While the 2008 financial crash turned out to be a reliable source of career lessons for many of our finance leader guests, Joel Campbell may be the first CFO to share with us a customer support lesson learned from the crisis.
Back in 2006, Campbell, a seasoned treasury executive, had been recruited to help to build a robust treasury function for Ameriprise Financial, the recently spun-off financial planning division of American Express.
“Those first 2 years were really about finishing this spin-off process, but the day that’s burned infamously into my mind is September 16, 2008,” remembers Campbell, who reports that this was the day when a money market fund widely used by Ameriprise customers “broke the buck.”
Read More“It became the first money market fund in investing history to let its net asset value drop below a dollar—and this had just never happened before,” continues Campbell, who adds that the fund served more than 300,000 Ameriprise customers who had routinely deposited their excess cash into it with the intent of using the proceeds to pay a variety of expenses, from mortgages to college tuitions.
Not more than 10 days after the fund “broke the buck,” Ameriprise’s management team committed $400 million from its own balance sheet to support those customers impacted by the fund’s sudden collapse.
Besides underlining the prioritization of customer care, Campbell notes, the experience also shaped his perspectives on treasury and finance.
“It helped me to think about how to look forward,’ remarks Campbell, who continues to laud Ameriprise’s response, “and I’m saying ‘look forward’ with regard not just to what’s happening in a business but also to trying to understand where the market is headed. It’s all about reading the signs so that you can step back and make sure that you’re making the right decisions from a risk or liquidity standpoint to be able to both run your business and support your customers in the right way.”
Says Campbell: “It’s the response that sticks with me. It was how the executive team quickly pivoted and said, ‘We need to take care of the customer, period. Full stop.’” –Jack Sweeney
“First, build your own personal balance sheet by deliberately developing and building a wide range of skills over time and applying them to a new industry/company to create a personal toolbox. Second, work hard: Nothing replaces hard work and doing whatever is asked of you. Never be afraid to fail or get a little dirty to get the experience that you need to open new doors to future success.” –Joel Campbell, CFO, TreviPay
CFOTL: Tell us about TreviPay … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Campbell: TreviPay has a really interesting story, and I’ll try to unpack some of it. Our core belief is that loyalty begins at payment. We are a business-to-business payments disruptor in the fintech world. Through automation and technology, we match large sellers—or what we call “network sponsors”—with all of the buyers that they bring to the table in order to give them more choice and convenience around how payments are made. Among other things, this can open new markets for them and their business. We help them to really automate their accounts receivable. We’re less focused on trade credit and offering working capital, even though we do these, and more about bringing technology to solve really complicated problems for B2B sellers and buyers and helping them to navigate the incredible amount of disruption that’s happening in this space today.
Read MoreBeing owned by private equity and in an environment where the B2B payment space is clearly being disrupted, one of our biggest priorities is to continually understand this new frontier in terms of what’s happening and changing in the market, with the broad digitization of payments. We need to make sure that we stay in the right position in the market relative to our competitors and that we focus on growing the company and growing the company quickly. As we do this, we need to be operating efficiently and dropping as much of this growth into our earnings as we possibly can. We also want to just strategically be making sure not only that we can articulate our strategy internally but also that we can demonstrate to our ownership team that the strategies that we have put into place are creating the benefits that we expected them to have. For me, these are the really dominant priorities.
Although when you’re owned by private equity, you’re also always looking over the horizon to identify what the exit looks like and what the best timing for it would be, I really try not to focus on the exit. I’m trying to focus on the journey to get to the exit. For us—and particularly the finance team—this means building automation, setting ourselves up for whatever’s coming down the road, and making sure that we have the right systems, the right people, and the right functionalities and processes in place for the future. We all need to be able to stand up and say, “We can take on whatever’s coming—whatever the future looks like and whenever we get there, we’ll have the right finance team to be able to support it.”
jb
TreviPay | www.trevipay.com | Overland Park, KS