Many corporate initiatives claim to be focused on people, processes, and technology—but few truly achieve innovation in all three areas. This year's Alexander Hamilton Award–winning projects in the category Technology Excellence defy that trend.

All three projects made great strides in the realm of technology, obviously, but their innovative thinking did not end there. "We talk a great deal about people, process, and technology, because there's a widespread interconnectivity between them in our organization," says David Deranek, director of enterprise treasury operations for Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). "Having the right people, with the right skill sets, in the right places is essential to building a more proactive treasury. When you have that, you can architect a modern treasury that really enables skilled teams to do what is asked of them."

Here's how the victors distinguished themselves from this year's stiff competition:

• Bronze Award:  When CUNA Mutual launched a new line of business, integrating customers' low-value monthly premium payments into the company's standard process didn't make sense from a technology perspective. Instead, the treasury team developed application programming interface (API) connectivity between customer-facing web forms and the company's treasury management system.
• Silver Award:  Microsoft's treasury team was receiving 1,600-plus bank statements each day from more than 80 financial institutions around the world. They had automated receipt of the statements, but monitoring the status of those statements and getting the data into the company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was too time-consuming. Treasury worked with Microsoft engineering to automate these processes.
• Gold Award:  Health insurer HCSC saw an opportunity to pull together information from many different data sources to support working capital decisions companywide. In addition to consolidating data in a centralized "treasury enterprise reporting" data warehouse, the project introduced sophisticated reporting and analysis capabilities, which improved treasury decision-making, supported dramatic process improvements, and made the entire business more nimble.

In all three projects, the treasury team embraced creative thinking, worked with other groups throughout the company, and delivered great results for the overall organization.