My Life in Treasury: Diane S. Reyes

The Long Goodbye

On the cusp of retirement, Diane S. Reyes, Group General Manager and Head of Global Liquidity and Cash Management, HSBC, reflects fondly on her journey to the top. One of the most powerful women in banking, Reyes also shares her insights into forging a path in a man’s world, her hopes for the future of the industry, and her post-retirement plans (spoiler alert: she isn’t picking up the gardening gloves any time soon).

Perfectly composed as ever, Diane Reyes is the picture of elegance on our farewell Zoom call. Yet her calm exterior belies mixed emotions around her retirement. We’re catching up at the hinge moment between her leaving the HSBC office for the last time and the start of a new personal and professional journey.

“Yesterday, I spent the day with my assistant, clearing out the remaining personal items from my desk – and shredding some long-forgotten memos that I found in a drawer,” she explains. “It brought back so many memories, packing everything into a box. And as I left the building, knowing that I wouldn’t be coming back, I texted my husband and explained the tinge of sadness.”

For those of you who don’t know Reyes, her husband and four children feature regularly in conversations about work. And conversely, members of her team are often spoken about as if they were family. Reyes combines her role of business leader, coach, mentor, and mother, wife and friend into a single package.

This ability to wear multiple hats simultaneously has undoubtedly contributed to her meteoric rise within the world of transaction banking. But hard work and time on the front line have been equally critical – and this is something she learnt from her parents. “My mother and father met in the military. Family life became front and centre for my mother when she was blessed with seven children, and she was always working to keep us healthy and happy. My father, meanwhile, toiled to support our large family financially, and his dedication to his job and his children has always inspired me.”

As a result, Reyes was keen to get through college in her native state of New Jersey and make her way in the business world. She was lucky enough to land a summer job, which turned into a permanent role, working for a technology company that processed data on behalf of other organisations, and provided specialist software to numerous banks. As her professional success grew, Reyes’ personal life was also moving forward, with marriage on the horizon.

To make the most of this new chapter in her life, Reyes wanted to move to Pennsylvania with her husband. Ever conscious of her career path, however, she was keen to carve out a role for herself before upping sticks. At the suggestion of colleagues from the tech company, who saw that she possessed keen knowledge about the niche software, she started calling up the banks who were using it and learning more about the banking system as a whole.

This thirst for knowledge, which was strongly encouraged by her husband, spurred Reyes to enroll for an MBA at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She and her husband subsequently moved to Pennsylvania where she completed her graduate studies. During that time, she gained significant knowledge about Mellon Bank, and a natural opportunity opened up there, in the area of transaction banking.

“Looking back, I consider myself very lucky to have landed in transaction banking straight out of grad school. Being at Mellon was a huge learning experience. There, I learnt the value of great customer service and quality solutions. In banking, substance truly matters. Style only carries you a little way.”

A force for good

Reyes also quickly understood that transaction banking was her calling. “It’s an area of banking that ticks so many boxes, and – for a change – you’re working with the regulators rather than against them,” she quips. “Being a transaction banker is about enabling customers to make the best use of their own cash; that’s extremely powerful as a mandate. Helping corporates to gain visibility over their cash in far-flung locations was also extremely rewarding.”

In fact, Reyes goes so far as to call transaction banking a “force for good”. This phrase embodies the gusto with which she has approached her career, which has led her from institutions such as Citi (see bio box for more details) to her “second home” at HSBC. Here, she has flourished, led ground-breaking projects, won numerous industry Awards, broadened her philanthropic activities, and challenged the perception of banking as a man’s world.

Ever keen to share the glory, Reyes credits several people, and a number of “happy opportunities”, for helping her on this journey. One of the key characters in her story, she says, is Dominic Barton, the former 9 year Global Managing Director of McKinsey. The Ugandan-born Canadian business executive, author, management consultant, and diplomat, became a sponsor to Reyes when she was participating in a Catalyst programme designed to help women become board members.

Working at one of the partner institutions sponsoring the programme, Barton received Diane’s ‘board bio’, which is essentially a punchy CV, and immediately spotted a skill that she was downplaying: crisis management. “You can’t buy experience. Living through a crisis and coming out the other side stronger and ready for the future, are skills that add value to business leaders. Dominic told me to move that to the top of my board bio and stressed that I should not try to distance myself from crises, whether they were global economic issues or business hurdles. Instead, he taught me to leverage those unique experiences and to promote them as positive learning experiences.”

Diane S. Reyes with her husband Ramon V. Reyes

This advice certainly came home to roost during the Covid-19 crisis. “When the pandemic struck, we were conscious of the enormous detrimental effect on lives and livelihoods. We mobilised very early on to assist a healthcare client in Malaysia to set up contactless payments at a drive-thru Covid test site, helping to keep both hospital workers and the public safe. As I look back on that, and similar projects, I’m incredibly proud that we faced the crisis caused by the pandemic head on, and came up with real-world, meaningful solutions, in a very short timeframe.”

The pandemic also presented an opportunity to help businesses to work in more efficient ways, through digitisation, for example. “Our teams have worked tirelessly to help our corporate customers to operate safely and efficiently from home. And at the same time, they’ve helped clients to leverage the catalyst of the pandemic to propel their treasury departments forward in terms of technology and process, ranging from introducing soft security tokens and digital signatures to embracing virtual accounts. Many positives have come out of a very negative event – and those wins should be celebrated.”

Here, Reyes diverts for a moment to recount an anecdote about her first days working from home during the pandemic. Initially, she was sharing a workspace with her husband, whom she lovingly describes as a “technology adept venture capitalist”. Being immersed in the work of investing, her husband has multiple screens set up with market activity constantly streaming. “When we had our first video calls during the pandemic, my team thought I had a special exemption to still go into the office as they thought I was sitting on the trading floor because of all the screens. My husband thought that was amusing!”

Although Reyes certainly did not have a special exemption, it could be argued at times that she has superpowers. Take the story of her proudest ‘win’ while at Citi – a 10-year contract with a department of the US Government – for example. “These contracts do not come easily. There was an 18-month period that was essentially a protracted request for information. And then another 18 months of negotiations. During those long months, many in the bank were questioning the amount of work we were putting in to try to win this contract, and whether the pay-off would be worth it.”

But Reyes was intent on staying the course and delivering the pitch to end all pitches. True to form, her tenacity paid off. Reyes and her team were awarded one of the largest, and longest, contracts ever signed by the US Government. “It was, and still is, the biggest deal I’ve ever seen in the transaction banking space – and I’ve had a fairly long career in this area!”

Ringing the changes

Looking back on those years, and the differences from when she entered the transaction banking space to now, Reyes inevitably highlights technology as one of the most significant changes. “It’s not just that paper processes have become digital, there have been huge leaps forward in areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence,” she says. Ten or so years ago, for example, the cutting edge of robotics in banking was having a physical robot help customers in the branch. “Today, we have deployed robotic process automation [RPA] behind the scenes to free up staff from time-intensive tasks, enabling them to add much more value to customers.” Corporate treasury teams are also using RPA every day – and many have learnt how to create their own RPA solutions. This, believes Reyes, is a “huge step forward”.

Another technology that has swept the transaction banking world by storm is APIs. In fact, Reyes is the proud owner of a certificate demonstrating her ability to develop an API. “I’m no coder,” she cautions, “but I felt it was important to truly understand how APIs work, so I participated in a course on the topic, along with many of my HSBC colleagues.” This is typical of how Reyes works – she likes to understand not only ‘why’ but also ‘how’.

APIs, she goes on to explain, are not only a new connectivity channel for corporates, but a significant efficiency tool, as well as a means of democratising data. “APIs are putting treasurers back in charge of their own data, without the need for a significant implementation project. Once an API is plugged in, the corporate can request data from the bank whenever they like – whether that be every 15 seconds, every 15 minutes, or every 15 days.” The ability to test an API set-up in a sandbox environment with HSBC before going live is another plus, and one that Reyes is rightly proud of. And, in the future, she hopes to see further innovations around API Passports, and ultimately collaboration on multi-bank APIs.

Leveraging on the momentum of APIs, BaaS is another tech acronym (among the sea of abbreviations that is inherent in any conversation about industry developments) which truly lights up Reyes’ face. Indeed, HSBC has recently announced a partnership with Netsuite to deliver Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) capabilities. As part of the deal, the bank will embed international payments and expense management into NetSuite’s SuiteBanking platform, thereby enabling corporate customers to automate accounts payable, accounts receivable and reconciliation processes.

As well as making banking “native in solutions like Netsuite” BaaS can support the concept of embedded finance on customers’ e-commerce platforms. “This could be anything from buy now pay later functionality, to a loan for a large purchase,” says Reyes. The point is that financial services from HSBC are seamlessly embedded in the customer’s platform, so that the end-customer making the purchase does not have to swap channels in order to access finance offerings. “It’s seamless.” Other BaaS propositions are also in the HSBC pipeline, including HSBC Global Wallet, a multi-currency digital wallet for making and receiving international payments “in the same way that a local would”, which is currently available to users in some markets through the HSBCnet platform.

While BaaS has been some time in the making at HSBC, Reyes is clearly delighted to see it delivered on her watch (and to hear whispers in the market that HSBC is circa six months ahead of its competitors in this space). “It’s a true turning point for the industry. And I’m delighted that as a large institution, we’ve been able to pivot to the cutting-edge and become part of this new transaction banking ecosystem where banks, fintechs and corporates are working more closely together than ever before.”

Naturally, there are significant revenue opportunities for all involved as well, and this will be a major driver of a BaaS uptake. Nevertheless, it is the breaking down of old banking stereotypes and silos by BaaS that Reyes highlights as “one to watch”.  And of course, Reyes is no stranger to moving the needle.

Putting diversity front and centre

One area where Reyes has been extremely vocal about smashing through barriers is gender equality. Here, she has an interesting track record as a role model and leader of change, having chaired various councils on women’s career development and featured regularly in the list of the Most Powerful Women in Banking.

Within HSBC, she has also driven a 400% increase in the number of women taking part in training programmes to enable them to become Managing Directors. “I was often asked why we had so few female MDs and there was a fallacy that they weren’t sufficiently talented. The truth was, they just weren’t getting the right opportunities. So we rolled out some executive coaching programmes, and made those available for longer periods of time to our female staff. Now, we are starting to reap the benefits of meaningful gender equality at MD level.”

Alongside training, Reyes is also liberal with advice, sharing tips she has learnt along her journey as a senior female exec. Women (and indeed men) can be prone to overanalysing situations and dwelling on the negatives for too long, she says. “This is where my 48-hour rule comes into play. If something happens that knocks me back, I allow myself two days to think about it and reflect. But once the 48-hour period is over, I put it behind me and move on. You can’t change the past, but you can learn from it.”

Another of Reyes’ maxims is to try everything three times. Whether it be food you don’t particularly like, or a pitch that keeps being rejected. “If you persist in knocking on the door, it might open,” she says with a smile. Nevertheless, Reyes admits that she herself was once guilty of giving up at two pushbacks on an idea.  “My boss teased me that I had not been true to my own advice – so I took onboard his feedback from the previous two rejections, tweaked the idea and presented it a third time. It was accepted.”

Her final piece of hard-earned advice for women and men alike is to spend time abroad before family obligations such as childcare or parental care kick in. “Yes, it’s still possible to move countries later in life, and HSBC has a great mobility support package for our teams. But if you have the opportunity to live abroad when you have no responsibilities as such, it can be a great window for learning about other cultures and also about yourself.” Reyes should know, given that she spent 19 years living in the Philippines and speaks the local language, Tagalog.

One of Reyes’ daughters is also about to follow this advice, with a move to Senegal on the cards. This daughter is a lover of languages who has already spent time in Madrid and Guatemala, as well as Tanzania. And Reyes can see very clearly that her daughter’s time abroad has influenced who she is: “When she came back to the US for a while, she remarked on the pace of life being so fast and overly competitive - without allowing time for any other priorities. So after her daughter’s year in Senegal, she plans to move to Europe with her soon-to-be husband, because the culture there suits her personal values so much better.”

The path ahead

With more time on her hands in retirement, Reyes will no doubt have her sights set on some trips to Europe in the near future too. But she by no means plans to become a cliché of a retired person. “My short-term focus is to have a break – three of my four children live on the West Coast, so my husband and I will spend some relaxing days there. From January 2022 onwards, however, I will be working on the Board of a fintech in the trade space. And I hope to secure one or two more Board appointments as well – I’ve been approached about several opportunities but am yet to finally decide which to pursue. I’m definitely not looking to step into another banking role just yet, though. My career has been amazing, however, I’m ready for a new chapter now.”

Reflecting on this parting message, I can’t help but feel it is bittersweet. Of course, I’m delighted to see this next stage of Reyes’ career unfold. But at the same time, I’m conscious that the world of transaction banking has just said goodbye to a powerful role model and changemaker. With any luck, it is more a case of ‘au revoir’ than ‘adieu’.