victoria | tasmania

New Fellow Member

Sherif Hussien

We’d like to congratulate Sherif Hussein who has been nominated by the council and approved by the board to be our newest FICM. We had the magical opportunity to surprise Sherif at the Pinnacle Awards with her certificate. Sherif has been a past president, on many sub committees and she has been an overall ambassador for the AICM and the credit industry as whole.

New Life Member

Tony

Mackwell

Congratulations Tony for being promoted to life member. Tony has contributed enormously across the last 25 years. He has been a board member, a president and has helped shape our CCE program and our young credit professional program. He is incredibly passionate about credit and still to this day assists and mentors our young credit professionals. We are forever grateful for all of his contributions.

Member in spotlight

Belinda Worton MICM

Credit

Manager

Australia & New Zealand, Penguin Random

House

Belinda has been in the credit industry for over 15 years across many different industries. We asked Belinda a few questions to get to know her better:

How did you get into credit?

I actually studied Music at Uni and have my Bachelor of Music. When I finished studying,

I wasn’t really interested in teaching or performing, so I ended off starting out in a few reception roles. I ended up in a position at Telstra, they were creating a corporate B2B credit team.

I enjoyed being a part of building the team and setting up the processes and that was really my first foray into the industry. I found Telstra was a good introduction to the industry, being a large corporation. It helped me understand the ins and outs of corporate life, managing relationships and politics and the like.

What has your career path been like?

Since Telstra I’ve moved around a lot, I’ve worked at many different insurance companies and lots of different industries, which I think is the beauty of credit. It has a presence in every industry and every large company has a credit department. I was the Credit manager at Aggreko for a couple of years and before that I was at BMW Finance in the collections team. I found it interesting dealing with consumers and repossession agents, every day there was something different.

After that I arrived at Aggreko in 2010 where I was promoted to credit manager of a small team. That was my first step into management, and it really allowed me to learn a lot about being in a leadership position.

The learning didn’t stop when I got my role at Penguin. My predecessor at Penguin had been in the position for 18 years and I had to work diligently to build my own reputation within the business. I think something I’ve learnt that it is the value in asking for advice. I called my predecessor at Penguin for advice when I took on the role, which ended up being really valuable. That really extends to what I do today within the industry, I often reach out to my network for advice. I think my network is one of my strongest assets.

What do you get out of the AICM?

The number one thing I get from the AICM is the networking opportunities. I’m always meeting amazing new people at the AICM events and training, and over the years it helped me build an extensive and valuable network. I always know there will be someone in the network at the AICM that will have the knowledge or the skills I’m looking for and will be willing to help me.

The events are also fantastic, attending the women in credit event is one of the highlights of my career. I find it really valuable; I always meet so many great new people, and it’s a great opportunity to catch up with people in my network that I haven’t seen in many years.

I’ve also found many of the training programs informative, I attended the training session just before Covid about policy writing because it was relevant to my role at Penguin. Being in a room surrounded by credit professionals from different industries and hearing how they deal with the challenges they faced, gave me a lot of valuable insight and I really learnt a lot.

The webinars during Covid were also really valuable, they gave me confidence and really helped with navigating the uncertainties during Covid.

What was your experience during Covid?

At the start with all the uncertainty about the future and the severity of the virus, I found it really quite challenging. We at Penguin ended up working from home, which was a new experience and had its own challenges, but the whole time there were so many uncertainties about how the business would operate and about the security of everyone’s jobs.

Once we adapted our internal processes to dealing with covid and working from home, then we were able to focus on supporting customers. There were a lot of complexities with validating orders with our customers, checking whether the stores were still operating, and navigating cash flow issues amongst our customers.

We offered our customers a lot of support, obviously our goal was to keep the business going while still getting paid and I think we managed that very well.

What do you do outside of work?

I play netball twice a week, I love playing. It’s very social and fun, I’ve made a lot of friends through it. I love sports, I watch a lot of community sports and love watching my nieces and nephews play basketball. I’ve also been to watch a lot of AFLW games which I’ve really enjoyed as well, I really enjoy that even though they are at a professional level, it still feels like a community game. I’m a bit of a sports fanatic! I also enjoy going out for breakfast and enjoy watching Netflix in my downtime.

What advice would give to someone trying to get into credit management?

I think it’s important to partner yourself with a strong leader and mentor. It’s important to have someone support you through your leadership journey, they can be really valuable. Surrounding yourself with people that support you and believe in you will certainly really help your development.

Membership anniversaries

l Tara Nicholls – 5 years l Brooke Lawrence – 10 years l Rebecca Fahey – 10 years