Euro & Me

I remembered having to prepare my third speec(got to search my pc for my second speech) and i came out with this...........



ITL, BEF, FRF, DEM, ATS…… geez…. I can’t even remember all my nicknames. How can I even remember all this tongue twisting currencies……

Good evening fellow toastmasters and guests.

At the strike of the clock, at 12.00 midnight, in the evening of 31st December 1998, while I was happily hibernating away in my nice warm bed, dreaming about the ‘dim sum’ breakfast I was going to have the next morning, there was this group of people, over the other side of the EARTH, who are busy preparing for the birth of a new phenomenon …. The birth of EURO……

Somewhere in my mind, in a galaxy far, far away, at a time when I was more concerned with whether I should or not answer the call of the Toastmaster, I was sent to attend a course on EURO in July 1998. I had no inkling what it was all about except that it was supposed to make my live easier. You see, I am with the Treasury Department of a bank. And what my main job function is, it is to ensure that all the many different foreign currencies in the bank are well funded. That means all money going out should be matched with all money coming in.

We are talking about not just five, or ten…. but more than thirty currencies I am looking after…. More than all the fingers and my toes put together. Many times I had to scramble to call other banks to cover accounts which has insufficient fund. So in future, if any of you experience your foreign currencies demand draft has bounced or your counterparties overseas failed to receive their money, then you know its dealers like me who were sleeping on our job.

Anyway, back to EURO. With EURO, that means instead of having to deal with eleven currencies in the EMU, I am going to deal with only one. WOW…… close to 100% reduction in workload…. What a dream. So there I was happily waiting for the year end to come. Then, as days and months progressed, I began to hear not very encouraging news from my friends from other banks about their woes and miseries with EURO.

I got worried. No one, not even my boss was concerned about what we had to prepare for EURO. It’s like Armageddon is coming, it’s just beyond the horizon and we were having picnic right at the edge of the earth. A few of my colleagues and I got together and starting to make enquiries from other departments about EURO. We were assured, quite confidently by our processing department, they handle the payment instructions and all other relevant accounting entries relating to treasury, that they have everything in place.
Phew, with this piece of mind, we continued with our picnic. We were thinking … this is LIFE!!!!

Then, a week before the start of the new year, before EURO was officially traded, all hell break loose …. Like they say, when you are down in luck, it doesn’t rain, it pours …. My boss called an urgent meeting to discuss the practical implication of EURO. It was then, we realised that nothing was done at all to ensure the payment and accounting system were in place for EURO. And we had to get it done in one week what others, even the foreign banks, took months to get it running smoothly…..

Needless to say, me, who was doing the funding and my colleague who was also doing the covering, spent the first two weeks of 1999, walking around with bags under our eyes. My colleagues in the accounts and processing department suffered a more terrible fate. It gave them countless headache attacks but at least they had an avenue to voice their grievances. They called us and nagged at us for not thinking about this earlier.

Well, that episode was soon over. It has taught me a very important lesson. That in this world, there is no free lunch. I was planning to have it easy with my workload reduction. I realised my effort and contribution is needed to make that happened. It’s the same with many things in life. You have a dream and you want it realised. Then, you know you got to put in dedication and determination to achieve it. I never expect EURO to have such an impact in my life.