Published: February 09, 2021
Anthony Carfang has a distinguished background in consulting, writing, speaking, thought leadership and advocacy in the areas of treasury management, payments, liquidity and banking. He talks to TMI about his career to date – and why he scorns to-do lists.
“I love this business,” declares treasury stalwart, Anthony Carfang. “There’s always something happening that has knock-on effects that most people don’t have time to think about on a day-to-day basis. But I do.”
In 2016, after 34 years at the helm, Carfang sold his Treasury Strategies consultancy. After a couple of years as MD under the new leadership, he decided to set up shop on his own again, and The Carfang Group was born. Although embarking on a new venture, his deep-rooted connections continue to give him one of the most visible presences in the treasury space.
Carfang insists what he does now “is not a full-time job”, but he is far from retirement. Having built over the years a portfolio of no less than four occupations, today he is as busy as ever. In addition to The Carfang Group, he currently runs an organisation called Alpha Phi Delta Foundation, overseeing a national scholarship fund. He is a Director of Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, and also sits on the board of post-treatment networking organisation, SurvivingBreastCancer.org. As a fifth strand, he also exercises his passion for genealogy and his Italian roots, operating since 2003 the largest genealogy website of the Abruzzo region of Italy.
His current level of activity is the result of a lifetime’s guiding philosophy. “You can’t be narrow in your thinking,” he states. “You’ve got to be part of your community. And as you become more successful in your career and you start moving in a more rarefied professional atmosphere, you begin to discover how so many organisations overlap.” Indeed, by maintaining a wide horizon, he’s discovered throughout his career that many more opportunities open up as shared connections intersect.
Starting out at First National Bank of Chicago, Carfang soon realised that while the fundamentals of finance and treasury stay the same, the arena in which they operate shifts constantly. Naturally, he’s seen some significant changes, his banking career commencing as new technologies were being launched, including the US Automated Clearing House (ACH) network. “The big difference is that back then, an international wire took around two weeks. Today, if it takes ten minutes it raises eyebrows.”
That’s progress, and having seen the first balance-reporting system, the first automated lock-box, and the first cross-border money transfers, he proclaims himself lucky. “I got to see how all of these ideas came together, so we were helping banks and corporate customers – some of the world’s largest companies – figure out how to use these services for the very first time.”
Exposure to the latest techy thinking set him up perfectly for what was to come. But softer skills were also encouraged at First National. “They used to do an outstanding job in training their people,” he recalls. “Relationship banking is a contact business, and the best training created the most polished and articulate communicators.”
Despite having access to a “phenomenal network”, everything he did had a First National bias. By cutting loose from the bank he believed that he could increase his exposure and begin to expand his network without limits. “We were just engaged with a really small slice of the corporate treasury pie. We wanted more,” he recalls.
There was an additional reason for Carfang leaving the security of the bank. At age 30 he had been promoted into a vice president role, one of the youngest at the time. “But I said to myself, ‘If I don’t leave now, I’m going to get really comfortable, and then all of sudden I’m not going to be able to afford to leave.’”
The ‘threat’ of having it all mapped out for the rest of his professional life didn’t sit well with him. He was eager to seize the day but rejected moving from banking to a treasury role. “I couldn’t have done that,” he maintains. “I need the variety and the broader platform that consultancy offers. But also I never wanted to be bound by the party line of a large organisation; that freedom has made a huge difference to me.”
By taking a calculated leap forwards he and his Treasury Strategies partner, fellow First National alumna Cathy Gregg, were quickly exposed to more banks, more companies, more vendors, newer ideas and greater complexity. “We’ve had a ringside seat on change for four decades now, and the idea of something new is what still keeps me going.”
While treasurers may be characterised as conservative in their professional approach, Carfang didn’t see this as an issue. Quite the opposite; he knew they could not refuse to look at the raft of new services coming on stream.
“With the landscape shifting rapidly, the fact that many [treasurers] were cautious meant that they had to talk to me,” he notes. “As part of their prudential responsibility to their shareholders, they had to understand what all these changes meant for their companies, so they could make informed decisions and explain to their boards why they should or should not adopt what was on offer.”
Alongside technology, regulation and geopolitics are moving at a hectic pace too. Carfang views these “three legs of the same stool” as having remained constant across the years, despite “the magnitude and relative importance” of each of component continually transforming.
“In the early days, regulation was not nearly as prescriptive as it is today,” he notes. Under current practice, not only do the regulations state prudentially what their objective is, but they say quite rigidly how it must be implemented. This, he believes, is a “big game-changer” for banks and treasurers “because it is possible to be tripped up on some seemingly insignificant detail”, as indeed many have been, with huge fines to prove it.
Carfang likens geopolitics to a double-edged sword. When the politics are favourable it provides harmonisation, which can accelerate the technology trends. But when it breaks down it can create significant barriers to progress.
With clients operating all over the world, keeping abreast of change requires vigilance. Writing articles, conducting seminars and maintaining a presence in the industry “keeps you sharp”, he says. But having time out is a vital part of being an effective performer; this is something he admits he has only recently learnt.
“Now that I’m not consulting 24/7 I have a lot more time to think about things. I’ve developed a macro-framework to view the industry, so that while I see something new every day, I can now compartmentalise these thoughts and have time to reflect on them later.”
It’s a way of working that Carfang advocates for all, although he accepts that time pressure does not always permit it. Something that all professionals can do, though, is work on becoming good communicators. “Many people think communication is about expressing an idea forcefully. That’s not it at all. It’s about understanding your audience and speaking to them in ways that make sense to them. That means learning to listen.”
Of course, for treasurers, being listened to is a critical matter, especially in the current environment where cash flow and liquidity are of existential importance. Although it is commonplace in the treasury sphere to talk of having a seat at the table, Carfang makes an important distinction as to what this really means.
“I wrote my first article on treasurers becoming strategically significant in 1985 and have been talking about it ever since. Treasurers are strategic from the standpoint of contributing to shareholder value through financial engineering and risk management and all that that involves. But they are not strategic from the standpoint of running the company’s core business,” he explains.
Although the profession does not have C-level authority, treasury is clearly vital to a company’s survival. If this was ever in doubt, Carfang suggests considering that the only time when the light is likely to be shone on treasury is when something goes wrong. “The job of the treasurer is therefore to make sure the light does not shine on them.”
Carfang’s position as a long-haul industry consultant continues to hold sway with those who seek his advice. He concedes that consultants have a reputation for being somewhat brash, “borrowing your clock and telling you what time it is”, but the Carfang way has always been to understand “why things are the way they are in any situation”.
His clear-eyed view is that anyone calling in a consultant didn’t purposefully build a bad system; something happened that made it that way. “Only when you understand why things are as they are can you begin to systematically take the client to a better place with actionable advice.”
It is perhaps not surprising that Carfang is a fan of Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods, a book that explains what it means to take risks. Describing it as “the most interesting perspective on the development of standards of living in human society”, he admits to being fascinated by its central tenet. “At every level at which humans have worked out how to manage a risk – sending a ship full of goods across an ocean to create new markets, or hedging crops to improve dietary conditions – it opens up a whole new level of activity,” he reveals.
Carfang is an adherent to Bernstein’s view that leaps in the course of civilisation immediately followed leaps in risk management, which immediately followed leaps in mathematics. Indeed, as a fully paid up numericist, it is his gift to see patterns and relationships where others see nothing.
As a former coach to a high school chess team that made the state and national championships every year, he developed a training technique leveraging this gift, teaching students to play matches “entirely in their heads”. It is, he explains, not something that can be done by memorising where every piece is on the board. “Instead, you have to memorise every opponent piece that is out of position.”
As might be expected, it’s a methodology he has used in a treasury context to understand why a process is out of position, and how it can be remedied. “Some people found us very intuitive at Treasury Strategies, but I think it was more about having structured frameworks, and being able to visualise the pieces that don’t fit.”
With so much going on in treasury, frameworks can bring order. But the nature of the business also demands an open mind. It’s an apparent contradiction that sees Carfang scorning to-do lists. “All you’ll have at the end of the day is a list reminding you of what you failed to get done,” he warns. “Instead, every night before you go to bed, make an ‘I did’ list. It’s a great way to feel good about yourself.” It’s also a great way to mark the changes in a long career in treasury.
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