Managing financial risks is a crucial component of corporate treasury's responsibilities. It can also be a highly complex endeavor.

As the global political climate becomes increasingly unpredictable, the pressure mounts for treasurers of multinationals to contain the risks posed by volatility in currencies and in global debt and equity markets. Some treasury teams are struggling under the increased attention. For others, the spotlight of scrutiny has become a place to shine. In this second category are the winners of the 2017 Alexander Hamilton Awards in Financial Risk Management. These treasury groups have developed innovative solutions for mitigating financial risks, and then developed cross-functional programs to successfully implement those ideas.

One of these award-winning companies, global telecom provider Ericsson does business in 180 countries and 109 currencies. The truly global scope of the company makes visibility into foreign exchange (FX) exposures absolutely business-critical. However, the company's legacy process for managing currency risks involved a great deal of manual data entry, which was both time-consuming and error-prone.