AFP Honors Profile: Mike Jacobs

Mike Jacobs, Senior Vice President and Treasurer, First Data Corporation

First Data Corporation is the largest processor of merchant credit and debit transactions in the world, including Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express transactions. Jacobs' role as the treasurer includes all global capital markets transactions, global cash management, managing rating agency and bank relationships and corporate financial analysis for the company.

He earned his CCM in 1995. He had been in corporate finance, but was being introduced to global cash management. "I thought I needed the education on those types of items to really help my treasury skills. I think it definitely helped me in global cash management and what you can do to improve the company. It improves your cash management efficiency," he said.

Jacobs is most proud of his work last year when First Data successfully spun off its major subsidiary Western Union into a separate Fortune 500 company. "That would be my most successful contribution," he said. He basically had to help the company split the treasury department apart. He also arranged a lot of the financing and dealt with technical tax issues. "I think that was the most difficult and challenging part of my career at that time."

The most unusual part of his job is the fact that at First Data, moving money is their business. "We move money from banks to Visa, MasterCard Associations over to our merchant clients. Banking is pervasive throughout the whole company. The relationships of between what's actually treasury and what's actually settlement operations is kind of a blur. It makes the job a lot more challenging. It also makes the jobs a lot more interesting." He noted that his company moves more money than a lot of small regional banks.

The greatest challenge ahead for financial professionals is that finance has had basically much more of a partner with business. Treasury will go out and help sell the business. "Especially with my business where we sell to banks," he said, "we'll be out there with M&A evaluating strategic fits for companies, showing customers and clients our strong competitive financial position so that they will have faith in that this will be a partnership for years to come. The challenge is to become more of a partner, more of a business person than just an accounting person, or just a treasury person."