Richard Hargraves’s career in finance started in 1988, when he
joined Barclays Mercantile in a middle-ticket sales role. “Though I
soon moved into the insolvency and asset remarketing sector,” he
says. “It was there that I gained a good understanding of the risks
a finance company is exposed to – and what to do when things go
wrong.”
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Later, Hargraves spent four years in the internal auditing team
of Barclays’ leasing and factoring division, with a pan-European
role. In 1998, he joined Siemens Finance, as it was then, as
commercial manager with responsibility for the company’s
documentation, which included the correct inclusion of specific
terms and conditions for finance agreements.
Commenting on his early days at Siemens, Hargraves says: “I got
very involved from the start with assisting the sales teams to
structure complex transactions and helping the risk team to get the
deals accepted safely.
It was a steep learning curve for me – especially since I did
not have the benefit of a vast array of internal legal
advisers.”
In 2001, SF acquired Schroder Leasing and became Siemens
Financial Services.The acquisition introduced Hargraves to the
world of processing small-ticket vendor business – what the company
calls ‘flow’.“With highvolume, low-value business, the challenge is
to make sure the processes are quick and as seamless as possible”,
Hargraves says.
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By GlobalDataIn 2004 he was promoted to his current role and assumed
responsibility for all the company’s credit risk.
“The key challenge,” he stresses,“is really maintaining the
speed and consistency of service.And obtaining as much quality
information as possible and making sense out of it.At the end of
the day,we have to assess the rationale of the credit information
we possess in order to do the deal.We endeavour to adopt a
commonsense approach to granting credit.”
Hargraves works with seven underwriters in his flow team, and a
similar number in the structured finance team.Vendors are
encouraged to introduce business via the company’s ease-elease
online system.Currently some 50 per cent of deals are introduced
using ease-elease and, of these, around 40 per cent are auto
accepted “within seconds”.
Hargraves’s modern style of risk management belies the old-style
credit analyst in finance companies who were often derided as
“credit prevention officers. I believe that a lot of regular
conversation and mutual understanding between credit and sales
teams is very important,” he says.
