Eddie Trahearn

I'm Eddie Trahearn, I work for GB Bank Limited and I am the Chief Financial and Strategy Officer.

I spend most of my time managing people. I've got a fairly large team. I've got five people that directly work for me, but then another 30 underneath those. So that takes up quite a lot of time, which is great because you get to interact with people. And the main aspects are accounting.

We do a lot of regulatory reporting because we have to make sure that everyone's money is safe who are saving with us. I also am responsible for our treasury function, which is where we do a lot of the cash management and risk management.

The savings team reports to me, so we're out with the bright colored posters and the rates that everybody looks for when they're trying to save some money. And I also look after marketing.

I'd love to tell you what a typical day looks like, but I don't actually have such a thing as a typical day.

I have peaks and troughs throughout the month in terms of engagement with each of the teams that work for me.

So at the start of the month, that would typically look like probably 50-60% of my day will be working on accounting queries, reconciliations, understanding how much money we've made.

Then as we move through the month, there's a lot of activity through the savings team. So how much money do we need to take in? How much money do we need to make sure we meet all of our regulations and fund all of the lending that's going out on the other side?

And then as we get towards the end of the month, there's probably a lot more time focusing on the treasury aspect, which is essentially the bank's bank. So they're monitoring cash in, cash out, and some of the more complex areas around financial risk management that banks do.

And those positions are typically all managed into the month end when our then reporting kicks in and that cycle keeps going, that I've just described, and then you can underline, underlie that with throughout the month we're working on financial planning and analysis.

So forward looking, what are we going to be doing? What's coming in, what business opportunities are there out there and that aligns to the marketing. So what brand building exercise are we doing, what events are we running, how are we engaging with the wider market.

So typically across a month I'm probably spread about 20% on each but there are peaks and troughs. So each day is slightly different and that makes it incredibly interesting as a job because I sometimes don't know what's going to hit.

There's always a plan that we have at the start of the day and typically within an hour or two that plan has sort of gone out the window and we're having to deal with whatever is happening that day.

So my direct peer group are the rest of the executive committee. So we have a Chief Executive who is my boss. We've got a Chief Risk Officer who provides oversight to what we do. They're making sure we're doing what we say we do.

And then we have an amazing Chief Operating and People Officer. She is running a huge team of operations across the business. And then we have a Chief Lending Officer whose job is to go out there and find all of the exciting lending opportunities that we can fund, which is how the bank makes its money.

On top of that, I also have a lot of engagement with our board, with our shareholders and that peaks and troughs throughout a month, but we typically have catch-up calls.

Part of running the bank is probably one of the most enjoyable is the communication and living communication and making sure that people are aware. No one likes to be taken by surprise. That's not a good way to run a bank.

So we spend a lot of time talking, you know, both up the command chain and also down into the rest of the business.

I worked in treasury, is my background, where you are right in the middle of all of the action. Everything that's going on in a bank has to come through the treasury at some point. So that I got used to variety and I'm lucky enough now that I can carry that variety on, you know.

It's exciting when you're making strategic decisions. What are you going to be aiming for over the next five years? It's exciting to be working on tactical problem solving on a day to day basis.

It's not so exciting always dealing with people and people problems that do crop up. You know, it's not always a rosy place. It's a relatively high stress environment in a bank at times, but that variety just brings a... it's almost like you almost can't get bored because there is always something going on and that is the greatest part of my job.

There's always something to do, something new to look at, something to maybe fix, something to maybe enhance. The best part is that variety.

The hardest part at times is the hours that we have to put in. It isn't a bog-standard nine to five job.

Things happen at different points, things have to be fixed sometimes really, really quickly, which can mean a long working day.

The relative stress, you know, we're looking after people's hard earned savings. So you feel that weight of pressure sometimes in terms of the decisions that we're making.

But for me, the hardest part is dealing with people and emotions. In the finance world, we typically like to work in numbers. So sometimes the softer side of the skill set is the hardest part to deal with.

So I joined a graduate scheme with a bank that's merged into Santander, doing marketing. And then I had to go out and find a business area that none of the graduates were in to do a couple of days work experience there and then come back and do a report into the rest of the graduates in my cohort.

I was a big fan of DuckTales as I was growing up, which is a cartoon with a billionaire duck who in the opening scenes dives into a vault full of gold and I chose the treasury because I thought there would be a vault full of gold and it would be great to see it.

Unfortunately when I turned up there was no big vault of gold, there was lots of numbers on screens, lots of flashing lights, lots of shouting. It was a very old-school dealing room as we would call it, you know, buy buy, sell sell going on. And I was instantly hooked, which then led me into a 15, 20 year career through treasury and various forms.

I've set up three bank treasury functions. Now this was my third one for new banks as they're starting out and through that skill set and because treasury is in the middle of everything, you become very strategic in your thinking. You become very aware of the comms and the comms that are needed throughout a business because you're constantly trying to gain and gather information.

It's a very strong awareness of accounting, who sometimes tried to hide away from it and not tell everyone that you know as much as you do. We've got exposure to savings markets, lending markets, the whole variety of things.

When my, he's still my boss, but he was previously the CFO here at GB Bank. When our founder CEO left the business almost two years ago now, he was asked to step up into the CEO role. And at that point, he also asked me to follow him up into the CFO role. And it's broadened slightly since then into the strategy world as well.

But ultimately, the career path and why I've been on it is because I wanted to go and see a vault full of gold that ended up not existing.

I helped to help found a bank and designed the treasury and build out for a bank called Charter Savings Bank. And it was only the second time in 100 years that that had been done.

So there wasn't really anyone to go out and ask questions about how to do things. There was a lot of figuring out. You had to be quite a self-starter to be able to plug systems together in terms of I need this and that to make sure that I can get the risk numbers to come out where I need them.

And that was as we were going through our bank application process, which can take... that one took two years and then your systems are really tested. You put a lot of fake transactions through to make sure the outputs are correct, make sure everything's hooked up together and that first day of getting the permission from our regulator, the Prudential Regulation Authority, to be a bank, was probably the proudest moment I've had.

It does sort of lose its impact when you're onto your third one, but at the same time, they're all proud moments because it is a tough journey to go through. It's emotionally draining. It's long hours. It's hard work.

But actually once you start to see the savers money flow in, you can see the loans going out. You can see that you're starting to make money, profits. That's a great, you know, it's a very privileged position to be in and a very proud moment.

But the actual day when you get the letter to say you are now a bank is a very proud time and one I'm lucky enough to have been around three times.

Well, I had some very good advice. So I'm privileged in that respect. The one piece of advice is, and I live by this now, I give this to my teams, but I was never really told it, was to never say no to an opportunity. If you think you can't do it, still do it.

Because the only way you're going to learn and improve and grow is by actually pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and trying to do things.

People are inherently good people. So even making mistakes, own up, accept it. And even if you're outside of your comfort zone, they're even more, there's a higher chance that they accept that you've made a mistake you didn't know, but they will teach you.

And by that way, you're not then outside your box, you're growing your box that you're in.

So never say no to an opportunity.