As global uncertainty mounts, corporate treasury teams havebecome increasingly focused on optimizing their liquidity in everylocale where they do business. "In order to [meet corporatestrategic objectives], we needed to be able to access all our cashglobally, wherever it was," says Steve Propper, vice president andcorporate treasurer for Corning Incorporated. "The more fungibleour cash is, the more liquidity we have on a global basis."

Optimizing a company's utilization of cash can be challenging,however. In some cases, restrictions on cross-border transactionslimit a treasury's ability to put resources to work in anotherregion of the world. In other cases, a significant debt load orrapid growth leads to conditions that limit visibility into oravailability of the liquidity that is vital to growth and perhapsto survival when markets turn downward.