These winning treasury teams re-examined processes, saw room for improvement, and then undertook truly transformative initiatives:

Honorable Mention: Global logistics service provider BDP International automated communications between its banks and its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. By providing real-time visibility to cash and payments around the world, the system eliminates inefficiencies that were inherent in the company's legacy manual processes and supports BDP's continued global growth.
Bronze Award: For Salesforce, cash forecasting is business-critical, and it's a process that treasury has always taken pride in. However, the company's invoicing forecasts used to be manually generated by a different corporate function. Seeing an opportunity to improve, treasury advocated to take ownership of the invoicing forecasts, subsequently transforming processes and using automation to accelerate the forecasts' completion.
Silver Award: Managing user access to online banking portals was a significant challenge for Microsoft. More than 2,000 users need access to portals of 60 different financial institutions around the world. Local finance teams were formerly responsible for access management. To improve security and consistency, the central treasury group transformed the process, consolidating and standardizing global permissions.
Gold Award: At communications technology company Bandwidth, a very small treasury team is responsible for managing liquidity across operations in 60 countries. They worked with their financial institutions and technology providers to streamline processes worldwide. Now transaction and account-balance data flows automatically into a centralized repository of treasury information. Running custom reports is simple, and machine learning capabilities automate trend analysis for rapid and predictive insights.

All four projects came to life when a treasury team leaped at the opportunity to improve their long-term value to the organization. "There are two ways to view a treasury team," Haines says. "On the one hand, you can just view us as counting the pennies and managing transactions. Obviously, that is important—but there's also the potential within treasury to be much more strategic. [Our invoicing forecast] project has enabled us to provide more insights and do more analysis. And honestly, that is where we feel we can provide the most value."

Instant Insights /

2021 Alexander Hamilton Awards: Treasury Transformation

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