in every place that I've ever worked, exceptional talent. And they don't necessarily have that same understanding of how to navigate a large organisation, or maybe what a different path could be for an accountant.

So as a senior leader, one of the things that I try to do is to give visibility to those opportunities to people in my team. Really, really important. Sometimes it's a conversation. Sometimes it's an introduction to a colleague or a stakeholder. But really important to try to show them that maybe your path could be something different than what you envision and what you imagine.

Jinny, I'd like to go to you next and talk about this learning path that we have because your path into treasury happened kind of an unconventional way because you started in communications. What did that shift from communications teach you about skills that might be underestimated early on, but becomes essential as you enter a leadership?

I spent in my first five years, I did corporate communications before I transitioned into the role of treasury or after I got my MBA. I would say that if I look back, the group treasury, the corporate treasury role actually requires a good balance of your quantitative and your qualitative skills. You need to learn how to analyse your liquidity, manage your financial risk, but at the same time also have the ability to really engage your stakeholders internal and external.

And for me, having that early start in communication did help me to kind of like ease into a treasury leadership role more easily because I'm more comfortable in writing, in speaking, in telling the story behind the numbers, right?

Manoj, I'd like to come to you next and ask about the role of men as allies and advocates because it's easy to show visible support to sign the petition, join the event, but how do we make sure that actually extends to where careers grow?

So you need to demonstrate in your own little world first that you really mean what you say. And I think that kind of then keeps reinforcing the message that here is an organisation which is living up to its values and is putting it into action.

I sit on what we call as empowering women. And it's a structured programme. We are in the second year of that programme. We have about 130 women globally. And what was interesting to me when I looked at the statistics was in the US, we actually have ten male participants.

So it kind of just shows the way we are institutionalising that process for visibility to be created, for the firm and for everyone to recognise that this is changing. 16% of the first cohort has already got promoted.

So it is kind of sending that message to from a diversity perspective that we value diversity, the fact that we have leadership that is no longer Japanese, that we respect cultural diversity and there is nothing stopping you from growing within this firm.

Shelly, I'd like to come to you next because most of us, we don't set out to cause harm, but even good people, good organisations, we can cause exclusion, silence, hurt. And when we bring out these difficult conversations, whether it's about bias, bullying, microaggression, a behaviour that's maybe gone unchecked for so long, things can get really tense really quickly because we automatically go into that fight or flight mode.

In my experience, and what I admire most is leaders that are able to actually sit with that discomfort for a minute, pause and they're not defensive. They're not taking a position of what I meant to say was, but they're actually pause and want to understand what was the experience the person had.

Because as we know, working across Asia Pacific, what lands for one person really well in a different culture can land not the same. And it's extremely important to be able to recognise that.

Jinny, I'd like to come to you next because you actually chair the SATS network of women and networks like that are very important because they create connection, they create support, but sometimes it only benefits the people within that network. So how do we make sure that these kind of initiatives actually reach the people who are furthest from power, furthest from visibility, furthest from connection so that they also benefit?

Just to share an experience, we recently paired up with a social enterprise called Daughters of Tomorrow, where they actually support low-income women, mainly single mothers, to find their way back into the workforce. So what we did was that we partnered with them and collaborated with our HR department to run a resume writing workshop for them.

So I thought that was a very meaningful experience for me, because I think empowerment doesn't necessarily need to come from just within the organisation. Sometimes I think we need to look outwards.

Rebekah, I'd like to end with you, because AI is no longer something that's far away. Many of us are already using it in our day-to-day work. And it's opening up a lot of new possibilities. How do leaders make sure that the decisions that we make are not only technology decisions, but it's also equity decisions?

I think as a corporation or organisation, if you set your goals, I'm going to cut 10% of my workforce or I'm going to be more efficient or expensive of 20%, you already have taken the human out of the equation. Rather than I think the goal along with it, adjacent with it should be, while I cut 10%, in terms of number of workers in this space. At the same time, I'm going to retrain 8%. I want to relocate them.

But I would say regulators across the world have become a lot more mindful of how we should deploy, govern and use AI in years to come. So I think the good takeaway here is that there's a lot more awareness. Rather than a few years down the road, we said, my gosh, we didn't see that coming. And there is regulator might to make sure that we use it responsibly and also to treat people with a lot of respect through this process.

We would like to thank our panellists, Shelly, Jinny, Rebekah and Manoj, as well as our guest speaker Rachel, our moderator Rozella, and everyone who joined us on the day.

Thanks also to our sponsors, J.P. Morgan, MUFG, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered, and endorser ACTS.

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