The last day of the Pepperdine program had us walk to nearby State Street and then back to the RealEx Payments offices - both of which are close to one another.
State Street
View from atop of State Street's building (looking east).
River Liffey emptying into the Irish Sea
Looking west atop of State Street's building
State Street is one of the big three (others being Bank of New York Mellon and Northern Trust) financial services companies which specialize in being a custodian of assets. In fact, the company is a custodian to 12% of the world's assets.
We were hosted in one of the company's very large and impressive conference rooms. The table must've been fifty feet long by 25 feet wide! We were also treated with numerous speakers and had an expat employee panel discussion. State Street, like all the other companies we visited, trumpeted very similar reasons as to why it is in Ireland: the 12.5% corporate tax rate, Ireland has a large financial services cluster, it is easy to do business in Ireland and Ireland's membership in the European Union gives State Street access to the markets of the other 27 EU countries.
Returning to RealEx Payments
In the afternoon we returned to RealEx Payments to close out the program. RealEx was recently acquired by Atlanta based Global Payments and the class was treated to Colm Lyon telling the RealEx story and Hank Boughner (President of Global Payments) describing how they are going to keep telling RealEx's story. Overall, it was amazing to see how a small indigenous Irish start-up, that had literally nothing to begin with, in 15 years grow (through the leadership of Colm and Gary) to be acquired for 115 million Euros.
Closing Dinner at Brookwood Dublin
The Pepperdine Global Programs office hosted our closing dinner at the Brookwood Dublin. Here we all congregated for the last time (along with new arrivals Dean Williams and Dean Smith). It was amazing how quickly the week went and how we managed to pack so much into it! Lastly, it was amazing seeing what was a group of strangers become a group of friends in all of about 5 days!
Photo by Desiree Williams
Photo by Desiree Williams
No comments:
Post a Comment