From the Trading Desk to Treasury: Alex Doane on Leading with Curiosity

Rida Khan
Hi everyone and welcome back to Treasury Trailblazers, a mini series from the Fintech Corner podcast. I’m your host Rida Khan and today’s episode is one I’m really excited about because we’re diving deep into the world of banking and cash management with Alex Doane, who has an awesome story to tell. He’s a former capital markets pro who started his career in a fast paced trading desk and he now leads cash management and bank relationship strategies for Lincoln Financial, a major insurance company. Welcome Alex, I’m so glad to have you.

Alex Doane
Hi, Rida, thanks for having me.

Rida Khan
Glad to have you here. Alex’s journey is such a great example of how intellectual curiosity, storytelling, and relationship building can be foundational to having a really impactful career. So if you’re someone who’s thinking about your next step in treasury finance, you’re trying to better partner with the banks, or you just want to learn how to lead and communicate your impact more clearly inside of your own organization, this conversation will be packed with insights you can definitely use. So keep listening in.

So let’s start with how did you know you wanted to work in finance, Alex? Is this something that you always dreamed of as a kid or did you stumble into it?

Alex Doane
Yeah, I’m one of those folks that knew very, very early on exactly what I wanted to do in my life and found a way to actually make it happen. I think I got started when as a very young kid, I remember driving to my grandparents’ house. It was really early in the morning. I can picture back the road that we were on, the car that we were driving. And I asked my dad, don’t know why I thought about it. I don’t know what triggered it, but I asked him why the price of a stock moved up and down.

Like why would somebody pay more for something five minutes from now than they did, than somebody else was five minutes before? My dad’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. And I remember his answer was, don’t know. And as a young kid, that was the first time I’d ever heard that. And I knew if he didn’t know that answer, that that was an answer that I wanted to go find out. My mom will also tell the story of when I would get off the bus from kindergarten, it was still the market was open.

I would run inside, run past her, run past the snacks and everything that she had set out. And I’d go turn on CNBC to look at the price of oil. I don’t know why oil of all the commodities out there, of all the things to look at, but she always tells that story of, know, it just was interested in watching the numbers go by. I don’t even know if I knew what they meant at the time, but just seeing that ticker go by and, West Texas intermediate crude oil, whatever the price was, it really sparked something in me.

And then, you know, a little bit later on, was in, it was in fourth grade, my school district and school. We had this event where all the fourth graders went to, at the time we thought it was a fake city. I’m pretty sure it was just a giant warehouse with a bunch of facades put up, but it was a make-believe city and every fourth grader had a, a role. So some people were, you know, the shop owner, some people ran the movie theater, whatever it was. Mine was I got to be the bank president.

Rida Khan
Awesome.

Alex Doane
I don’t know to what extent my parents had a role in influencing that outcome, or if that was just random. But I got to sit there and help my classmates when they would come in. Everybody had to get a loan. Everybody had to pay back the loan kind of thing. And I got to sit there and talk through their business and what they were trying to do and make them their loan. And so that really solidified for me that finance, working in the banking industry was something I wanted to do.

And then to the actual execution of that, when I was in college, I went to Ohio State and had a great internship program with PNC, PNC Bank. And so I landed an internship with them between my sophomore and junior year. I was working in relationship management with a great guy up in Cleveland. Really enjoyed that, but wanted to get more analytical. And so then after that, did another internship on the derivatives trading desk selling interest rate derivatives in Philadelphia here and decided that they wanted me and I wanted to come back full time. So ended up joining them after graduation and stayed there for seven years.

Rida Khan
That is awesome. So while we were watching Sesame Street learning how to count, you were busy looking at oil prices on TV. That is a, that’s the dream. And not a of finance and treasury professionals can say that like, Hey, this is what I wanted to do very early. So I think that’s, that’s an awesome story. So all the way from watching oil prices to PNC, you’re pretty established in your banking career at this point. You you mentioned doing a series of internships, moving up the ladder. What made you decide to pivot out of that role at PNC?

Alex Doane
Yeah, it was a very tough decision. I loved my time at PNC. I loved the folks that I got to work with. I always tell people it was probably the best way that I could have started my career. It was such a high demanding role. And I sat down after a while and started looking at where I wanted to be in 10, 15 years.

I actually went out on Indeed or whatever the job site was and looked at you know, what roles did I want to have in 15 years and what were the experiences they were looking at? You know, needless to say, when I got on there, 15 years of derivative sales experience wasn’t going to carry me as far as I thought at the time. So it was very much a business decision to look at it and say, you know, my, my career is a series of steps. not necessarily perfect, a perfect straight line from where I was out to where I wanted to go.

But continuing to be there, continuing to look at that role, it wasn’t gonna be another step forward. Yes, I very much wanted to broaden my experience. I knew when I was looking at roles that I wanted to have that I needed to get more experience kind of across the world of treasury. At a certain point, I was gonna need to have management experience as well. My experience in derivatives was an inch wide and a mile deep. We could spend a couple hours talking about derivatives here and everyone would go to sleep.

But yeah, it was great to learn that. But at the end of the day, that was valuable for what I was doing at the time, not where I wanted to be. And Lincoln was a great landing spot for me. It was very valuable that I had that derivatives experience, but it also then gave me the opportunity to broaden out into sort of the wider capital markets world. And then now in my current role, you know, on the management side and then also the more operational pieces.

Rida Khan
Join us for the next episode all about derivatives on FinTech Corner. No, I’m just kidding. But let’s dive more into your current role because your title, AVP, Cash and Bank Relationship Management, that sounds like there could be quite a bit that falls under there.

It sounds like you’re kept pretty busy. So can you tell us a little bit more about Lincoln Financial and what you do there and what are some of the skills that you gained that you were talking about that you were looking to get out of this?

Alex Doane
Yeah, you’re very right. My current role keeps me very busy every day, most of the nights, sometimes the weekends as well. Yeah, so what specifically what I do or what my teams do. So I have one part that focuses on managing our operational relationships with all the different banks that we work with. And then also leads what we call our bank strategy work, where we focus on just maximizing the mutual benefit of those relationships, both for us and for our partners.

One is an area around liquidity operations where we’re looking at raising and investing cash. And then another is actually managing all of Lincoln’s cash. What I say our mandate is to have the right amount of money at the right place at the right time. It’s an incredibly complex cash story. Lincoln is one of the larger players in the insurance annuity retirement solution space. And you know, with all of the different components of our business, all the different legal entities involved, all the complex transactions that we’re a part of, our cash story can be incredibly complicated.

It’s probably where I spend the most amount of my time is actually understanding that story and then telling it in a way that folks that don’t, you know, work in this space every day or, you know, that just have a passing understanding of what we do can understand it.

And it’s actually where, you know, how we got connected here with, with Trovata was the ability to take all of this data that we have from all across our organization, our many, many bank accounts, and put that into, you know, at least the starting point of a story that is easier to digest than, you know, some of the reporting that we were doing before. And it’s an incredibly challenging role. It’s an incredibly exciting one as well, you know, to see where sort of the center of a lot of different things that are happening around the organization. And it’s a lot of fun to see how all the different pieces come together.

Alex Doane
I’ve enjoyed being able to connect some of the dots from when I was on the capital market side of the world and seeing how the transactions that I was doing over there, I didn’t have a full appreciation for how they were impacting the operational teams and now being on the operational side, it’s been interesting to see how maybe I could have been a better partner in the past and why some of the emails and phone calls were perhaps a little more testy than they needed to be because I wasn’t.

I just didn’t have the appreciation for that side of the world.

Rida Khan
I love it. That’s always like the best moment when you’re on the other side and you’re like, that’s why they were annoyed. That’s what I could have done better.

Alex Doane
Yes, it was very interesting to join the role. a lot of the folks that I was dealing with now were reporting to me. And I was like, yeah, I probably could have been a little nicer with some of them. I could have tried to manage those relationships a little better.

Rida Khan
I’m sure that’s a long forgotten at this point, especially because it sounds like you are a very, very engaged manager. Let’s dive into that a little bit. I mean, I want to talk about the cash story thing. We’ll definitely get there because that’s exactly what the purpose of Trovata is, is to help you tell your cash story and act on it. And I love that that’s a central message for you and how you operate because it really speaks to business context and the world of shifting technology and AI.

I think remembering that humans need to provide context is a really, really good thing to do to keep you sane and help folks figure out what the next step forward for their career is. Speaking of steps forward for your career, so we started off with you being an IC. You mentioned you have a team now. Let’s connect the dots for the audience. What was that transition to having a team like and how did you navigate that?

Alex Doane
Yeah, that was a very interesting transition. I joined Lincoln, as you said, as an IC. I like to think that I demonstrated my skills well. But going back to where I wanted to be in 15 years thought, I always knew that I needed at some point to manage a team, to lead. That was always going to be an expectation of where I wanted to go. And the sooner that I could get that experience, the better. To go from being accountable just for the work that you put on a piece of paper to being accountable for the results that 13 people can generate to be accountable for how my leaders manage their team. I had to learn a lot of new skills. I read a lot of books after I got the job just to even get a foundation for where I was going. getting the job was just the first step.

Rida Khan
Yeah.

Alex Doane
At the time I knew somebody was gonna have to take a risk on me. Whenever somebody’s looking to hire somebody, it’s an exercise in risk management. And I didn’t have management experience and usually the first thing somebody’s looking for when they’re hiring a leader is tell me about a time where you’ve managed people in the past. And I wasn’t gonna have a great answer for that. I could tell all the stories of…

Alex Doane
You know how I sort of pseudo-managed interns or something like that, but it was never going to be the same as you know was accountable for somebody else’s performance. So I knew I had to demonstrate myself as a good risk for my now boss to take. Yeah, and it’s it’s not easy to convince people that you’re a good risk all the time. You know it part of that comes down to relationships right? I knew my current boss from my prior role.

He was somebody that I worked with regularly so he knew that I could form sentences and represent his teams well. But it also was a lot of hard work where he would see that he thought that while I didn’t have that exact skill that I could potentially do the job well. The other part of it was not viewing that promotion as success, but just the start of the process to get to where I defined success.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with folks in our lives who have gotten a promotion and said, now I’ve made it, and now I can kick back. And that’s really, when I think about my definition of success, this is the first step on that journey. It’s not necessarily the end of that journey. In terms of stepping into a role where I’ve got folks that have worked here for decades, and they have forgotten more about their jobs than I will ever know.

For me especially, stepping into the role, I knew that I wasn’t gonna try to come in here and change everything. It could be easy to come in and say, hey, I think I’m smart, I know exactly what I’m doing and we should do this this way instead of that way. But oftentimes the best thing that I can do is just get out of my people’s way and to be out in front of them, clearing the path for them to do what they’re incredibly capable of doing.

You know, and it’s, it’s not always the glamorous work, you know, having a conversation with somebody so that, you know, an initiative we’re going to do two or three weeks or two or three months from now, you know, they’re on board with it. By the time we get there, it’s not necessarily, you know, worth it. I’m gonna go home and tell my wife, you know, what a great day it was at work or, know, what I added, but it adds, it, clears the path for the folks that work for me to do, you know, what, again, what they’re incredibly capable of doing. You know, and it’s, I,

Part of it is also, I had to come in with a learning mindset, right? It was, tell me about what you do, tell me about how you do it. It’s whenever there’s a new leader in town, people are always gonna have their own opinions, especially when it’s folks that I’ve worked with for a while. So having to sit there and be committed to understanding what they’re doing, how they do it, why they do it was really important for me as well.

Rida Khan
I love that answer because I think that’s something a lot of new leaders struggle with, you know, coming into a managerial position and having folks on the team, like you said, doing something for decades or have been around the company longer than you, earning that respect is just so critical. And I think what you just outlined, which is you don’t always know everything, take a second to listen, trust the experts is exactly what new leaders need to remember because it can be a bit of an ego moment, right? Like, OK, I’m leading the team now. I know what I’m doing, but sometimes the best thing you can do as a manager is be a little bit more humble and know that your purpose is to unblock and find opportunities for your team to grow and do their job.

Alex Doane
Yeah, it’s an interesting dichotomy between being humble and, know, but also having to be accountable, right? It’s, you know, it would be easy to sit back and say, you know, I, I’m just here to learn, you know, go and go and do your thing. But at the end of the day, if something goes wrong, you know, it’s still mine to, it’s still mine to defend. It’s still mine to account for. So, it’s very, those early days could be very, it requires a lot of precision on, you know, where am I going to step in? Where am I going to step back?

How am going to earn that respect without not being forward enough to manage the situation if it’s going to go wrong? That certainly didn’t get it right all the time, even much of the time. But every time that scenario came up, it was a learning opportunity.

Rida Khan
Yeah, I love that. It’s a delicate balance. I think another delicate balance in managing, kind like you mentioned, like having a cool story to tell your wife when you come home is you used to do all the work, all the action, right? And then as a manager, there’s so much more bureaucracy in that role, so much more relationship management. Do you still have those moments of like, man, I got to do the work today and that was a lot of fun? Or what is that balance like between doing the doing the people management and still kind of driving that impact personally?

Alex Doane
Yeah, so there are definitely times where I have to get involved, right? It’s because of my experience, my background, having been on the other side of our treasury world as well. I have that understanding of how things come together. And a lot of times, just the other day, diagramming on my whiteboard how we want certain things to flow around the organization and putting that together and then presenting it. Because I have that understanding, it was an opportunity to demonstrate myself.

At the same time, you know, my value to the organization is not just the ability to take what’s in my head and put it onto a PowerPoint slide. It’s also then the ability to help others understand what’s in my head and help them to start to get to the same mindset and understand things. Uh, so it is a balance of, know, some things need to happen right now. Some things need to happen in a very, very precise way.

And according to my standards, so they, you I take those on and some things are more of a learning opportunity. Some things are a chance for somebody else to bring an idea to show what they can do, how they would put together the slide, they would organize their thoughts and start to sort of shape then the succession plan for if they decide that I’m no longer needed, right? There has to be somebody that steps in behind me.

Rida Khan
Yeah, absolutely. Good leaders inspire other great leaders, right? So I think that’s a great segue. I want to transition into some advice for others that might be in cash management or treasury. You want to learn from your experiences. You mentioned telling a cash story earlier. What do you think is needed to be successful if you want to go into this career and you want to tell a good cash story?

Alex Doane
It’s an interesting question. So I think to be successful in this line of work, the biggest thing is intellectual curiosity. I don’t think there’s anything out there that signals your drive, your work ethic, your hunger to be the best that you can be, then showing that you’re not the person that’s okay with answering I don’t know to something. It’s fine to say I don’t know, but it’s you know, in my mind, it’s not fine to then not go find the answer. I think a lot of people, whether they be managers, mentors, peers, you know, people in the business world can accept that you don’t necessarily know the answer to every question, that nobody’s going to know the answer to every question that might pop up. But if you’re the sort of person that six hours later, you know, sends an email and says, hey, you know, didn’t know the answer to that question. I didn’t have a great answer for you at the time. Here’s what I found out, here’s exactly how I think it relates to the situation we were talking about, here’s the decision I think you should make off of that.

That intellectual curiosity to go and say, this piece of information passed by my desk, I didn’t know it, I’m gonna go find it, that changes the whole world for you. And you never know when something might be valuable.

It’s sort of like the Jeopardy thing, like there’s a thousand questions out there that you might have to know the answer to. But, you know, I think back to a time where I was on the trading desk and I was fortunate to have a Bloomberg terminal at the time. And one of the things I set up was a newsfeed from every newspaper, every news organization in the entire world would feed through my Bloomberg screen. And it was late one Friday, I was one of the only ones there on the desk. And I saw that one of the headlines said explosions in Ankara. And I was like, that’s interesting.

A while ago, I don’t remember when I had learned that that was the capital of Turkey and that Turkey is a NATO member. All of a sudden I pulled up the Turkish lira and saw it starting to sell off. And then I pulled up US rates and saw those starting to rally. And I was like, this might actually be a story for my clients on Monday. Like how, let me go and learn a little bit about this. And I flipped on the TVs on the trading desk and nobody was covering that story yet. So I sat there for 30 or 45 minutes watching the markets move. And then all of a sudden I started to see headlines come up.

And then actual news coverage started about it. And so just knowing that that headline, because of knowing what the capital of the country was, turned into something valuable that I could go and talk to clients about. Now, at the end of the day, it was sort of a non-event because that coup didn’t actually happen. But yeah, at the time, it could have been.

Rida Khan
Totally. Yeah, I think that that sort of curiosity is really, really hard to develop if you don’t have it innately, but it is so important, right? And whether you are, you know, someone who is serving clients or your client side, keeping up with what’s going on geopolitically, I know it’s a lot of work. It’s, you know, another job on top of your existing job, but that is what drives that like advantage over other folks that are doing what you do, because you’ve actually got, you know, valuable information to bring to the table that isn’t just shaped by your internal organization.

You can make decisions that are driven by what you see in your industry, what you see in the markets. And I think that’s when you start to see really, really great plays shape up. So one of the things that I do want to ask you though, because again, harder to develop innately, kind of something a lot of people just come to the table with, but you’re a manager, right? So I’m sure if you think that this is the most critical part of being successful in this career, you want to see that. You want to see those traits on your team.

So how do you encourage that kind of curiosity, especially when a lot of people are just like, man, I’m just trying to my job. This is a nine to five. I don’t have a lot of time for all of that.

Alex Doane
Yeah. Yeah. Encouraging that curiosity is, like you said, it’s a very important piece of what I do. There’s a couple different ways. I think first is what I was mentioning earlier, sharing knowledge. There’s a lot of times where knowledge builds knowledge. Some people will say, helps me connect dots or I sort of understand the context better.

What they’re really saying is,now that I understand this thing, I now then understand this other thing. And so, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been very blessed to have, you know, a very interesting career path to get here. And I’ve seen a lot of those dots. And so I can connect those dots for folks. So sharing just information, sharing why our treasury team might be doing something, sharing what’s going on in the world, what’s happening away from us in the industry.

All of those things help people connect the dots when they see a story. And then I asked them for a piece of information, you know, they’re better able to connect those and then they can take their own experiences and say, hey, Alex was asking for this. I understand what this is. Wow, I never knew about what I was doing previously. Now I’m curious to go and figure out what that other thing is. More tactically, if you have any of my team members on, they’ll probably tell you they’re very annoyed by this, but I ask a lot of questions rather than give a lot of answers.

Rida Khan
I love it.

Alex Doane
I also, I often answer questions from my teams, with a question. Again, I like to think that it signals that I’m open to what they think. And also that my sort of implicit expectation is that they go find the answer to that. Right. It’s it, you know, it can be very easy to just say, Hey, here’s the answer, but what have they, what have they really gained from that? If I say, you know, why do you think that should be the case?

Now that’s really exploring their thought process. That’s really thinking about why do I think that’s the case? Like, what is the context that I have that’s making me say, Alex, what do you think about this? And it’s also then trying to challenge them with new scenarios to get them outside their comfort zone.

This can be a little bit challenging sometimes. There’s a lot of times where it’s a sink or swim sort of situation. Being outside your comfort zone is, by definition, not comfortable. And it’s, it can be a struggle, but I often think that there’s a lot of value in the struggle. Um, you know, it’s, don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world to have to spend all day trying to figure something out.

You know, I learned the most when I was struggling to figure things out. Um, again, I think back to my time at PNC, right? I was a very junior analyst having to come up a very steep learning curve very quick. And, you know, there’s only so many people on a trading desk and, know, if they’re all on the phone and a client calls in and it rings to my line, I’m expected to pick that phone up and to be able to be conversant with them in whatever topic that they want to be. Now, I don’t have to be certainly an expert. I don’t have to sell them on what we’re doing, but I always have to be able to hold a conversation with them. At least I have to be able to represent the bank in a way that would reflect well on myself and the institution. So, I knew that I had to acquire that knowledge.

A client could call up and be like, what do you think’s going on? Why are rates moving today? You know, better find out in the morning why that’s happening. Cause you never know. Could be 30 seconds from now or 30 seconds from now, a client would have wanted to call and do a trade. And I had to be able to flip that switch and know exactly what they were doing. Know exactly how that had been sold and be able to execute on it. So yeah, that got me outside of my comfort zone. It was very uncomfortable for a while. I, you know, I don’t have an ulcer, but it probably got pretty close at one point, just having to know… the struggle and the stress of having to prepare for all of those different scenarios.

You know, it was very valuable in a way that, you know, I learned to never let something pass me by that I wasn’t going to figure out the answer to. There was always a scenario. There was never a question that I wouldn’t get asked. And so I always wanted to know the answer.

Rida Khan
Yeah, like you said, having that whole Jeopardy board in front of you and not knowing what the question is going to be, that’s the feeling. So I think once you kind of get through that, and even if you’ve got a moment or two where you might not know the answer right away, but you give a decent enough response or you come back and find the answer, like that really shows you that you can overcome even those difficult moments where you aren’t sure if you can trust yourself. And you know, that you shouldn’t be afraid of these new questions because you are maybe more capable than you originally thought.

I love that. I also love the answering a question with a question. I think that’s a great managerial technique. I know, one of the things that I love to do as a manager is, know, a lot of times as a manager, you kind of get into the decision making role a lot, right? Like, hey, I’m stuck between this and this. What do you think I should do? And I always love to just pause and be like, so what’s your recommendation? What, which one would you pick and why, right? Cause then that really helps get to the context of why is your direct report asking this question? There must be some nuance here for them to bring it to their manager. And also signals that trust that you were mentioning, hey, I trust you to go out, seek out the answers and be the expert in your space. So I love that as a managerial technique.

Alex Doane
Yeah. I often think about what, at what strategic level am I operating?

Right. Like my, way I communicated it to my team was, I know, I expect the day-to-day folks to be managing like today, tomorrow. I expect my managers to be managing two, three weeks out. Like what is, you know, we’re putting somebody on the team’s putting together a slide. The manager should be thinking about what is the conversation we’re to have around that slide and what do we need to communicate effectively?

I need to be thinking about what’s the slide that we’re going to make for the next presentation and how should we be influencing that slide today? How should we be changing it to drive the next conversation to be the one that we really want to have?

And, you know, it can be easy to get into the details of like, oh, we need the slide to look exactly like this. And there are certainly times where that’s appropriate, but, you know, it can be maintaining the right sort of strategic level can be very helpful in that. that’s where saying, you know, somebody comes to me with a question that’s two weeks out instead of two months out, right?

Like that’s your call. You know, what do you think? As long as you’re not gonna, as long as it’s not gonna break anything, try it, let’s see what happens.

Rida Khan
Yeah, absolutely. That’s how you learn. Yeah, I think with, you know, thinking about things, you know, like you said, a week, six months out and having the right strategic level, that’s a really great segue. You know, we’ve talked a lot about how to work with your direct reports, but maybe let’s talk a little bit about how to work with, you know, leaders that might be upwards on the organizational chart as you are. know, how do you manage and build solid relationships with your higher ups? Like, what advice do you have for that?

Alex Doane
Yeah, building relationships up the chain is both very, important and can be very, very nuanced and difficult at times. I always think about the first thing is I need to be on their radar, right? Like if somebody has no idea who I am, what I can do, what my reputation or my brand is in the organization, it’s very difficult to start from zero and say, hi, I’m Alex, right? That’s a tough way to form a relationship.

At some point you’ll have to get on their radar. You know, it’s the way to do that is, you know, are you the person that they see every morning when they come in when you see when they leave? Are you sitting there working hard? That was, you know, PNC. One of the things I did was I always wanted to be the first one on the desk and I was always one of the last ones to leave for no other reason than my boss walked in. You know, she saw that I was there and, you know,

Are you a reliable pair of hands? Right? I wasn’t going to be on somebody’s radar if every time they gave something to me, it like fell apart. You know, and are you the kind of person that can speak confidently, authoritatively? Can you command a room when you have the opportunity? You know, sometimes the way you get on somebody’s radar is, you have 30 seconds in a meeting that they happen to be a part of, you know, do you reflect well on yourself in that case? Or do you stumble over things? Or do you not know your materials?

It’s those little opportunities that somebody takes away and says, man, that guy, that lady that presented pretty well. I’m curious who that is. Maybe they look you up on the organization chart and see you work for somebody else and like, that’s an interesting one. That’s an interesting person to keep my eye on. It’s that that gives you a chance to form that relationship. Then it’s up to you to take advantage of it. Maybe you’re on the radar now and now your leader or whoever gives you the chance to present a couple of slides in a meeting with that person.

Now you’ve got a real opportunity. Can you demonstrate that ability? Do you know the detail? You know, sometimes it’s, might just get to sit in on a meeting and there’s always that meeting after the meeting for a couple of minutes. You know, are you able to speak up with a great idea that, you know, maybe changes what was just decided in that meeting? Those are all great opportunities. You know, part of it, part of taking advantage in that scenario is also, you know, can, do you know your audience well enough, right?

You’re probably the subject matter expert in whatever you’re in at that point, right? That’s why you’re there. The person that, you know, the senior person in that room cares about the details, but cares about them in their own way, right? Most of the time, they want to know that the details are handled, but want to understand at a much higher level the strategic impact of those. So if you’re going to sit there and throw a hundred acronyms at them, explain in detail and try to demonstrate your knowledge by the quantity of information that you can throw at them, that’s probably not going to be successful.

If you’re the person that can boil it down to, this is what you should really care about, there’s a lot of details behind it, but here’s the core nugget of this information. All of a sudden, now you look better to them and you have that opportunity to talk with them afterwards, go get coffee, whatever it is. And then you could say, hey, if you’d love to learn more of the details, I’d be happy to get together with you and we could go through a meeting dedicated to the details. I’m happy to explain everything.

I was an economics tutor at Ohio State when I was an undergrad. That was a really interesting experience because economics was like the analytical elective that people could take. You know, economics seems like it shouldn’t be that difficult. But you get folks who were art majors, philosophy, they have a thousand degrees that you can get at a school like Ohio State. They needed an analytical elective and would take that. And for anybody that’s taken micro or macroeconomics, it’s either your thing or it’s your not, or it’s not.

I loved economics. I could sit here and take the whole time explaining economics, but it was a great part of what I did at Ohio State. And I learned from that that I needed to be able to explain things in three or four different ways. And it’s the same skill that I use now when I’m talking up the chain, right? An art major maybe needed to have a supply and demand curve explained a particular way.

Rida Khan
Yeah.

Alex Doane
Math major wanted to understand national income accounting with the equation rather than with me talking about when they go to the grocery store and buy groceries, how that impacts GDP. know, all understanding how to change and provide the right amount of detail and, you know, explain things in a different way has helped me a great deal with explaining things up the chain of command and understanding that I need to, you know, I need to explain something different to a finance leader than to a legal leader.

Those are very different relationships, both important, but they both require a different touch. And it then also comes into the motivation of that leader. The classic example is if you have a leader that’s measured on, let’s say, earnings per share in a public company, if you’re going to go to them with an idea that’s going to tank earnings per share, you’ve got to understand how they measure their success.

You could have a great idea, but if it’s not going to get them where they want to go. It’s going to be a tough conversation. So you have to think about that motivation. How do you appeal to what they value? Or do they want a simpler organization? Do they want to be able to understand the story better? If you’re going to bring something that doesn’t align with those, that’s going to be a tough conversation. There you go. Yes.

Rida Khan
Yeah, absolutely. And as someone who was an economics major, I can vouch for the fact that it’s not as easy as it looks. Yeah, micro and macro, know, things that appear very simple, but can definitely sneak up on you. But no, what you were saying about providing a right level of detail and knowing who you’re talking to, knowing what their intrinsic motivations are, I think that all ties back to, really what you talked about at the beginning of this episode, which is telling a great cash story and knowing how to be an excellent storyteller and having the right context within that.

So could you maybe share an anecdote or a time when you feel like you told a story very well, you really exhibited effective storytelling and that actually changed a leadership decision or your perception inside the business?

Alex Doane
Yeah, being able to tell a story and craft that argument is, it is always going to be influential. I picked up that skill from being in sales. Sales is oftentimes telling a story. You have to tell an accurate story, a factual story, but, you know, sitting across the table from a client that doesn’t really want to understand what I’m selling, but just as looking for an outcome, you know, it’s a classic. I’m not selling you a drill. I’m selling you a hole.

You’ve got to understand that they just want a hole and tell them the story about how your drill makes that hole. Yeah, and so I have taken that skill and tried to apply it as sort of an internal sales role in what I do now. You have the story of Trovata and the reporting that we’re sending out now. That has absolutely influenced the decision making that we’re taking.

The timeliness of reporting that we’re able to send out now and the ability to to tell folks on our treasury team or up the finance chain that we have the story under control. Sometimes just a complex story, even if you have it under control, can seem out of control. And so to be able to say, hey, we understand this, it inspires the confidence that you really do understand it. And that allows some freedom to then operate.

It’s somebody that has their shop in order is going to have a lot more opportunity to sort of tinker with that shop and see what can happen. You know, maybe it makes an easier case to bring it, bring a new resource in or a different skillset. All of those things come from being able to tell people or inspire them to believe that you have your, story in order. And so you’re being able to, to communicate that, this is exactly what’s happened during the day. This is where it’s happened within the organization. This is how it’s happened. These are the things, you know, in acknowledging that.

There’s always going to be some things that are out there that we don’t know. Like, hey, this is where we have uncertainty, inspires all the confidence in the world that the rest of it, you do have certainty on. So all of those different things come together to be able to craft a better argument for resources, be able to craft a better argument for where we should go in the future, what my strategic vision is for my part of Lincoln. All of that stems from people believing and having the confidence that I know what I’ve currently got.

Rida Khan
Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I think, you know, when you mentioned Trovata, one of the things that we were thinking about when building out this platform is you’ve got to tell a story, but you’ve also got to tell a story and drive value kind of quickly, right?

Because if the company or your team is in the midst of this really important decision and it’s your job to go out and find all the context and do some analysis and make a recommendation, you can’t come running in with that story, you know, three weeks later and be like, guys, I know what to do now. I’ve thought about it because chances are that that situation has already passed by that point. So I think that’s why, you know, in the advent of Trovata, there was such a focus on APIs, you know, with the hope that it would really drive that real-time decision-making and that agility that a lot of treasury and finance folks need, and it’s really difficult to gain manually. So I think, you know, that’s such an important element of this as well is…
Don’t be afraid to tell the story, even knowing that you’ve got like a margin of error, like you said, knowing that you’ve got gaps and being really explicit about what those gaps or consideration factors really are, because that’s gonna make people actually trust you.

Alex Doane
Absolutely.

Rida Khan
Awesome. So speaking of trust, there’s not many external relationships that are as important as the one between Treasury and Finance and they’re bankers, you know, really need a lot of trust. They really need a solid foundation.

You are someone who’s worked within a bank and you’re now managing banking relationships. So I don’t think that there’s a better person to ask, how do you play the game well? What do you recommend to finance and Treasury professionals that are wanting to make sure that they’re getting the most value out of that banking relationship?

Alex Doane
Yeah, the premise of your question is exactly correct. Managing relationships with our banks is both one of the most important, one of the most nuanced things that we have to do. Yeah, I actually think about it. It’s very similar to managing up your leadership chain.

I have to understand what motivates each of our banks, right? Each of them, you know, and this is in concert with our treasury team, right? Each of them has their own desire for where the relationship is going to go. Some may want to go a different direction than others.

If we try to expect that they’re all things to us all the time, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment and them to be in a frustrating situation. Understanding how they view success and then being able to tell the Lincoln story in a way that makes sense, the same idea of storytelling and how we craft that argument and that narrative.

It helps them right there. At the end of the day, a banker for an organization is as much a salesperson as they are an advocate for their client within, within their bank, right? Just like I’m managing up my chain to, know, for whatever project or whatever I’m managing to, right?

They’re managing up their chain for, Hey, this is why we think we should do this thing, you know, for Lincoln and arming your advocates with information and a concise, clear story, right? Like you mentioned.

In my prior role, right, I’ve been in those meetings where we’re talking about clients and where we’re going with a relationship and the ones where it’s a very concise, clear, this is where we’re at, this is where we’re going, carries a lot of weight, just like any argument, just like any debate. The more concise, the more clear the argument you’re gonna make, the more resonance that’s going to have. My job is in a lot of ways to arm our bankers and again, with our treasury folks to tell that story effectively. To tell them where we see things going.

It’s also a short-term, long-term game. Lincoln’s not running a charity and our banks are not running a charity. Everybody has an economic incentive and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very easy to say, but it’s very difficult to do that sometimes it’s not just about the best deal today, but it’s about the best overall outcome long-term, right?

Sometimes it’s better to take the second best or to take the more expensive option if that then leads to a better partnership in the future. You know, sometimes also about being a better client, right? Like it’s, it’s not always the easiest thing to think about, but you know, a lot of times you’re your own worst enemy and you know, trying to, trying to put that blame on somebody else, right?

That can make for a difficult conversation. So, you know, we’re always trying to think about ways that we can be the best client in our own way, in our own very difficult, complex way. And then also thinking not just about where we are today, but where do we want to be in the future.

Rida Khan
I love that. And I think that is a lesson that folks can take into any sort of vendor relationship, not just banks, right? It’s actually not just on this external party to be a mind reader and guess what it is that you want. You actually need to take the time to educate your vendor, tell them about what makes you tick, what are your motivations, what are the challenges your team is facing, what are your most important strategic priorities for this year? Those are communications that I actually think a lot of folks forget in their weekly grind.

Alex Doane
Absolutely.

Rida Khan
That’s like a good dose of medicine for the folks listening. Like, hey, even before you think about criticizing this external party, have you done your end of this relationship? Have you held up your end of this trade-off and actually provided them with information they need to succeed? I love that. That’s great. And then also a lesson for managers as well with their director.

Alex Doane
Absolutely. I always talk about ownership. There’s always a piece of any challenge that you as an individual, you as a leader own, even if you don’t want to think about it, even if it seems like somebody else’s fault, right? You always own a piece of that. And thinking about that and thinking about how you can change that is going to go a long way.

Rida Khan
I love that. Alex, anything else you want to share as we close out this episode, whether it be a piece of advice or something you’re looking forward to?

Alex Doane
It’s about to be summer, so I’ve got my two little girls in the pool that our neighborhood’s gonna open up, so I’m excited to go to the pool with them.

Rida Khan
I love that. That’s such an endearing answer. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. I know you’re busy as we talked about at the beginning of this episode, but your experiences, what you’ve done in your career, those are really going to resonate with a lot of the folks listening, whether they work in banking or are in the treasury cash management realm themselves.

If anyone wants to stay connected with you or keep up with your journey, where’s the best place for them to find you?

Alex Doane
Yeah, LinkedIn is going to be the best. It’s been a little bit since I’ve updated my picture on there, so but I am out there and would love to connect with folks.

Rida Khan
I love that. Yeah, go find Alex. You can definitely recognize him based on his profile picture. There’s no, no concern there. And for everyone listening, we appreciate you tuning in. Don’t forget to follow Fintech Corner on your favorite podcast platform and keep an eye on Trovata’s LinkedIn for more conversations like this one.

Thanks Alex.

Alex Doane
Thank you.