If corporate finance is the brains behind an organization's financials, planning for budgets to be met and guiding investments to the optimal locations, then corporate treasury is the heart—ensuring that cash is flowing to all the right places at all the right times, in the right currencies, to keep all the business's other organs alive. But there are times in an organization's lifecycle when this crucial function needs to be re-imagined.

Transforming the treasury function is an enormous undertaking. Yet it's also enormously rewarding for those that succeed, as demonstrated by this year's winners of the Alexander Hamilton Awards in the category Treasury Transformation, sponsored by Citi, Deloitte, FiREapps, and Deutsche Bank.

At Toyota Motor Credit Corporation, asset and liability management is business-critical. "We usually fund at floating rates and lend at fixed rates, so there's a natural mismatch," says Sylvia Baharet, treasury strategy and analytics manager. "Management needs to constantly look at trends in interest rates and how those will affect our profit margins."