Stein and the treasury department he oversees thrive on playing the central protagonist in many important strategic financial initiatives at Merrill. At the same time, the 37-year-old treasurer sees the importance of getting treasury teams out the door to mix it up with colleagues in other departments and other geographic regions. "The most important thing you can have is great people who think about their jobs holistically. That means embedding [themselves] in the business aspects of the company," says Stein.

It wasn't always that way, and much has changed in the two years that Stein has been treasurer–although the people have largely stayed the same, despite some changes in roles. Perhaps the biggest changes stem from the fact that Stein, like CFO Jeff Edwards, came from the investment banking division, where, as Stein puts it, the orientation is "only outward looking," with a particular focus on clients and relationships. Merrill's treasury before Stein, on the other hand, was largely inward looking and many of the staff's most creative ideas weren't making their way out into the broader finance organization. "Treasury at the time had wonderful, creative people, but the organization wasn't fully using their capabilities when it came to working with the rest of finance or with the rest of the firm," recalls Stein. "I found myself very often in a position of helping them work with colleagues. It didn't take long for that relationship to transform. Now, treasury is much more outward looking. It's a real team orientation." That can be especially important in a large global treasury department with employees scattered among three U.S. cities and 10 others outside the U.S., including Dublin, Sao Paulo, London and Tokyo. While many treasury employees are hired overseas to be close to the company's operations there, they all report to Stein's New York-based department.

The more proactive approach to problem solving runs through all three of Merrill's winning AHA entries. In the category of corporate finance, Merrill took a gold for establishing a new analytic framework for assessing risk for its bank's commercial paper backstop credit business. Although the project was done in cooperation with other departments, Stein says that the recognition that a totally new approach was needed came from his staff. "We fundamentally needed a way to analyze liquidity in a more sophisticated fashion. We knew empirically that the behavior was substantially different from our [earlier] model. It was driven by our reexploring our [processes] and intellectual curiosity."

Merrill's silver-winning program in the insurance category, the Credit Related Employee, Director and Officer Protection (CREDO), sprang from a dialogue between treasury and colleagues in trading and investment banking. The cross-departmental working group discovered that the way to reduce annual D&O insurance renewal risk was simply by locking in cost-effective, multiyear indemnification protection–something that was not possible through conventional insurance markets. Again, it required Merrill executives and particularly those in treasury to think beyond the confines of their department's experience. The result of unlocking creativity has been the creation of a best-practice treasury searching out the next challenge rather than shrinking from it.