Holly Hess Groos has had a busy year and a half since becoming treasurer and senior vice president at Verizon Communications. A few months into the job, Groos faced a $5.3-billion credit facility that was expiring in April 2010. She worked to take advantage of the improved credit environment to extend the facility three years and upgrade it to $6.2 billion.

"What we found was that for a company with an investment-grade credit rating like ours, bank interest had expanded beyond the U.S., and we had five large foreign banks join the facility," Groos says. In the end, she was able to extend the facility by an additional 18 months, to 4.5 years, and have it expire in October—a better time of the year for refinancing.

Groos also oversaw a debt offering this year that raised $6.2 billion in long-term debt. "Our target was to raise $4.5 billion," she says, "but we left ourselves open to upsizing if interest rates and terms were right, and they were."