As treasury technology evolves, it presents corporate treasurers with myriad opportunities to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their function. To harness these opportunities, treasury must, first and foremost, keep an open mind.

Every treasury team understands that staff can gain more time for value-added activities if the company replaces manual processes with automation. To some degree, these benefits can be achieved through a straightforward implementation of standard treasury software. Indeed, the opportunity to offload rote tasks from human to machine is a core selling point of many types of finance systems.

But a treasury team that sets its sights only on by-the-book software implementations may be missing out on crucial opportunities. This year's Alexander Hamilton Award winners in the category Technology Excellence demonstrate the remarkable gains that companies can achieve if they look beyond the obvious advantages of treasury management systems and related technologies.