Rory Jones

What attracted you to Barclays?
What attracted me to Barclays when I first started applying was mainly the size of Barclays. The size in that it was going to be such a diverse company because of its size. With that diversity brings challenges that you wouldn’t get in another organisation. The opportunity to work with different sorts of people and the challenge really made me apply.

Why did you choose to join the Treasury?
I applied for Treasury because after university I was looking for an intellectual challenge. I was looking to keep learning and of all of the schemes at Barclays I thought that Treasury would be the best place for that. I thought it was going to give me that intellectual challenge and since then, in the past year, it has definitely proven to be that. It’s always challenging me intellectually, there are always new things that I’m learning about the financial markets.

What does the Treasury do?
Treasury is coined as the banks bank. What that means is that we raise money for Barclays in various ways. Before we raise that money we decide what money needs to go where so there will be a plan of where that money goes. Then Barclays Treasury will go out into the markets and try and find that money for that plan. That is essentially what one part of Treasury does. Another part of Treasury is involved with the balance sheet, looking after the risk management of interest rates. So where interest rates might go and then Treasury might do something to counter that, whether that’s dealing with subsidiaries in different countries or whether it’s dealing with other parts of the bank.

What have you been doing since you joined?
Since I joined Treasury I have been on a 12 month rotation. Three months in a home team and then two more rotations, three months on each. My first team was involved with interest rate risk management. Essentially what I had to do was deal with different countries, different parts of Barclays business, and that might be Barclays Madrid. I had to deal with them and off-set the risk involved with those deals with Barclays Capital. In my second rotation I was in a team called Capital Issuance and basically they raise money for the bank. They look to go out into the market and ask for money and then they’ll pay money to the shareholders for that, basically they will pay a coupon on that, and that’s what our teams do.

What does your current role involve?
My current role is in a team called Capital Issuance and Securitisation. Capital Issuance involves finding money for Barclays Bank and they might go about that in a number of ways. They might go out into the market and ask the investors for money and they might ask investors to take on a certain responsibility with the money that they have been given. So there are different types of deals that they can do with the investors. So that’s the team I have been getting involved with at the moment. What I have been doing for them is looking at their investor relations website and looking at ways to improve how they deal with those investors and look at how much information they give to those investors.

What do you enjoy most about your job?
Treasury is quite a small part of Barclays Bank but it is an essential function and so the responsibility that you get given in those teams I think is massive. That’s what I enjoy day to day is knowing that I have that responsibility, I have a target to meet and once I have met that target, there is the reward and praise you will definitely get for achieving those goals. So I think that’s what I enjoy the most.

Can you outline any interesting projects you have been involved with?
The most interesting project that I have been involved with is a project that I’m working on now that involves updating the debt investor website for Capital Issuance and Securitisation. Basically I’ve gone out and researched different companies' websites. I’ve gone out and I’ve found out what sort of questions investors are asking with regards to debt and I’ve pulled all that together. I’ve presented to management my improvements for our website, where I think we should be going, how we compare to our peers and hopefully the outcome will be a success and I can see a real result in the work that I’ve done.

What support and training have you had since joining?
The support network and the training in Treasury, I think, is second-to-none. It’s absolutely excellent with regards to support. You have a buddy, you have a line manager and you have a mentor. Now your buddy is really your first point of contact, you can talk to him about everything. He is a previous grad and he is someone that you should be going to for any issues really and you can have a really good laugh with. Your line manager is someone who you’re going to be reporting to, but he’s someone who has worked with graduates before and he knows what he is doing and he knows how to get you going and get you involved in projects. Your mentor is there whenever you need him to basically give you advice on your career. You can sit down for an hour once a month, you can sit down every three months. He is there to give you some sort of direction to your career, where you’ve got to go and where you need to be. Barclays Treasury offers the opportunity to study for qualifications - you can get involved in the ACA which is an accounting qualification, there is the CFA, which is an Investment Management Qualification, and there’s the accounting qualification CIMA and another called Association of Corporate Treasury or ACT. Qualifications that you can do are hard, in that the work that you put in outside of work is quite a lot, but the reward and the doors that they will open are vast really. So Treasury really supports you in that you get 20 study days off a year, which is excellent, so before an exam you can take a week off, study hard and get them done and in that sense Treasury is brilliant.