These are traits reflected by both winners of this year's Alexander Hamilton Awards in Operational Risk Management & Insurance:

• Silver Award:  The U.S. Postal Service had a sophisticated system for protecting customers' credit-card data, but a cross-functional team of treasury, IT, and security professionals determined that tokenization of card numbers would be more secure. The implementation of tokenization technology was fairly straightforward, but convincing hundreds of thousands of employees throughout the organization that it would work required carefully constructed and well-planned communications.
• Gold Award:  To reduce liquidity risk around the world, Microsoft worked with its banks to build one of the world's first multi-country, multi-currency zero-balance account structures. It also set up multi-bank cross-border cash sweeps out of high-risk countries and expanded its pay-on-behalf-of structure. All in all, these changes enabled Microsoft to reduce its global cash balances by around $1 billion. The company further reduced operational risks by establishing a contingency action plan through which employees in treasury and related functions monitor global trends, then respond quickly and decisively whenever they identify a risk.

How does a company empower treasury professionals to undertake such radical improvements? Scurlock says that in Microsoft's treasury function, "self-direction is encouraged. The leadership team has the attitude that 'If you have an idea, let's try it. Let's take the risks. If we're going to fail, let's fail fast and move on.'" The benefits of this leadership approach, he adds, are that "treasury staff feel empowered to engage with other teams across the company, and to make decisions on new ideas without necessarily having to go through a steering committee or get approval to pull in certain resources. We hire professionals and then trust them to take risks. I feel like this approach has never steered us wrong."