Alexander Hamilton Awards

Now in their 25th year, the Alexander Hamilton Awards from Treasury & Risk recognize companies taking big leaps forward in treasury, finance, and/or risk management through process innovations and technology implementations.

 

The first half of 2020 has been a year unlike any other, yet treasury organizations continue to find ways to innovate. In fact, the pressures that the Covid-19 crisis is exerting on corporate liquidity, debt covenants, the supply chain, and other areas of business and financial management are driving many treasury groups to explore solutions they might not have considered in a more typical business climate.

Treasury & Risk wants to hear about the innovative projects you have launched in the past few years, whether or not they’re related to the current economic crisis. For the 2021 Alexander Hamilton Awards program, we are accepting nominations for awards in seven categories:

  • Liquidity Management. This category is aimed at portfolio management, short-term investing, and cash visibility, as well as debt management and crisis planning to ensure adequate ongoing liquidity. Cash forecasting and cash pooling projects fit into this category.
  • Financial Risk Management. This category includes innovative solutions in management of risks around domestic or international interest rates, foreign exchange, or commodity prices; the use of derivatives or capital markets to hedge the company’s financial risk exposures; and/or management of counterparty credit risk.
  • Working Capital & Payments. This category recognizes innovations related to the collection of incoming payments and the disbursement of outgoing payments, as well as the organizational structure around management of payments and the cash conversion cycle.
  • Treasury Transformation. This category celebrates projects that have achieved noteworthy success through a major revamp of corporate treasury processes. Centralization or decentralization of the treasury function, outsourcing initiatives, restructuring of treasury to support new lines of business, and staff recruitment or development programs—among other types of projects—fit into this category.
  • Operational Risk Management & Insurance. This category encompasses innovative solutions around risk assessment, identification, mitigation, and/or transfer when protecting a company’s business, property, supply chain, employees, data, and/or reputation.
  • Technology Excellence. This award recognizes corporate treasury or finance departments for their implementation of innovative technology solutions that may be developed either internally or externally. Winning projects must be exceptionally creative, must solve a major problem, must yield impressive results, and/or must set a precedent for a best practice in treasury or finance. Projects that fall into this category could include those that solve a complex issue in financial management or compliance, improve communication or analysis of financial information, mitigate risk, or give the business a strategic advantage.
  • Best Practices in Restricted/Emerging Markets. This award recognizes corporate treasury, finance, and risk management functions that have successfully supported business operations in parts of the world where other organizations may fear to tread. Winning projects may include pioneering solutions that overcome regional restrictions on movement of money, compliance or disclosure challenges, banking regulations, and/or cultural issues.

 

Successful entries will describe an innovative project in one of these areas and will explain how that project establishes the organization as a leader in treasury and finance, enabling the company to gain important new insights, achieve dramatic improvements in efficiency, and exhibit best practices.

 

We may also recognize one organization with an Overall Excellence Award, depending on whether our judges feel such an award is deserved based on the various entries received in the contest’s seven categories. Companies enter to win the Overall Excellence Award by entering multiple projects across multiple categories.

 

Enter today via the online submission form. Or contact Meg Waters, editor in chief of Treasury & Risk, at [email protected] or 720-895-3967, for more information and/or to receive a PDF version of the submission form for purposes of streamlining the submission process.

 

DEADLINE: August 28, 2020

 

 

 

 

Treasury & Risk is also in the process of presenting the 2020 Alexander Hamilton Awards. Our first category of awards for this year:

Treasury Transformation

 

Stay tuned, as Treasury & Risk will present awards in five additional categories throughout 2020.

Thank you to our judges—Jean-Francois Heitz, Erik Smolders, Craig Jeffery, and Marie Hollein—for your work selecting our 2020 winners among all the entries.

And thank you very much to our sponsor—ION—whose support made this year’s awards program possible.

 

 

 

 2019 Winners

Treasury & Risk congratulates Corning Incorporated for winning the 2019 Alexander Hamilton Overall Excellence Award! Our conversation with Corning’s treasury leadership team highlights the ways in which the company has built a truly innovative treasury function.

Other 2019 Alexander Hamilton Awards: